The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
... In the context of carceral issues, political actors often use "law and order" or "tough on crime" frames, refer to people ar rested or incarcerated as "thugs" or "felons," or invoke concepts of non criminalized people as "innocent" or "hardworking" to conjure up im plicitly racialized dichotomies of Blackness versus whiteness, criminality versus virtue, and people to be feared versus people to be protected. The formation of these associations began in slavery and has continued through the current era through decades of entertainment, news media, and politi cians constructing Blackness as criminal, dangerous, and something to be feared (Muhammad 2019). In large cities like Los Angeles, dog whistles are often geographical, referring to people in communities that have been subjugated by race and class (such as "people in South Los Angeles"); de pict young Black or Brown people as violent or involved in gangs; and high light a violent incident as a justifier for the expansion of carceral systems (Muhammad 2019). ...
... The formation of these associations began in slavery and has continued through the current era through decades of entertainment, news media, and politi cians constructing Blackness as criminal, dangerous, and something to be feared (Muhammad 2019). In large cities like Los Angeles, dog whistles are often geographical, referring to people in communities that have been subjugated by race and class (such as "people in South Los Angeles"); de pict young Black or Brown people as violent or involved in gangs; and high light a violent incident as a justifier for the expansion of carceral systems (Muhammad 2019). Racialized carceral logics are powerful and thus are often used by reactionary political actors to strengthen support for the car ceral state. ...
Deep canvassing is one of few attitude-change interventions repeatedly shown to work, yet it has not been examined in the context of anticarceral issues. Scholars and advocates also debate whether we should discuss race when promoting racial equity policies—with some concluding we should avoid race and others calling for further development and testing of a variety of methods. This study addresses both gaps by assessing the effects of race-explicit and race-absent deep canvass conversations on increasing support for anticarceral policies and on changing dominant carceral attitudes. Through a randomized, placebo-controlled field experiment of more than 1,400 canvass conversations with Los Angeles County voters,I find that deep canvassing is effective in building support for anticarceral policies. Race-explicit and race-absent approaches have similar effects on policy opinions, but the race-explicit condition may be the only method that changes underlying ideological attitudes about the carceral state.
... In contrast, audit studies demonstrate that Blackness functions as a "negative credential," disadvantaging Black applicants across various organizational settings even when formally recognized credentials are held constant (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2003;Pager 2003). Prevalent racial schemas in the contemporary United States include the association of Whiteness with purity and innocence, juxtaposed against the association of Blackness with criminality and Hispanic/Latino identity with illegality (Eastman 2015;Menjívar 2021;Muhammad 2010). Organizational processes such as hiring and promotion in workplaces-or admissions and academic opportunities in higher education-connect these abstract schemas to material and social resources (Nguemeni Tiako et al. 2022;Ray 2019;Ray and Purifoy 2019). ...
... As Ray (2019:43) observes, credentials have the potential to "shield [a person] from the consequences of rule-breaking"-and indeed, we found this to be the case at SLAC. Whereas being in the numerical minority contributed to the visibility of students of color, persistent cultural schemas associating White bodies with innocence and Black and Brown bodies with criminality and illegality transformed this visibility into intensified surveillance (Eastman 2015;Menjívar 2021;Muhammad 2010). White students benefited from the invisibility of Whiteness, which functioned as a tacit credential of innocence (Ray 2019). ...
How do seemingly nonracial organizational processes reproduce racial inequality? This study examines how “the
Pact,” an ostensibly race-neutral COVID-19 behavioral policy implemented at a predominantly White U.S. liberal arts
college, undermined social connection and belonging among students of color. Analyzing three waves of interviews
with 30 undergraduates (N = 75 interviews), we document disparities in four domains of campus life: (1) social
isolation in residence halls, (2) access to “safe” forms of rule breaking, (3) visibility and surveillance, and (4) stakes
of violation. We identify three underlying mechanisms—unequal resource allocation, uneven rule enforcement, and
color-blind decision-making—and demonstrate how distinct institutional conditions facilitated these processes. This
analysis advances theoretical understandings of racialized organizational processes in higher education by connecting
previously theorized mechanisms to specific university characteristics and practices
... Further, as the medium of television expanded in the 1950s and 60s, so too did exposure of clashes between police and black protesters (Barlow and Barlow 1995), revealing that many officers were willing to ensure, by force, that African Americans remained subservient to whites (Spratt 2008). Unlike lynchingwhich has a complicated history that obfuscates its connections to positive law and where complicity and resistance amongst some police is well documented in the historical literature (Gregory 2022;Jordan 1980;Muhammad 2010)slavery, convict leasing, and chain gangs were official criminal 'justice' responses to those who violated legal prohibitions under apartheid (Litwack 1999). It is somewhat paradoxical that critical discourse on the part of police relative to these official policies was presumably either absent or ineffective in curtailing the brutality of those practices in a racialized America; many officers willingly enforced the law without evidence of sustained resistance that would signify critical reflection on the morality of their work (Hawkins and Thomas 1991). ...
