The Long Legacy of White Citizen Police: A Recap of the 12th Annual Gondwe Lecture (original) (raw)
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Burning in the Melting Pot: American Policing and the Internal Colonization of African Americans
Rutgers Race & The Law Review, 2021
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, was killed by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis Police Department officer. During Floyd’s arrest by Chauvin and three other officers, Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. During this time, Floyd said more than 20 times that he couldn’t breathe as he cried in pain, begging for his mother. Less than two days later, racial justice protests erupted in 2,000 cities across all 50 states as more than seven million people took to the streets demanding an end to police brutality and racial injustice towards African Americans. Despite the protests being overwhelmingly peaceful, brutality against protestors by federal, state, and local law enforcement was rampant. Videos emerged of police assaulting peaceful protesters and kettling groups of racial justice advocates. Federal agents aimed crowd-control weapons at protestors’ heads, beat street medics applying aid to protestors, and dragged protestors off the street into unmarked vehicles. As I watched agents of the State murder George Floyd and saw countless acts of police brutality against peaceful police brutality protestors on a nationwide scale, I read the names of recent Black victims of police brutality: Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Aura Rosser, Michelle Cusseaux, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Stephon Clark, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Daniel Prude, and many others. All of these victims were individuals with hopes, fears, aspirations—all of which had their lives taken by those tasked with protecting and serving Black communities. While these killings were tragic, their deaths cannot be attributed solely to a few “bad apples” as unfortunate, isolated events. Rather, their deaths—and contemporary racial inequality—are ultimately a consequence of enduring historical processes and structures of colonial domination that have persisted since our nation’s founding. While the particular appearance of colonial control may have transformed over time, the logics of colonialism—containment, erasure, terror, and removal—persist in one form or another, with policing acting as the primary institution through which colonial logics are implemented, managed, and perpetuated. America’s modern policing institution was formed in the early 20th century and shaped by the imperial-military regime that governed America’s colonized territories overseas. While modern policing was rooted in colonial notions of Black criminality and biological inferiority, racialized policing and systemic discrimination isolated African Americans into “internal colonies”: isolated, economically-deprived urban neighborhoods. As time progressed, police occupation and domination of Black internal colonies were given different justifications, such as “law and order” or anti-narcotics initiatives, while simultaneously maintaining the same colonialist machinations and structures that white American society insists were abolished long ago. Within this note, I will argue that contemporary American policing, and its relation to racial inequality is merely the newest chapter in a generational process in which the police constitute the front line of a race- and class-stratified social order. First, I will discuss the colonial origins of American policing practices, which are rooted in American empire, and the domination and control of colonized territories. Additionally, I will discuss how operational and structural reforms such as intelligence-gathering and counterinsurgency helped the military to surveil and control colonized populations. Then I will discuss how “imperial feedback” permitted the operations of empire abroad to shape the operations of domestic policing. I will explore how colonial control practices and radicalized homologies were adopted by police, and counterinsurgency and intelligence strategies became standard practice for law enforcement. Second, I will discuss the Great Migration of Black Migrants from the Jim Crow South and how the “Promised Land” of Northern cities proved to be another form of racial enclosure. I will discuss the social, cultural, and economic developments that spurred racial animosity towards Black migrants. Then I will briefly discuss how racial animosity or “whitelash” manifested through segregative policies and the social construction of Black criminality. Third, I will discuss how, from the 1910s to the 1970s, reform era policing practices acted as a conduit for white racial animosity and how police viewed themselves as essential in controlling and suppressing the perceived threat associated with racial and ethnic minorities. Finally, I will discuss how the social construct of Black criminality shaped the strategies of police departments in urban areas. Fourth, I will discuss the origins and history of the war on drugs. I will discuss the radicalized origins of “law and order” rhetoric and how social welfare became replaced by further police militarization under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. I will explore how Ronald Reagan and subsequent presidents’ war on drugs aggravated the militarization of American police and laid the foundation for a racially disparate and discriminatory system of mass incarceration. Finally, I will discuss the consequences and costs of the war on drugs regarding criminal justice and the impact the war on drugs has had on Black communities. Fifth, I will explain the nature of colonialism and how internal colonialism allows colonialist structures to persist throughout history. My explanation will include a summary of the dynamics of colonial domination and how colonizer “myths” allow colonial domination to endure through white dissonance and dissociation from historical atrocities. Finally, I will apply the concept of internal colonialism to the “urban ghetto.” I will explore how colonial ideologies and practices helped isolate Black Americans in economically disadvantaged areas. I will explore how these same colonial structures have endured in modernity and perpetuate racial inequality and the subordination of the internally colonized Black population.
