Crook County

Front-stage and backstage behavior is a sociological concept devised by Erving Goffman (d. 1982), a Canadian-born sociologist who served as the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association. Front-stage behavior refers to how people act in public spaces. By contrast, backstage behavior refers to how people act when they are alone or in small, trusted groups. Front-stage behavior demands decorum, while backstage behavior is relaxed. Gonzalez Van Cleve argues that colorblind racism allowed professionals at the Cook County Courts to use backstage behavior even in public sections of the courtroom.

An indigency hearing is a court procedure that determines if a defendant can afford an attorney. Due process requires that defendants who cannot afford attorneys, deemed indigents by the court, be assigned public defenders free of charge. Gonzalez Van Cleve discusses indigency hearings within the context of racialized court culture, whereby defendants are denied due process, including indigency hearings.

The term mope is shorthand for lazy, incompetent, and unmotivated people. It is most often used to describe Black defendants but can also be directed at defense attorneys who don’t adhere to court culture. Court officials resent mopes because they take time and resources away from the real criminal threats, or monsters. The mope construct is central to colorblind racism because it shifts the justification for inequality away from race and onto morality. Mopes are immoral and thus deserving of punishment, humiliation, and unequal treatment.

Racial colorblindness, or race neutrality, is an ideology that posits that the best way to end racism is to treat people equally, without considering race or ethnicity. Proponents of colorblindness claim not to ‘see’ race. As Gonzalez Van Cleve demonstrates, however, avoiding the topic of race does not eradicate racism, it simply forces people to cast it in different terms, such as morality.