The value of college education for US police officers has been contemplated since at least the 1920's, yet the importance of critical thinking has only recently attracted scholarly attention. Modern police training is frequently led by experienced former practitioners; however, as "insiders" they may be less likely to critically evaluate the role police play, and have played, in maintaining unjust and discriminatory systems, particularly for African Americans. This article considers existing scholarship on police training and education, highlighting and demonstrating the importance of historically reflexive critical thinking.
... "No amount of therapy will help me, this is not limited to police, it is in the public sphere". Noel here summarizes what we see emerge in many of the participants' narratives: Black LGBTQI+ bodies and lives are direct and conscious witnesses to the linkage between capitalist racism and increased exposure to state violence through policing (Alexander 2012;Muhammad 2010). The criminalization of the Black LGBTQI+ body is a function of racial capitalism, and the over-policing and mass incarceration of Black bodies are the practical ramifications of these larger social mechanisms (Alexander 2012). ...
In this paper, we discuss qualitative findings drawn from a larger community-engaged project in a predominantly Black Midwestern city. Data collection for the project, which focused on the effects of policing on the city’s African American community, was carried out in collaboration with Black community organizations and an independent police oversight board. Using an intersectional queer politics lens, we present findings from a thematic analysis of field observations that focused on the city’s LGBTQI+ community. Major themes that emerged include the social context of Black LGBTQI+ oppression, the criminalization of the Black LGBTQI+ body, and mental health impact of policing experiences. Overall, we found that transgender and gender non-conforming experiences with police were particularly harmful. We conclude with insights into the strategies of resilience and resistance used by the community to navigate the impact police work has on their lived experience. Policy implications of our findings and the importance of queer politics to enable Black LGBTQI+ populations to access services and thrive, rather than survive are also addressed.
... If a White individual deviates from what is deemed pristine (i.e. Whiteness from an American lens) and commits an act of criminality or terror, they have issues that require nurturing (Muhammad, 2010); targeted education, labels, and policies regarding White power terrorists do not materialize. On the other hand, a Muslim perpetrator (who veers from the central norm of Whiteness) is a generalizable indictment of an entire faith and race who are viewed as being prone to criminality and in need of surveillance because they are deserving of suspicion. ...
... 185. Such views nevertheless persist [88] despite earlier (1680) condemnation that slaves were "Unman'd and Unsoul'd". The basic question "Is he/she not a human being?" can be cloaked with much pseudo-scientific gloss or referring to "the curse of Noah". ...
Pellagra is caused by a diet with little meat or milk and a reliance on maize. Pellagrins suffer from poor cognitive and social skills. Pellagra was cured with nicotinamide (vitamin B3) but before that pellagrins were considered inferior and dangerous degenerates and were known as the “Butterfly Caste” after the characteristic sunburn rash. Quests for meat drove the diaspora “out of Africa” with meat sharing being the social norm. After the domestication of animals “meat elites” across classes, castes, sexes and continents emerged. Nomads migrating to northern Europe created mixed pastoralist-farmer populations whose fermentation cultures and genetic innovations allowed lactose tolerance. Skin lightened as sunlight, needed to synthesise vitamin D. and sunburn was rare. Conquests encouraged their view that they were a superior race rather than that they were blessed with a superior diet. Ruling classes on a high meat diet combined forces with cereal dependant workers (with higher fertility) whilst the “lumpenproletariat” were economic vegetarians. Social contracts broke down with rebellions, but slaves, oppressed sharecroppers and refugees bore and bear the brunt of (subclinical)pellagra often in ex-colonial subjects—to whom dietary reparations could bridge international inequality gaps.