2015
Thank you first and foremost to my thesis advisor, Professor Engel, whose constant dedication and commitment made this project possible. And thank you to every other professor I've had at Bates, who've taught me, among other things, to always remain "critical, not cynical". And lastly, thank you to the spell check function of Microsoft Word, without whom "institution" would be misspelled differently 197 times. ! 4! Quotation: "Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. … Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat… And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as individuals. Thus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge." The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison ! 5! Introduction: Contemporary Relevance, Conceptualizations, and a Preview I. Contemporary relevance: an incident On a Saturday afternoon in August of 2014, a young Black man named Michael Brown was walking down a street in Ferguson, Missouri, when he was shot and killed by a police officer. Factually, this is about as much as has been agreed upon in this closely followed and highly visible case (Chuck 2014). A friend who was walking with Brown presented a hostile and violent depiction of the officer involved. According to the friend, the officer drove up to the two young men and verbally harassed them, first telling them to "get the fuck on the sidewalk" and then singling out Brown, saying "I'm gonna shoot you". Eventually, according to the friend, the officer fired shots at Brown, even after Brown ran away from the officer, with his empty hands displayed in the air, and killed him in what would seem to resemble an execution-style murder (Chuck 2014). The Ferguson police department painted a very different picture of the encounter, portraying Brown has the hostile instigator of violence. According to the police department, the officer politely asked the two young men to move to the sidewalk, which angered and provoked Brown, who subsequently initiated a fight. Amidst a chaotic battle in the police car, one in which no neutral party can presumably really know what happened, the officer's gun went off and Brown was killed (Chuck 2014). Following this incident, there was born a tremendous racial consciousness, first locally in Ferguson, and then nationally across the United States. Residents protested loudly and visibly in the streets of the otherwise unremarkable St. Louis suburb, challenging and grieving the ! 6! killing-the individual act of the officer-as well as the systemic failures that followed, including a horrifically unprofessional handling of the case by local and state authorities. The protests garnered national attention, as the protestors, largely Black, were met by an almost exclusively white police force armed with tanks, snipers, and suited in riot gear (Davey and Bosman 2014). The asymmetry was striking and absurd, but also informative-the stark juxtaposition of unarmed Black individuals with white figures of authority, fingers on their triggers, revealed the same racialized fear, mistrust, and anxiety that shaped the asymmetric, lethal encounter between the white police officer and Michael Brown just a few days earlier. Three months later, the cynicism of those protestors was largely vindicated when the police officer involved was not even indicted, let alone convicted, on any charges resulting from the lethal encounter. After a process riddled with unprofessionalism and racism on so many levels, protestors again took to the streets, this time having seen their cynicism confirmed. Not only had a police officer taken the life of their brother, neighbor, friend etc., but the criminal justice system, the system in place to protect and serve its citizenry of all colors, had shrugged in response (Davey and Bosman 2014). Now, the anger, despair, and cynicism were directed not just at the police officer who had taken Brown's life, toward an individual, but toward systems and institutions at the heart of American civic life and politics more generally. A systemic trend It would be naïve and myopic at best, disingenuous and deceptive at worst, to tell the story of the shooting of Michael Brown without including the other stories of other young unarmed Black men who were killed under similar circumstances. The story of Michael Brown's death at the hands of the criminal justice system is neither unique nor unremarkable-as an ! 