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Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy: From Slave Catchers to Petty Sovereigns
Abstract
Though states are founded in and dependent on successfully claiming a monopoly on the use of violent force and the certification of citizenship, these means suggest particular ends: the production of the social order. Police have the primary mandate to produce order and administer poverty.
From a new abolitionist perspective, the particular social order of the U.S. is unique. The white race was founded through the production and maintenance of the color line and performed through a cross-class alliance of whites. Policing is deeply implicated in these processes.
A historical account of police during the Herrenvolk era is provided. Finally, the persistence of racist policing is explained in light of a now officially color-blind political order, with officers functioning as petty sovereigns in a neoliberal era.
... The first police forces in the US were slave patrols in the South formed to quell rebellions and recapture escaped enslaved persons (Walker and Katz 2018, 32; Brucato 2021). In the North, the formation of modern police forces coincided with the abolition of slavery and the mass resettling of Black people in that region (Brucato 2014(Brucato , 2021. A notable historical theme of US policing includes a disposition toward Black people that allows Black bodies to be captured, subdued, or even killed in service of protecting corporate or white property. ...
In an era when the public and shareholders increasingly demand greater accountability from institutions for racial injustice and slavery, scholarship on corporate reparations is more and more essential. This article argues that corporations have played a significant role in the cultural dehumanization of Blackness and therefore have a particular responsibility to make repair. Cultural dehumanization refers to embedding anti-Blackness into US culture in service of capitalist profit accumulation, which has resulted in status and material inequalities between Blacks and whites that have persisted from slavery to the present. More specifically, the article argues corporations have a moral duty to offer reparations to Black Americans regardless of any redress offered by other perpetrators of anti-Blackness. It appeals to tort law in providing a moral justification for corporate reparations to Black Americans.
... Slave patrols were tasked with the routine surveillance of the slave population in order to regulate and manage their movement according to the politico-economic imperatives of chattel slavery (Bass 2001, 159;Brucato 2014, 38-9). In fact, slave patrols are a significant strand in the genealogy of US police (Bass 2001;Brucato 2014;Hadden 2001). ...
... They came later, and more often than not, made a bad situation worse" (Butler 2017a, 122). Given that the aim of this article is to recenter the trajectory of the abolitionist promise of Reconstruction, it is important to remember that the genealogy of the police as a professional organization of the state has its origins in fulfilling the promises of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (Brucato 2014). Therefore, the skepticism shared by Abdullah and Olamina is intimately tied to their understanding of justice as abolitionist. ...
Entering the discussion of the current political climate as a possible “Third Reconstruction,” this article reads Octavia E. Butler’s recent New York Times bestselling novel, Parable of the Sower, to re-center the fugitive politics that brought about the first Reconstruction in the long struggle for Black liberation and engender what I am calling an abolitionist politics of self-care. Butler’s main character, Lauren Oya Olamina, operates as literary archive that brings together an initial canon of Black feminist intellectual visionaries, each of whom contributed to the long project of Reconstruction, and provides tangible practices for abolition democracy steeped in an attentiveness to interdependence and sustainability, all ecological, emotional, and political.
... The history of policing in the US, while unique in its development, shares a colonial genealogy with other nation-states that created a racialized social order through enforcement of the color line (Brucato 2014). Yet, the myth that "organized police forces are relatively recent inventions, developing especially in the nineteenth century" persists (Howell 2018: 123). ...
Critical scholars argue that contemporary policing practices reproduce colonial logics through the maintenance of racial and economic inequality. In this article, I extend the framing of policing as a colonial project grounded in white supremacy to an analysis of police responses to white power mobilization during a heightened period of activity and violence (2015–2017). Borrowing from Perry and Scrivens (2018), I identify the two most common police responses—“disavowal of risk” and “minimization of threat”—in the official investigations into the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017. Based on an analysis of newspaper reports from across the United States during the two-year period since then, I found that local and federal law enforcement consistently trivialized the presence of white power groups in the community, elevated the potential threat from protestors, concentrated intelligence efforts on activists, and provided differential protection to white supremacists.
... The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 proved to be a decisive turning point in the Abolitionist Movement. As historians have documented, the fugitive slave law created a state of exception, bypassing due process, deputizing all white people to act as slave patrollers, and criminalizing those who would assist slaves on the run (Sinha 2016;Hadden 2003;Brucato 2014). Abolitionists could not in good conscience obey the law. ...
Critical criminologists have challenged the utility of efforts to reform the criminal justice system for decades, including strong calls to abolish the prison system. More recently, the rebellions in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Charlotte have made racialized police violence and police reform issues of national concern. In this article, we examine abolitionist claims aimed at law enforcement institutions in the aftermath of Ferguson and other subsequent rebellions. We consider the implications for abolitionist organizing when the institution of law enforcement, rather than prisons, becomes the explicit target of our movement(s). How are groups theorizing and practicing police abolition and how does this align with, challenge, or expand past conceptualizations of abolition? To answer this question, first we sketch the broad parameters of abolitionist thought, particularly as it is taken up in the disciplines of political theory and criminology. Second, we analyze an emergent praxis of police abolition that revolves around the call to disband, disempower, and disarm law enforcement institutions. We argue that by attacking the police as an institution, by challenging its very right to exist, the contemporary abolitionist movement contains the potential to radically transform society. In this spirit, we amplify abolitionist praxis that (1) aims directly at the police as an institution, (2) seeks to dismantle the racial capitalist order, (3) adopts uncompromising positions that resist liberal attempts at co-optation, incorporation, and/or reconciliation, and (4) creates alterative democratic spaces that directly challenge the legitimacy of the police.