... By highlighting the many forms that racism takes and how it is embedded within cultural norms, institutional practices, policies, and local microsocial dynamics that work together to filter the opportunities and experiences of people of color, CRT has played a key role in illuminating the historical processes of marginalization and oppression from slavery into the present in the United States (Mills 2022). A key idea underpinning the CRT argument is that the systemic racism of today is the inheritance of a racial hierarchy that was developed to justify slavery in the past (Kendi 2016;Muhammad 2019). The systemic racism concept, therefore, refers to the ways in which institutional practices and policies work together across social domains to create and maintain racial inequities broadly construed and widely documented in the United States, even in the absence of overtly discriminatory intent or individual acts of bias (Williams 2020). 2 Because systemic racism involves the allocation of resources, opportunities, and privileges based on race/ethnicity defined against whiteness and European ancestry, it produces unequal outcomes for different racial groups throughout the social ecology. ...
This article examines the relationship between social inequity and the immune system, emphasizing some of the many ways that systemic racism and other forms of marginalization can undermine health. Of much sociological con- cern, chronic stressors increase inflammation and consequent susceptibility to health morbidities and, ultimately, mortality by burdening marginalized group members in ways that adversely affect immune regulation and functioning. As with social sys- tems more generally, the immune system is a cross-scale complex system of many regulating, coordinating, and interacting parts, within both itself and the other bodily systems it protects. Along these lines, we thus propose that to properly conceptualize how social conditions undermine immune functioning and health, it is important to consider the immune system beyond its component mechanisms and parts. This view is akin to the way critical race theory proposes that “systemic racism” in the United States is a collaborative arrangement of social structures whose explanatory richness and historical durability can only be fully understood as a gestalt. We therefore seek, where possible, to emphasize the systems nature of the immune system similarly to the sociological insight that society comprises complex systems whose interrelated structures interact in dynamic and sometimes unpredictable ways. We scaffold this discussion within the literature on systemic racism in the United States, emphasizing inflammation as a key marker of immune demand and dysregulation and highlight- ing some implications for health inequities among marginalized populations more generally.
... By highlighting the many forms that racism takes and how it is embedded within cultural norms, institutional practices, policies, and local microsocial dynamics that work together to filter the opportunities and experiences of people of color, CRT has played a key role in illuminating the historical processes of marginalization and oppression from slavery into the present in the United States (Mills 2022). A key idea underpinning the CRT argument is that the systemic racism of today is the inheritance of a racial hierarchy that was developed to justify slavery in the past (Kendi 2016;Muhammad 2019). The systemic racism concept, therefore, refers to the ways in which institutional practices and policies work together across social domains to create and maintain racial inequities broadly construed and widely documented in the United States, even in the absence of overtly discriminatory intent or individual acts of bias (Williams 2020). 2 Because systemic racism involves the allocation of resources, opportunities, and privileges based on race/ethnicity defined against whiteness and European ancestry, it produces unequal outcomes for different racial groups throughout the social ecology. ...
This article examines the relationship between social inequity and the immune system, emphasizing some of the many ways that systemic racism and other forms of marginalization can undermine health. Of much sociological concern, chronic stressors increase inflammation and consequent susceptibility to health morbidities and, ultimately, mortality by burdening marginalized group members in ways that adversely affect immune regulation and functioning. As with social systems more generally, the immune system is a cross-scale complex system of many regulating, coordinating, and interacting parts, within both itself and the other bodily systems it protects. Along these lines, we thus propose that to properly conceptualize how social conditions undermine immune functioning and health, it is important to consider the immune system beyond its component mechanisms and parts. This view is akin to the way critical race theory proposes that “systemic racism” in the United States is a collaborative arrangement of social structures whose explanatory richness and historical durability can only be fully understood as a gestalt. We therefore seek, where possible, to emphasize the systems nature of the immune system similarly to the sociological insight that society comprises complex systems whose interrelated structures interact in dynamic and sometimes unpredictable ways. We scaffold this discussion within the literature on systemic racism in the United States, emphasizing inflammation as a key marker of immune demand and dysregulation and highlighting some implications for health inequities among marginalized populations more generally.
... The emergence of Black digital publics is significant for Black people because Black witness has always been insufficient whether in the court of law or in everyday life (Hill, 2020). For example, the racial data revolution between 1890 and the 1930s led to ideas that marked African Americans as racially inferior and criminally deviant (Muhammad, 2010;Peraza, 2021). The lack of analyses of knowledge production and power relations in technology often results in educational practices that inadvertently repeat historical patterns of injustice and inequality (Baroud & Dharamshi, 2020;Haight et al., 2014). ...
... In the U.S., following the legal emancipation of slaves in 1865, the modernisation of the conflation of Blackness and slaveness has manifested as a conflation of Blackness and criminality, enabling the continuation of slavery and its carceral logic that continues to shape the contours of Black life (Hartman, 2022;Sharpe, 2016;Vargas, 2021). Because of how anti-black Negrophobia shapes how Black people and Blackness has come to be imagined in the collective (un)conscious, Black people are understood to be always already criminal, and thus the natural result is that Black people experience the brunt of the violence doled out by the carceral state and its agents (Wilderson, 2020;Fanon, 1952;Muhammad, 2019). ...