7! anecdote, it merely personifies a trend in American criminal justice. Indeed, beyond the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the killing of young Black men, and subsequent excusal by the criminal justice system and, oftentimes, general public, has become, in many ways, a sick tradition in the culture of American policing, criminal justice, and public opinion thereof. It is far beyond the scope of this project to address fully this epidemic of state-sanctioned violence against young unarmed Black men. However, it is worth briefly recalling a few of the more recent egregious and well-known tragedies to illustrate the pattern. In November of 2014, Akai Gurley, a 28-year old Black man was killed, unarmed, in a public housing unit in Brooklyn (Goodman 2014). Before that, in Staten Island in July of 2014, a 43-year Black man named Eric Garner was killed over a dispute that followed from a few officers forcefully arresting him for selling untaxed cigarettes (Goldstein and Schweber 2014). The officers, who put Garner in a forceful chokehold, were not indicted (New York Times 2014). Before that, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year old Black teenager, was killed in Sanford, Florida by a self-designated "neighborhood watch coordinator" who was later acquitted on grounds of self-defense (Alvarez and Buckley 2013). Before that, in 2006, Sean Bell, a 23-year old Black man, was killed the morning of his wedding day when five police officers fired fifty bullets at him. Three of the officers involved were acquitted (Wilson 2008). And before that, in 1999, though by no means the first iteration of the pattern of racialized police violence, Amadou Diallo, a West African immigrant was killed by four officers who fired forty-one shots while Diallo was standing in the doorway of his apartment in the Bronx. All four officers were subsequently acquitted of all charges (Fritsch 2000). These incidents tell the stories not only of agents of the criminal justice system killing young Black men, but the system designed to carry out criminal justice sanctioning those actions. ! 8! With this wider perspective, we can see that those individuals protesting in the streets of Ferguson were not angry about an isolated incident nor any singular event, but rather a brutalizing pattern of events-what has been, for many of those people, the norm. They were not protesting one action by a system that has failed to hold perpetrators of racial violence accountable, but rather only the latest action by a system that has succeeded in maintaining indifference to, if not endorsing, racial violence. Indeed, an exceptional string of what appears to be systematic failures can only stretch so long until they ought to be seen as systemic successes. II. Same story every time / Being Black is not a crime: a pattern The systemic and repeated failures of the criminal justice system to account for statesanctioned violence against young, unarmed Black men became abundantly clear to me on a personal level when I attended a massive rally in New York City following the announcement of the non-indictment in the Michael Brown investigation. At this rally, there were many slogans and phrases that spoke to the specific incident in Ferguson ("Hands up, Don't Shoot"); more striking to me, however, was that many, if not most, of the phrases I heard were not limited to this one incident, but instead spoke to a larger trend in policing, law enforcement, and the criminal justice system. Many condemned "stop-and-frisk" policing in New York or the system of mass incarceration as a whole. The phrase that seemed most explanatory to me, and the phrase from which this thesis borrows its title, was "Same story every time / being Black is not a crime". The first part of the phrase, "Same story every time", suggested a pattern. As such, I was compelled to explore questions of race and the criminal justice through a methodology that explicitly valued long time horizons. By extending the time frame and including in analysis ! 9! historical context and past "stories", what may seem to be isolated incidents can be more readily identified as recurrences of one singular pattern that manifests itself time and time again. What appear as countless stars, randomly situated in entropic clusters, actually constitute a constellation that has a purpose, story, and deeper meaning. The importance of seeing a pattern, of identifying a metaphorical forest from the tress, is paramount to the substance of this project, the purpose of which is largely to connect legislative instances, separated temporally and geographically, to identify a pattern of state-sanctioned control. From this pattern, then, we can draw meaning. The second part of the phrase, "being Black is not a crime" is perhaps more straightforward and obviously linked to the substance of my project. If the first part describes a methodology, of seeking patterned constellations, the second describes the pattern's substance: the criminalization of Blackness. When state-sanctioned authorities have shot and killed unarmed Black men, and juries and often public opinion acquit or otherwise refuse to hold those individuals accountable, the killing of those Black individuals by police officers is deemed somehow excusable, the logical,...
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