Review of Policing Black Lives by Robyn Maynard - Matthew

Book Rview, 2018

My review of 'Policing Black Lives' by Robyn Maynard

Harvard Law Review, 2018

14 See Carbado, supra note 9, at 164 (framing this phenomenon as part of a broader problem of mass criminalization).

Journal of Urban Affairs, 2017

President Lyndon Johnson's appointment of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder (Kerner Commission) followed a series of inner-city riots in the 1960s. The Commission's 1968 report, issued months before Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, famously concluded that the United States was moving toward separate societies, one Black and one White. In recent years, another version of racialized violence has garnered public attention: systemic police brutality and repeated killings of unarmed Black and Brown men by police, spawning a new civil rights movement proclaiming Black Lives Matter. Condemnation of this violence and acknowledgment of its racial content by leading public officials is now standard fare, but criminal convictions and departmental discipline are scarce. This review essay brings attention back to the institutionalized racism called out by the Kerner Commission, arguing that occasional and even chronic police violence is an outcome rather than the core problem. A more fundamental issue is a routine function of policing-protecting mainstream United States from the perceived risk from its "ghetto" underbelly through spatial containment. We are at the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson's 1967 appointment of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder (also known as the Kerner Commission). Rioting was continuing at that time in Detroit, having already occurred on a large scale in Los Angeles (Watts 1965), Chicago (Division Street 1966), and Newark (1967). The Commission's report the following year famously concluded, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal" (Kerner et al., 1968, p. 1). Most recently public attention has focused on another version of racialized violence: systemic police brutality and repeated killings of unarmed Black and Brown men by police. Widely disseminated videographic evidence of homicide after homicide (shooting, tasing, choking, rough riding), instantly distributed through social media, has spawned a new civil rights mobilization proclaiming that Black Lives Matter (BLM), a nascent social movement centered on the problem of violence by agents of the state (Pellow, 2016). Condemnation of this violence and acknowledgment of its racial content by leading public officials became standard fare in 2015 and 2016, though criminal convictions and even departmental discipline of offending officers were scarce.

Race & Class, 2018

Social justice : a journal of crime, conflict & world order , 2020

2021

2017

Book by Robyn Maynard Review by Kuir ë Garang In 2012, a young South Sudanese woman, Ny (not her real name), who is now a fourth-year student at the University of Calgary, told me that a White teacher made her redo a math test because the teacher doubted her math capability. Ny, as a result, generalized her experience with that teacher as a "damaging" mainstream perception of Black Canadians: "What was done was damaging and a clear example of how Black Canadians are viewed in the education system." 1 And in 2014, a mother from Jamaica told me how her children were placed in an English as a second language (ESL) class because of their accent and appearance. These devaluing experiential stories are just a few examples, among many others, that made reading Torontobased feminist writer and social activist Robyn Maynard's Policing Black Lives a personal reminder about the precarious social status of Black Canadians. Undoubtedly, Black Canadians are judged from preconceived racist ideas, not from their actual, verifiable realities, as Ny's and the Jamaican mother's examples show. This marginalizing attitude mirrors Maynard's message about Black devaluation in Policing Black Lives, the devaluing ideas used to initiate and fuel state violence. Maynard's main argument is that "marginalized social groups" experience harm as "state violence," which is mediated through government policies, actions, or inactions (p. 6). This violence is operationalized not only through the criminal justice system but also through institutions like schools, child welfare, social services, and medical institutions (p. 7). Such historical state violence, Maynard argues, now exists in modified (but still oppressive and marginalizing) forms through police surveillance and brutality, criminalization of students, and racialization of welfare services, among others. Regardless of the contemporary forms it takes, this state violence continues to have the same dehumanizing and marginalizing effect it embodied during slavery and past racist segregation (Chapters 2 & 3). Even when Canada is regarded as an exemplary land of freedom and is contrasted with the United States (p. 3), Maynard argues that Canada's racism (past and present) and participation in slavery and slave trade is now manifest in the inequality of "racial capitalism" (p. 57). An important argument Maynard makes-which needs reiterating-is that when scholars write about anti-Black violence, the literature makes it appear as if the violence is only meted out on Black men (p. 13). Admittedly, Maynard Reviewer Note

2016

New American Studies Journal, 2022

American social justice organizations, including Black Lives Matter, regard these killings as the betrayal of the promise of the US to treat all of its citizens equally before the law. The premise of the social contract, upon which the country was founded, is discredited. As Charles W. Mills argued, America's social contract is, in fact, a racial contract, which excluded Black people as slaves from the body politic at the country's very inception and still marginalizes them through institutional racism. However, some scholars, both radical and liberal, have argued that the social contract is not beyond redemption. This article addresses the history of police violence and extra-legal killings of Black people and argues that social contract theory plays an ideological role to legitimate the coercive power of the state over the African American community. It first looks at the alarming numbers of Black Americans killed in the United States over the past few decades and compares police violence to the extralegal lynchings of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Using Walter Benjamin's 1921 essay "Critique of Violence," the article then describes the obfuscation of an underlying truth: that, far from being a neutral arbiter between its citizens, the state is the primary inscription of violence in the body politic. The police are the face of that state, both in its law-making violence (die rechtsetzende Gewalt) and law-preserving violence (die rechtserhaltende Gewalt). In contrast to the mythology of a social contract in which all members are treated equally before the law, the state targets African Americans to legitimate its monopoly on violence, thereby unmasking the social contract as a racial contract, which has excluded

Criminal Justice Matters, 2012