... As our digital footprints have grown, though, law enforcement officials no longer need to rely only on demographic data and past run-ins with police; now, they can also use our social media presence and 'friends' (Stuart, 2020;Brayne, 2021;Lageson, 2020), phone and text records and contacts (Ferguson, 2017;Brayne, 2021), and myriad digital exhaust, such as credit card records or search engine history, gathered by private companies who partner with law enforcement agencies directly or indirectly (Zuboff, 2019;Marx, 2016) to anticipate crime. However, due to such a high volume of data, predictions become increasingly capacious, labeling far more people and places as high risk than will ever be involved in criminal activity (Harcourt, 2007), disproportionately impacting low-income, communities of color who have long been the target of unequal US policing and punishment practices (Muhammad, 2019). ...
... These distorted beliefs are often rooted in racial group positions, through a specific form of "not knowing" or racial ignorance constructed through the absence of being targeted by carceral apparatuses (Mills, 2007). Alongside the absence of direct experience with carceral realities, the mass public has been fed anti-Black racialized stories about crime and the legitimacy of policing and incarceration (Muhammad, 2019). Together these socio-historic processes have created the dominant psychological construct of carceral justification, exemplified through distorted beliefs that the criminal legal system works to improve community safety. ...
Black-led social movements have demanded sweeping changes to the criminal legal system by advancing abolitionist goals. Public attitudes about the criminal legal system influence what policy agendas are developed, legitimated, and implemented. In order to assess influences on such attitudes, there is a need for research that examines the underlying carceral logics people use to inform their opinions toward anti-carceral policy proposals. Applying System Justification Theory and a framework of carceral logics, we developed the Carceral Justification Scale (CJS) using data collected from 1,394 Alameda County, California registered voters. Items were developed via literature review, qualitative analysis of canvasser conversations, and expert review. Exploratory (N = 461) and confirmatory (N = 463) factor analyses suggested an oblique 2-factor structure and produced 6 items with the following factors: (a) System Works, and (b) System Necessary. Internal consistency estimates were .71 and above and the scales accounted for 28% and 27% of variance, respectively. Initial construct validity was established as CJS scores were associated with racial resentment, system justification, political ideology, and anti-Black bias awareness in ways consistent with theory. This measure is useful for the evaluation of community practice political interventions that aim to increase support for abolitionist policies.
Research and policy continue to focus on the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) in the U.S., with estimates indicating that 81 million people have been victimized by a partner in their lifetime. IPV disproportionately impacts women, and Black women in particular face victimization at a much higher rate when compared to other groups. Considering their overrepresentation, advocates have called for increased attention to IPV and its associated risks for Black women. As one of the most effective ways to publicize important health-related information is through the media, assessing coverage and framing is essential to understanding whether risks and resources are successfully communicated. The current study analyzes media attention to Black women’s elevated risk of victimization, and finds that while coverage is relatively minimal, media sources employ framing devices such as statistics, expert commentary, and single-victim focal points to discuss the issue. Three prominent themes emerged in content analysis of the media coverage, as news article language served to promote risk awareness, provide risk explanation, and/or address risk criticism.
The rise of entheogenic religion – that is, religions that involve the use of psychoactive drugs – has captured the attention of scholars and journalists. These studies tend to advance the interests of practitioners who advocate for the legitimacy of entheogens and of entheogenic religion more broadly. This Element breaks with these approaches as it offers a historical and critical analysis of entheogenic communities. It examines the production of entheogenic groups in the United States and considers the historical factors that have contributed to the rise in psychedelics more broadly. It also explores legal considerations and the impact of the law as a curator of entheogenic communities. This Element recognizes that these communities – like all imagined communities – are culturally conditioned, socially constructed, and historically contingent. By exploring these contingencies, we learn more about the broader sociocultural, historical, and economic frameworks that underlie the burgeoning association of psychoactive substances and religion.
