Racial Profiling, Security, & Human Rights (2013)

Logics of Genocide, ed. Anne O'Byrne and Martin Shuster, 2020

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress [CRC] presented a petition to the United Nations entitled “We Charge Genocide.” While the petition was never formally considered by the UN, the project of naming, analyzing, and contesting systematic anti-black violence in the United States has inspired activist groups such as We Charge Genocide [WCG], a grassroots organization challenging police violence against youth of color in Chicago. Both organizations engage strategically with formal institutions such as the UN in a way that exceeds the restricted agenda of those institutions and struggles for revolutionary social change. But the UN’s narrow definition of genocide, and the analogy with homicide upon which it relies, pose challenges for this project. I propose a concept of structural genocide, based on a model of social justice rather than criminal justice, as a tool for articulating the harm of policies and practices that undermine a group’s life chances, whether or not they directly kill people.

Interface: A Journal For and About Social Movements, 2021

"This special issue was inspired by the powerful anti-racist movements that surged following the police killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020, in Minniapolis, Minesota. George’s last words, “I can’t breathe”, while a white police officer´s knee pressed into his neck for nine minutes, subsequently became an emblematic battle cry against institutional racism. The brutality of this incident, albeit by no means unusual, caused global outrage and mobilised responses on other continents such as Europe and Asia, despite the global pandemic and lockdown. Interestingly, the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) centred its anger on institutional racism. This gave recognition to racism as constituting a key part of a system of repression and domination rather than amounting to an occasional outburst or something gone wrong in the country of opportunities and freedom. As the antiracist movements gained momentum in the midst of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, they met with challenges that raised new and old questions. Drawing on the Afro-Pessimist claims that (US) civil society is inherently antithetical to all manifestations of Black social life (Hartman, 1997; Sexton, 2016; Sharpe, 2016; Wilderson, 2010), scholars Adam Bledsoe and Willie Jamaal Wright argue that global expressions of anti- Blackness are necessary for the perpetuation of global capitalism. They go on to argue that “regardless of the particular expression of capitalism, anti-Blackness conditions the possibility of capitalist reproduction across different global contexts” (Bledsoe and Wright, 2018). In contrast to this conception, several contributions to this special issue observe an emerging multiracial composition and diversity in the antiracist uprising during the pandemic."

This paper analyzes the use of statistics within political movements that target carceral institutions—prisons, detention centers, “terms of engagement,” stop-and-frisk, etc. Using a Foucaultian analysis of biopower, specifically regulatory power, I argue that the uncritical adoption of statistics in the analysis of black death under mass incarceration transforms and strengthens regulatory power against which these statistics are deployed. The use of statistics to remind us of how deeply precarious black life is covers over the individuality that was lost. Further these statistics of black death function as a specter that haunts black life; they make descriptive and normative claims for a future of black existence. What is at stake here is not the mere reproduction of an apparently totalizing power. Rather, the particular use of statistics by prison abolitionists and other organizers concerned with the spectrum of carceral institutions highlights the precarity of black life in the United States. Through the production and re-production of this statistical data, black life is rendered doubly-precarious. Every 28 hours means that the social and political institutions on which we must depend consistently fail to provide the security for black life. However, every 28 hours also means that black life is represented only in death. Whether or not we remember Freddie Gray’s name or which number Tamir Rice is on the list of black murders, their lives get subsumed into a group statistic that eclipses individual identity.

Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 2021

But what was happening in the US's geopolitical 'backyard'? What was going on in Latin America? There is a plethora of structural, political and historical reasons for anti-racism to crystallize into countless issues of contention and articulate as a movement. For instance, there have been allegations and reports of racially motivated police abuses in several countries in the region, where poverty is also racialized (see for example:

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 2014

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2017

We wrote the proposal for this special issue at the beginning of 2015. From our institutional home in the United States South, daily life, class discussions, and academic work felt saturated with biopoltical questions. The year 2014 had ended with waves of protests against racialized police violence and the pervasive criminalization of Black communities and protests had coalesced around a provocative set of signifiers. The #BlackLivesMatter movement, originally a response to the July 2013 acquittal of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin's vigilante killer in Florida gained the silent ''hands up, don't shoot'' gesture in reference to the August 2014 fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by a police officer subsequently acquitted by a grand jury. That winter, a New York City policeman was acquitted by a grand jury despite videotaped evidence of the July 2014 choking of Eric Garner, and t-shirts worn at protests and at sporting events called us to remember Garner's last words: ''I can't breathe.'' In each case, the loss of a young black man's life was followed by a second symbolic death, in the highlighting of the victim's supposed flaws and mistakes and the subsequent failure to hold anyone accountable for the death. A growing litany of these police killings was then given intersectional nuance by #SayHerName's recounting of Black female, queer and trans victims who had not only been subject to violence but then omitted from the public recounting. The names of Sandra Bland, Renisha McBride, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddy Gray, Philando Castille, and too many others signal particular lives valued and mourned, but also indicate a repetition and wearing down of life. We wrote the proposal with ferocious anger and with the Movement for Black Lives in mind as an expression of righteous fury at state violence that cuts directly to the heart of race-biopolitics. Two years later, as we write this introduction, Donald Trump takes the office of US President. He promises to wall out Mexican and Latin American migrants, expel or register Muslims, and restore white nationalism. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, four million refugees have left Syria since 2011, and more than six million were internally displaced at the end of 2016 (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2017), but in the political discourse of the US 2016 elections, refugees were figured as security threat rather than as a humanitarian crisis engendered in part by US geopolitical strategy. Likewise, migrants crossing the US-Mexico border were figured as

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.

Strategies, 2010

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