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ORIGINAL ARTICLE “Don’t Ever Forget Now, You’re a Black Man in America”: Intersections of Race, Class and Gender In Encounters with the Police Andrea L. Dottolo & Abigail J. Stewart Published online: 15 January 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007 Abstract Middle-aged black and white graduates of a Midwestern US high school responded to interview ques- tions about race and racial identity. Their answers included descriptions of police harassment and crime, and focused on those considered to be criminal actors: most often apparently poor, black men. Qualitative analysis of 38 interviews showed that questions about racial identity tapped into a discourse that constructs and stereotypes criminals as occupying social positions defined by race, class and gender, particularly for African Americans. The concept of intersectionality illuminates the cultural con- struction of police encounters with citizens in terms of poor black men, and the specific nature of the stories of racial identity told—and not told—by respondents with different race, class and gender identities. Keywords Intersectionality . Race and gender . Masculinity . Identity construction . Social class Introduction Feminist scholars and activists have been writing about the concept and lived experiences of intersectionality for several decades, notably in the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977), which argued that our identities and varied relationships to systems of power and privilege are simultaneous and mutually constitutive. Other influential feminist theorists followed, using intersectionality to illus- trate that individuals exist at the “intersection” of many identities and social realities, all informed and shaped by the others (Crenshaw 1995; King 1997; Smith and Stewart 1983; Spelman 1988). Collins (1990) described intersec- tionality as an “interlocking matrix of relationships” (p. 20). As discussed by Shields in the introduction to this special issue, traditional psychological theory and empirical re- search tend to homogenize gender, as well as other social identities such as race, while often ignoring others such as social class. The isolation of one identity as a unified or monolithic category can result in essentializing across multiple differences, overlooking important relationships and distinctions based on other identities and dimensions of power. Generally speaking, psychologists and social identity theorists also tend to separate notions of the self from political and institutional structures, viewing them as distinct from each other. Sometimes psychology has conceived of identities such as race, class, gender or sexuality in terms of the language of individual differences or personality traits, dissociated from context or social structure. The connection between social identities and institutional structures is an especially important component of the notion of intersectionality. Social identities are not only multiple and complicated, but result from social locations that are situated within systems of oppression. That is, social structures and institutions create, shape and maintain social identities. Kitch (1994) emphasized the relationship between individuals and structures, “All iden- tities, even those conforming to mainstream or dominant norms are...fabricated by political structures and operations that conceal the mechanisms through which they function” (p. 88). Many feminist psychologists have discussed intersectionality in terms of the relationship between Sex Roles (2008) 59:350–364 DOI 10.1007/s11199-007-9387-x A. L. Dottolo :A. J. Stewart (*) Department of Psychology and Program in Women’s Studies, University of Michigan, 204 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA e-mail: abbystew@umich.edu identities and institutions, and incorporated that relationship into their theory, method, and analyses (Deaux and Stewart 2001; Espin 1997; Marecek 1995; Stewart and McDermott 2004). A point of intersection between identities and institutions is clearly and vividly illuminated in encounters with the police. Law enforcement officers embody an institutional- ized regulating force, operating on those designated as criminals or suspects. Perhaps because of the quantity and richness of detail in accounts of the police, some social scientists have explored citizen–police encounters as an example of the relationship between social identities and institutional structures. For instance, Young (2004) showed, in his study of “marginalized Black men,” that nearly all of them had been detained by the police at some time (p. 95), often for being “in the wrong place at the wrong time” (p. 119). Equally, Wilson et al. (2004) examined racial prejudice in police profiling. The current project builds on these studies, as well as the work of Fine and Weis (1998), who asked working class adults in Jersey City and Buffalo—areas hit hard by deindustrialization and econom- ic instability—about their experience of crime, violence and the police. Their results demonstrated that “even experi- ences as seemingly clear cut as crime and fear are deeply classed, raced, ethnicized, and gendered” (p. 437). The current study examined the ways in which some adult citizens’ responses to interview questions that asked specifically about race and racial identity spontaneously included descriptions of police harassment and crime, especially those who are considered to be criminal actors, those with “suspect” identities. Where Fine and Weis (1998) began by asking questions about crime and the police and discovered accounts grounded in race, we began with questions about race that were sometimes answered with accounts of encounters with the police. That is, when asked general questions about racial identity, participants responded explicitly with descriptions of police encounters, although they were not asked directly about law enforce- ment at all. Both approaches tap into a specific discourse that constructs and stereotypes criminals as occupying intersectional marginalized social positions defined by