This article explores the sudden spate of stories concerning the so-called “blue gum negro” (the Blue Gum) that circulated in the national press from the late 1880s to the late 1890s. These reports concerned purportedly blue-gummed, Black assailants, whose bite was alleged to be poisonous, and of whom African Americans were supposedly terrified. This article argues that, although these narratives reinforced white notions of Black criminality and credulity, they marked a particular moment of racialization, in which fears of bodily contagion, generated by the recent revolution in germ theory, were harnessed to notions of embodied racial difference, to express and galvanize white anxieties about racial impurity. Because Blue Gums embodied dysgenic menace, white journalists and writers were often reluctant to disavow their existence, instead capitalizing on the slippage between figurative and literal language that characterized discourse on race. However, in appropriating Black culture and presenting a figure from folklore as a racial type, white writers betrayed not only the essentially superstitious character of racial thought but also the interwoven nature of dominant and subjugated cultures in the United States.
This chapter considers the ontology of the human being as a person while confronting W. E. B. DuBois’ question “How does it feel to be a problem?” The chapter examines the ways in which the Black person is objectified and how that objectification is problematic to both the Black person and those who objectify her.
In this article, we take a look at the influence of 20th-century provenance of caste as a category of academic importance meriting a debate in American sociology and beyond. Two actors participated in the animating discourse of caste and race in the annals of American sociology. Oliver Cromwell Cox took a class position to define caste, unmaking the hierarchies set in social structures. Instead, he advocated for a racialized system to understand the post-slavery capitalist America. Gerald Berreman represented a different camp that found social hierarchies to be co-determinant of relations and division arranged into a caste society. The debate over caste, nevertheless, admitted to the plausibility of castes contrasted with India’s caste system. However, caste categorization was found to be an appropriate application to the conditions of social inequalities. Gunnar Myrdal and other scholars of repute contributed to the debate. What remained limited in their theoretical contributions to the discussion was an inadequate focus on the lived reality and politics of the caste formulations in the postcolonial, socialist mode of production. A serious examination of untouchability, sub-castes and sub-sub-castes that regulate the kernel of the caste system as well as the racialized castes in India were not studied or referenced in detail. This article adds to that void a theoretical understanding of the discussion on caste, race and colour in sociological and anthropological disciplines.
Despite reforms aimed at reducing racial disparities, the police department in this study experienced ongoing disparities in use of force. Through an analysis of the department's policies, training, and interviews with officers, this article identifies a practice termed 'forceful deescalation,' involving preemptive low-level force against passive non-compliance. Falling outside official use of force classifications, forceful de-escalation emerges as the department attempts to reconcile reform goals with perceived realities of street enforcement. Justifications rest on presuppositions of: a double-bind between crimefighting and reform; verbal and passive non-compliance as threats; and low-level force as minimally harmful. Forceful de-escalation reveals how police violence is reproduced in response to reform. As attention focuses on "less lethal" force, this paper illuminates how low-level police violence maintains harms and inequalities associated with deadly force. Through interactions often escaping official scrutiny, aggressive tactics become reinscribed and normalized as "de-escalation," perpetuating racial inequities under the guise of progressive change.
The criminal culpability of juvenile offenders remains a controversial and contested issue in the legal and public arenas in the United States. Since the mid-2000s, juvenile crime has been reframed by SCOTUS as a problem of brain immaturity. This article interrogates the omission of race from this new discourse of immaturity. First, I show that an alliance of learned societies, scholars, policy experts, legal professionals, and philanthropic foundations, which I call the new child savers, strategically sowed doubt about the criminological evidence of “high-risk” offenders to ensure the success of this new discourse of immaturity. I introduce the concept of benevolent ignorance to explain how they strategically concealed this inconvenient knowledge to achieve the socially valued goal of “saving children” from harsh sentences, and to escape public controversies over the racial overtones of risk assessment tools. Second, using Mills’ s concept of white ignorance, I argue that progressive elites and scholars involved in juvenile justice reform have historically ignored the lived experiences of juveniles of color. Finally, I discuss how the discourse of brain immaturity perpetuates and reinforces a colorblind explanation of juvenile crime that ignores the role of race in young people's encounters with the justice system.
A significant amount of criminological research has focused on explaining the overrepresentation of Black individuals in crime, attributing them with disproportionate criminal involvement. However, evidence suggests that the most severe crimes, particularly elite white-collar crime, can be disproportionately attributed to White individuals. This study tests the Theory of Racial Privilege and Offending, which argues that racial dynamics in the United States shape cultural adaptations contributing to white-collar and corporate crime. These adaptations involve cognitive frameworks related to empathy, entitlement, and competition. The findings support the influence of race on financial conditions and racial isolation, mixed support for isolation's impact on cognitive frameworks linked to criminality, and strong support for the direct impact of cognitive frameworks and crime-specific justifications on offending likelihood. The study concludes with implications for research and policy.