... Just as Hart and Cohle are programmed in service of a particular type of order, so too are liberal subjects who fetishistically disavow the inherent violence of police and actively solicit the trap of a coherent symbolic order (Hall and Winlow, 2015: 111) and the place of police within the ontologies of world and earth (Thacker, 2011). In regards to the former, as those who enforce the wage, protect private property (Neocleous, 2000) and fabricate the color line (Brucato, 2014), the police are vital to the creation and continuation of the late-capitalist world, one that is always imagined as being for (some of) us. ...
The first season of the HBO series True Detective has drawn attention to Eugene Thacker’s horror of philosophy trilogy and his tripartite mode of thinking of the world and the subject’s relation to it. This article is an effort to read Thacker’s speculative realism into a critique of the police power. Where the police concept is vital to sustaining the Cartesian world-for-us, a world of mass-consumption and brutal privation, the limitations, failures or absence of police might also reveal horizons of disorder—primitivism, anarchism—the world-in-itself. A critical reading of True Detective and other police stories suggests that even its most violent and corrupt forms, as inseparable from security, law and order, the police power is never beyond redemption. What is rendered unthinkable then is the third ontological position—a world-without-police—as it exposes the frailties of the present social order and the challenges of thinking outside the subject.
The state (federal, state, or municipal governments) often authorizes new technology designs for its own racist and xenophobic goals. While, the state ultimately controls the forces wielded by the military and law enforcement, interested bystanders and social movements can counter these forces. Art installations, testifying in government hearings, new benchmark data sets, and Black-centered design are implemented by marginalized (Black) designers to counter state-supported data racism.KeywordsContextualizationData racismGenocidePredictive algorithmSousveillanceState powerSurveillance
Police scholars have studied the creation and formalization of police organizations in U.S. cities during the mid-1800s, and competing explanations describe why cities adopted formal and professional police departments. Riots, class conflict, and an increase in crime have been proposed as reasons why cities created police agencies. The current study tests whether police organizations were created and formalized in response to city-level differences in dangerous classes, specifically African Americans. Using intercensal estimates of historical Census data from 1840 to 1930, this study analyzes the importance of racial ratios as they relate to the creation of a formalized police department in 64 U.S. cities. The data is sourced primarily from northern cities, as these were among the first areas to formally adopt police departments. Definitively determining a cause or causes of police agency creation is both an interesting and unique research question that has not been addressed. Empirically testing historical police theories is rare because the data is notoriously hard to acquire. This study attempts to remedy this situation by pulling data from four sources of agency creation. Results indicate that the racial composition of a city was not a significant predictor of the creation of a police department. Importantly, this finding indicates that other explanations of police agency creation should be tested empirically.
This research explores the intertwined construction of race and gender in a wide variety of white supremacist newsletters and periodicals published between 1969 and 1993. While traditional accounts of the white supremacist movement treat it as a movement concerned with race relations, I read this discourse as a site of the construction of race. Additionally, I argue that race and gender are inextricably linked. Exploring how meaning works in white supremacist discourse, this research provides an analysis of the construction of racial and gender difference within the framework of the equality versus difference dichotomy. Within this framework, difference requires hierarchy, so that any effort to redress inequality is posited as a threat to difference. The primary project of the white supremacist movement is the construction of white racial and gender identities as naturalized and hierarchized differences.
This book seeks to give a comprehensive theory of policing. To set out the background for such a theory, the diverse types of agencies involved in policing, the history of policing, and the representations of policing in the press and in police literature are examined. The police are then defined by their use of a wide array of means, including violence, which are prohibited as legal violations for all other citizens. This definition is tested in the subsequent chapters bearing on the main components of the police web. First, the public police working in uniform are described in respect of who they are, what part of their activities are devoted to crime control, and the ways in which they operate. Second, criminal investigators are put in focus and empirical findings on how they clear up cases are discussed. The security and intelligence services are the subject of the next chapter, which develops a model that contrasts "high policing" (intelligence services) with "low policing" (public constabularies). The following chapter addresses the crucial issues that relate to private security, stressing the uncertainty of our current knowledge, and proposes a fully developed model integrating public and private security. The last chapter is devoted to military policing in its democratic and undemocratic variants, and to the extra-legal social control exercised by criminal organizations such as the Mafia. In conclusion, the book tries to link the theoretical issues raised throughout the book and make his position explicit with respect to all of them.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
This book seeks to analyze the issue of race in America after the election of Barack Obama. For the author, the U.S. criminal justice system functions can act as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it adheres to the principle of color blindness.