Being Fearless and Fearsome: Colonial Legacies, Racial Constructions, and Male Adolescent Violence

Violence and masculinity, as many criminologists have argued, are tightly coupled in the United States. According to the current masculinity and crime perspectives, men who confront multiple oppressions (e.g., class, race, and political) are particularly apt to use violence because, while marginalized men lack economic power, they possess power in terms of their gender, especially through the use or threat of violence. While many scholars acknowledge that racial oppression can contribute to the development of violent masculine identities, the authors argue that race remains undertheorized in prevailing explanations of masculine identities and violence. In this study, the authors argue for further advancement of the colonial criminology framework to deepen our understanding of the race-based inequalities leading up to violence. More specifically, the authors analyze data collected from a 6-year ethnographic study of youth violence among Pacific Islander adolescents to illustrate the effects of the lasting legacy of colonialism as well as the continuing salience of racial and ethnic identity formation in explanations of violence, primarily involving Native Hawaiian and Samoan youths in Hawai‘i.