In the study of U.S. inequality, social scientists have long sought to tease apart the “effect of race” from the “effect of class” in our analyses. In studies of how individuals make evaluations of the social world, for instance, researchers have asked whether race or class demography shape individual perceptions, how each matters independent of the other, and ultimately which matters more. While this scientific practice is widespread, what I term the race-versus-class paradigm is only one way to analyze the relationship between race and class. The materialist tradition offers a competing approach, asking not how race matters independent of class, but how racism operates through structural, material conditions. To better explain the relationship between “race” and “class” in how individuals evaluate the social world, this paper proposes a theory of race as resource signal. In this alternative approach, race and class are interwoven, mutually constitutive, and dialectically constructed concepts unable to be meaningfully teased apart. I trace the differences in the two approaches through an empirical application, asking how individuals evaluate school quality based on neighborhood race and class demography in a video experiment.
Lassana Cisse Souleyman and Ahmaud Arbery lived separate lives on two continents, but they succumbed to the same fate. Souleyman was an Ivorian man residing in Malta with his family; Arbery was an American man living in Brunswick, Georgia. News reports state Souleyman was known for checking on his fellow migrants after his factory shifts; Arbery was also a kind soul, known for taking exercise runs through his neighborhood. Hate-filled, racist men turned their environment into hunting grounds and perceived human beings as disposable prey. As prey upon a hunting ground, they sought out, stalked, and killed Souleyman and Arbery in the communities where they built their homes, lived, and worked. As word spread of the murders, government officials and political pundits suggested, “This is not who we are.” This suggestion comes as an assuagement of anger, fear, and disbelief. However, it falls flat when considering the history and backfires as knowledge about the murderers came to light.
The origin of the criminalization of African Americans is often considered to be the period after the Civil War with the passage of a series of repressive laws called the Black Codes. However, I argue that the progenitor of this criminalization originated over 80 years earlier during the Founding Era, particularly following the British royal governor of Virginia’s proclamation in 1775 that promised to free all enslaved people who fought on the side of the British. The Founders feared any actions from the Black population to obtain their freedom and equal rights. Therefore, the Founders criminalized all aspects of their lives which was discussed at federal and state constitutional conventions, codified in the United States Constitution and confirmed at the First Congress of the United States. This was the catalyst for the laws and policies that negatively influence the present-day criminal justice system that disproportionately impacts African Americans.
In this brief contribution, I discuss several of the essays for this volume, highlighting some of their most notable contributions to the themes of the conference: our understanding of the Greco-Roman economy, and related issues such as inequality, economic development, and social conflict and injustice. I emphasize the relevance of this research beyond the study of ancient history, and the value of an ancient perspective in casting new light on the intractable problems of modern capitalism, racial capitalism, and colonialism. I raise the potential of comparative research in better understanding and addressing two particularly destructive modern anti-democratic ideologies: neoclassical and neoliberal economic dogma, grounded in possessive individualism, and scientific racism and white supremacy. Such problems are increasingly urgent, given the rise, particularly in the United States, but also in a number of European nations, of racist and fascist anti-democratic agitation, which threaten the decades of democratic reform, economic growth, and social change experienced, at least in the developed world, since the revival of ancient democratic ideals ushered in by the French Revolution. I put special emphasis on the importance of canvassing a wide range of ancient and modern scholarly and intellectual perspectives on the ways of creating a more politically, economically, and socially just and democratic society, highlighting the work of Cedric Robinson and Robin D.G. Kelley on the Black radical tradition, as well as the ideas of Canadian scholars such as Richard Iton and C.B. MacPherson, whose contributions have been unfairly neglected.
Over the past decade, recording technologies have enabled organized activists and ordinary residents to capture and circulate videos of police misconduct. Existing research focuses primarily, however, on organized activists who rely on formal training programs to record police behaviors. If formal programs train organized activists to capture police abuses on camera, how then do ordinary residents determine when they should record police behavior? Drawing on in-depth interviews with Black men who live in a Southside Chicago neighborhood, this study finds that residents’ recurrent interactions with police enable them to interpret officers’ words and actions as symbols of police misconduct, which, in subsequent exchanges, serve as signals to record events with their cellphones – what I term “camera cues.” Camera cues facilitate situated conceptions of legal authority that trigger residents’ distrust of police, reflecting the micro-dynamic connections between individuals’ legal consciousness and legal cynicism. Equipped with cellphones, residents scrutinize officers’ outward displays and police–citizen interactions to challenge police misconduct. While recording police behavior makes it possible at least occasionally to resist the dominance of legal authority, doing so often involves additional risks, including the destruction of their cellphones, verbal and physical threats, and arrests.