race, class and gender. Both studies examine interviews and document responses that draw on a popular cultural narrative of criminality as it is experienced in everyday lives. As Fine and Weis (1998) explain, “In this land, the story, not the logic and statistics, reigns supreme: the story of what we have suffered, what we have heard about, what we fear” (p. 441). In assessing how participants understood racial identities, we wanted their language and stories to guide our analyses; therefore, our research questions were somewhat open-ended. The research questions that guided our research were: How did Black and White men and women who attended a racially integrated high school construct racial identities? Was the process different for Black and White participants? Specifically, how do both Black graduates and Whites express awareness of institu- tional power when discussing racial identities? Does gender matter in the discussion of racial identity? Through our analysis of the themes in the interviews, we found that attention to intersectionality illuminated both the cultural construction of police encounters with citizens in terms of a certain intersectional location (working class or poor Black men), and the specific nature of the stories told—and not told—about their racial identities by respondents with different race and gender positions. We focus in this paper on analyzing responses in terms of references to experiences of discrimination generally, and then much more specifically—discriminatory encounters with the police. Method Participants The present study includes analysis of themes in interviews collected as part of a larger, collaborative project conducted by Stewart, Winter, Henderson-King and Henderson-King (see Stewart 2003 for details). The larger sample used for this thematic analysis includes 38 interviews with graduates of a high school in the Midwest (referred to as “Midwest High School”) who had remained resident in the general area of the city called Oak Valley (not the actual name of the city) where they grew up. Interviewees were contacted from a current list of alumni maintained by the class reunion committee. Since resources permitted interviewing 40 individuals, and the goal was to have roughly equal numbers of people in groups defined by race and gender, the sample was stratified by race and gender and randomly selected contacts among alumni who remained in Oak Valley were made until the sample was completed. A total of 82 individuals were contacted when sampling was completed; thus, we interviewed 46% of those contacted. About half of those 42 not included were actually never reached, so the rate of agreement among those reached was considerably higher. The interviews were conducted in 2001–2002 with graduates of the classes of 1968; thus, participants were all in their early 50s at the time of the interview. Because the school was about half White and half Black when these classes attended it, roughly equal numbers of groups defined by race and gender were interviewed (7 Black men, 9 Black women; 10 White men, 12 White women). Interviews averaged well over an hour, and the interview protocol consisted of open-ended questions about general demographics, background questions, memories of high Sex Roles (2008) 59:350–364 351351 school, their lives since high school, and various social issues. Participants discussed the ways that Oak Valley has been affected by social changes since high school. They also discussed their own racial identities and race relations associated with their high school experience. These included a significant protest by Black students and their parents against a “dress code” that included a policy perceived as racially motivated (prohibiting facial hair or mustaches and beards), increasing tensions in the school, and the eventual closure of the school as part of a school desegregation plan. Because we assumed that same-race discussions of race-related experiences are generally more comfortable, we matched interviewees with interviewers on race; we were not able also to match on gender. Most participants (36 of 38) had been married at some time; 14 had also been divorced at some point. At the time of the interview, 24 were married. Most participants had children (4 did not); 20 had one or two children; 14 had more. Most children were no longer living with partic- ipants, but in 11 cases there were still children at home. Most participants had not completed college (7 completed high school only and 19 completed some post-high school training, but not a college degree); six had graduated from college, and six had completed master’s degrees. Five of the participants were retired or on disability; the remaining 33 were employed full or part-time. Their jobs were classified according to the standard Hollingshead and Redlich (1958) occupational status categories as follows: six were in unskilled labor positions; nine in skilled labor; seven in sales and clerical jobs; seven in administrative, entrepreneurial and semi-professional positions, and nine were minor professionals (mostly teachers and social workers). There were no race differences on any of these variables in this sample. Coding Procedures Interviews were tape recorded, transcribed, and edited to remove identifying information about individuals and the city. Interviewers then listened to the recordings again while proofreading the accompanying transcript. The authors analyzed the verbatim transcripts using a grounded theory approach to identifying themes arising in response to interview questions (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Strauss 1987). Once themes were identified in the text, the authors discussed and reread passages, organizing themes into coding categories. Once the themes had stabilized into categories that were understood clearly by both authors (with interrater agreement on independently coded passages above.85; see discussion of reliability below), they were recorded on the transcripts in NVIVO. Coding categories were not mutually exclusive; thus, a given passage might be coded for more than one category. For example