Felon Disenfranchisement

Abstract

Felon disenfranchisement is deeply rooted in U.S. history as a form of punishment and as a tool to inhibit African Americans from voting. Today, there are 5.3 million U.S. residents politically disenfranchised due to a felony conviction-about 2 million of whom are African Americans. The overrepresentation of African Americans disenfranchised, and the U.S. history of racism, brings forth the question of how these laws continue to exist. The objective of this study is to demonstrate, through a socio-legal approach, the federal court system's role in perpetuating and maintaining the ethnoracial divisions in society through the validation and rationalization of felon disenfranchisement laws. We aim to demonstrate how over the past century many disenfranchisement laws have been ''whitewashed'' in order to eliminate any indication of racially motivated practices, a practice that coincides with the historic expansion of the penal state in the controlling of minority populations.

The diversity officer: Police officers' and black women civilians' epistemologies of race and racism in policing

“…Finally, as a discourse that reflects and reproduces an epistemology of white ignorance, racecraft enables the (mis)understanding that "race"-defined through inhered traits and individual attitudes-is to blame for racialized patterns in police arrests, harassment, and violence, rather than structural racism (Schaefer & Kraska, 2012). This equips some white people to defend police as wellintended and virtuous (Lee & Gibbs, 2015) in the face of widespread police brutality, and construct criminality and violence as outcomes of "race" (i.e., blackness), and not racist policing (Alexander, 2012).…”

Wicked Overseers

“…These cultural symbols allow departments to act outside of de jure racism and criminalize other indicators of racial status (clothing, mannerisms, and other noncriminal or otherwise nuisance forms of behaviors). Such “colorblind racism” encourages the belief that racial disparities in traffic stops, drug arrests, and general police practices are the result of individual decisions to commit crime rather a result of explicit systemic racial bias (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Schaefer and Kraska 2012). In the eagerness of the colonial machine to eradicate all notions of racism, law enforcement turns to an objective tool to predict risk and guide enforcement practices, which in turn generates new justifications for police presence and carceral control in ghetto communities predicated on the need to remove dangerous individuals.…”