This study draws from W.E.B. Du Bois’ urban sociology in The Philadelphia Negro, Darkwater, and Black Reconstruction in America to offer a conceptual foil to present-day broken windows policing. We suggest that the Chicago School’s ecological model of urban life facilitated a broken windows approach to policing by labeling people and places as disordered but also that a Du Boisian approach—what we call “mended windows”—offers new ways of addressing underlying inequalities that reproduce harm. After drawing out the distinct intellectual trajectories of these two approaches, we turn to two contemporary cases of racialized police violence—Syracuse, NY, and the Antelope Valley, CA—to illustrate the theoretical and methodological significance of a Du Boisian mended windows analysis of urban policing across time and place. We conclude by considering what this approach might have foretold about contemporary movements to defund policing in favor of investing in community vitality.
During World War II police officers in Marseille and Algiers relentlessly hunted Algerian black market operatives. Hundreds of reports from these two cities detail the actions taken to prevent individuals from selling contraband goods, exceeding fixed market prices, or ignoring rationing protocols. Long-standing colonial stereotypes had labeled Algerians as prone to theft and violence, but the economic restrictions of war created a new category of the imagined Algerian criminal: the black market trafficker. In police reports the figure of the Algerian profiteer is omnipresent, but internal communications acknowledged that Europeans profited from the black market, too. Why, then, the fixation on Algerians? This article argues that police developed a narrative of Algerians as “internal enemies” of France. Their underlying suspicion of Algerians endured throughout World War II even as governments rose and fell in France and loyalties of the entire nation shifted. In treating Algerians as threats to national security, the police justified a system of control that homogenized the Algerian community along racial lines. The racialized policing of “anti-French” Algerian traffickers built not just on visual codes of race but also on how police practice mapped ideas of race onto the space of the city.
For some, the idea that words like ‘thug,’ ‘terrorist,’ and ‘urban’ carry racial connotations might come as a shock. They contend these words simply refer to vicious criminals, violent dissidents, and geographic regions. However, this chapter argues that these kinds of terms do carry racial overtones and are often used to justify coercive treatment of those who are so labeled. It then presents two broad strategies for addressing the unjust negative valuations based on being classified by such expressions: refusal and resistance. The chapter will demonstrate these strategies by focusing on the term ‘thug’.
America’s juvenile justice system was founded on the notion that the juvenile court would serve as the “ultimate parent” for youth. Yet, the history of youth punishment challenges the promise of juvenile “justice.” To offer a more comprehensive account of the family systems in juvenile court, this study draws from the insights of historical research on youth punishment and family criminalization to examine juvenile court outcomes in Arizona. Combining a historical lens with insights from attribution theory, we use quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the relationship between diverse family systems, including single mothers, single fathers, extended families, and foster care families, and juvenile court outcomes (i.e., diversion, preadjudication detention, petition, and judicial dismissal). Our findings suggest the need for more complex understandings of both family and punishment, and more expansive theorizations of the sorts of solutions that match the scope and scale of the problem.
This chapter examines whether changing cultural beliefs about American childhood translated into changes in practice at children’s institutions. Children’s institutions played an important role in American culture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, the location of these institutions occasionally contradicted contemporaneous ideals about childcare within the United States. One of the primary cultural preferences that arose during this period was the idea that the physical proximity to undesirable individual in cities negatively influenced child development. This chapter uses time as a proxy for the increased application of these ideas to test if the location of children’s institutions adhered to these ideals. Children’s institutions in this chapter fall into two categories – children’s homes for white American children and Native American boarding schools. Using these categories, this chapter explores if adults equally applied social expectations for children’s care to children of different races. This meta-analysis draws from online-accessible information about children’s institutions to suggest that the application of child-rearing ideals at children’s institutions built for children of different races had unique patterns in site location. Suggesting that while ideas about childcare standards and ideals filtered into American culture, the application of these methods were not evenly distributed.
