White prisoners are what Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) calls 'collateral damage' since they have been swept up in a criminal justice system geared toward the mass incarceration and (in Alexander's terms) segregation of African American men and Latinos. They are at the 'boundaries' because they are physically excluded from society, of course, through walls and razor wire, but they are at the boundaries of white normativity and the American status quo because they have lost many of the tacit 'privileges' of whiteness (including many presumed rights like voting, for example).

Perhaps those persons most at the boundaries of white normativity in America are incarcerated whites. 2 Consequently, their whiteness (or their inability to claim a normative whiteness) is underscored, made visible, as evidenced by the epithet ' white trash.' As whiteness studies theorists have suggested, much can be learned about white normativity by exploring how whites at the boundaries of whiteness negotiate their distance from entitlement, performing cultural work that seeks to claim or critique an otherwise taken-for-granted racial identification. Whites at the boundaries of white normativity-such as poor whites-are unable to fully lay claim to what David Roediger, after W.E.B Du Bois, calls the 'wages' of whiteness, the tacit 'status and privileges' of their racial identity. They regard themselves as a neutral or standard, without race or ethnicity, or as a member of the 'human race.'' 'Moreover,' Moya and Markus continue, 'when experimental social psychologists ask people to describe themselves on open-ended questionnaires, white people tend not to mention the racial or ethnic aspects of their identity.' 1 White racial identity, or 'whiteness,' is not always so invisible to white people, however. Moya and Hazel Rose Markus write in Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21 st Century (2010), 'Many whites are quite comfortable with the idea that race (especially) and ethnicity are things that Asians, Latina/os, and blacks have to contend with, but that white people do not. Most white Americans tend not to distinguish race as an important or even identifiable part of their identity.

Fish by T.J. Parsell