The current popularity of prison greening coincides with a reformist project in carceral administration centring the "rehabilitation" and "transformation" of incarcerated people, finding a natural home in the prison garden. In contrast to mainstream literatures that celebrate reform and foreground recidivism, I argue that the prison garden is exploited institutionally for the symbolic power of "green" to help resolve a crisis of legitimacy in prisons, and thereby capitalism, depoliticising the violence of incarcera-tion while reproducing the symbolic conditions of racial capitalism through two different socioecological (prison) fixes. This proceeds in strikingly similar ways to urban sustainable development, which regularly depoliticises and extends racial and spatial injustice across the city. Yet, in its tensions and contradictions, the (un)sustainable prison garden remains a space where radical possibilities can emerge through moments of resistance, constituting various tenets of a precarious carceral food justice praxis. Resumen: La popularidad actual de la "ecologizaci on" de las prisiones coincide con un proyecto reformista en la administraci on carcelaria que se centra en la "rehabili-taci on" y la "transformaci on" de las personas encarceladas, encontrando un hogar natural en el jard ın de la prisi on. En contraste con la literatura dominante que celebra la reforma y pone en primer plano la reincidencia, argumento que el jard ın de la prisi on es explotado institucionalmente por el poder simb olico de lo "verde" para ayudar a resol-ver una crisis de legitimidad en las c arceles y, por lo tanto, en el capitalismo, despoliti-zando la violencia del encarcelamiento mientras reproduce las condiciones simb olicas del capitalismo racial a trav es de dos "arreglos" (de prisi on) socioecol ogicos diferentes. Esto procede de manera sorprendentemente similar al desarrollo urbano sostenible, que regularmente despolitiza y extiende la injusticia racial y espacial por toda la ciudad. Sin embargo, en sus tensiones y contradicciones, el jard ın de la prisi on (in)sostenible sigue siendo un espacio donde pueden surgir posibilidades radicales a trav es de momentos de resistencia, constituyendo varios principios de una praxis precaria de justicia alimentaria carcelaria.
In the aftermath of World War II, eugenics and the pseudoscientific base used to justify its practices are generally understood to have phased off the scene. If, however, eugenics never actually disappeared but has been persistent, and in turn becomes one of the best explanations for mass incarceration today, what role did Christianity—especially Evangelicalism—play in this unprecedented moment of imprisonment? Building on legal scholarship identifying the significant role of eugenic philosophy that manifests in penal policy and ongoing phenomena into the early twenty-first century, this article examines key figures in the backdrop of eugenics’ particular early developments, and leading figures—namely, Billy Graham and Prison Fellowship’s Chuck Colson—whose ministries operated in close proximity to the prison during the latter twentieth century and especially over the past fifty years as incarceration rates skyrocketed. After examining several important theological tenets reflected within Evangelicalism that are compatible with eugenic logic, a critical approach is developed drawing from more robust theological considerations that if appropriated earlier might have found evangelicals resisting the mass incarceration building efforts rather than supporting them.
Theories of race-making have recognized the confusion and contradiction in state-led racial projects but have not sufficiently elaborated their unintended consequences. Focusing on the relationship between the state, racial science, and immigration policy in the early twentieth century United States, this article illustrates how practical challenges in racial projects can jeopardize and thereby eventually trigger innovations in modes of racial governance. The Dillingham Commission (1907–1911) was a Congressional investigative commission that attempted to collect comprehensive data on immigrants in order to provide a scientific foundation of immigration policy. Specifically, the most powerful members of the Commission’s executive committee wanted to single out Southern and Eastern Europeans (SEEs) and portray them as “undesirable races.” Developing such a classification scheme, however, proved to be difficult, and the facts collected from the field did not support their goal, instead demonstrating that in many cases SEEs were not very different from other immigrants and their native-born counterparts. The idea for national quotas, as well as the theoretical foundation for the inclusion of SEEs, emerged in this process, not as an outcome of ideological design but as an unintended byproduct of knowledge production. I highlight the pursuit of facts-based governance and relative autonomy of middle-level managers as key factors that enabled such process.
This article examines the constructions of Black “degeneracy” through which white Americans rationalized Jim Crow terror. Ruminations on African Americans’ supposed downward trajectory, I argue, drew relational meaning from a range of colonial discourses. Claims that African Americans were deteriorating outside the bonds of enslavement were articulated within wider transnational imperialist discourses circulating in this period that imagined that the world's savage peoples were destined to recede in the march of civilization. Here, I examine white Americans’ narratives of African American degeneration through two other imagined hemispheric encounters between white civilization and savagery. In the article's first half, I consider images of Haiti employed in cultural and political texts to signify the durability of innate Black savagery and the apocalyptic potential of Black freedom. In the second half, I consider discourses of Black degeneration in freedom alongside the genocidal construction of the “vanishing Indian.” I focus on two memorial projects: the 1931 monument to the Faithful Slave erected in Harpers Ferry and the never-completed National American Indian Memorial, for which ground was broken in 1913 at Fort Wadsworth.
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