Wicked Overseers

Abstract

In recent times, several tragic events have brought attention to the relationship between policing and racial/ethnic minorities in the United States. Scholars, activists, and pundits have clamored to explain tensions that have arisen from these police-related deaths. The authors contribute to the discussion by asserting that contemporary policing in America, and its relationship to racial inequality, is only the latest chapter in a broader historical narrative in which the police constitute the front line of a race- and class-stratified social order. In other words, contemporary criminal justice and race struggles are a legacy of colonialism. This essay begins with a brief overview of colonialism before turning toward dissecting the contemporary colonial character of policing African American urban ghetto communities in four parts. First, the emergence of ghettos as internal colonies is described. Second, mechanisms are given that propelled the mass entry of police into ghetto spaces, with particular attention given to the war on drugs, broken-windows and order-maintenance policing, and police militarization. Third, the authors explore how contemporary policing acts to manage the colonized through police stops, searches, and other practices. Finally, the relationship between American policing practices and cultural denigration of African Americans is described.

Trauma and Substance Use among Indigenous Peoples of the United States and Canada: A Scoping Review

“…Findings are also consistent with global literature regarding the impacts of colonization on the destruction of culture, and the subsequent negative impacts of those losses on well-being for Indigenous communities (Goldstein et al, 2018; Maple-Brown & Hampton, 2020; Okazaki et al, 2008; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2008). It is important to recognize the ways in which the legacy of colonialism has influenced the current state of global society and continues to contribute to the oppression of Indigenous peoples (Anastario et al, 2020; Steinmetz, et al, 2017). Additional work is needed to further understand how the intersection of historical and lived trauma dynamically influence substance use outcomes among Indigenous peoples in the United States, Canada, and globally, and to explore the role of government policies in perpetuating ongoing harm and oppression against Indigenous communities, furthering the deleterious effects of historical trauma.…”

Revisiting the Weberian Presumption: Gun Militarism, Gun Populism, and the Racial Politics of Legitimate Violence in Policing

“…In conjunction with civil society and market institutions, the state-as a complex of discourses, practices, apparatuses, and actors-has conjured race as a social identity, an axis of inequality, and a narrative frame of social life throughout American history (Harris 1993;Collins 2002;King and Smith 2005;Bobo and Charles 2009;Wacquant 2001;Anderson 2012;Feagin 2013;Omi and Winant 2014;Forman 2017;Kendi 2017). Although "racial formations" and the social institutions they buttress are contingent arrangements in the sense that they are socially constructed (Omi and Winant 2014), the sociology of race reveals the foundational and enduring impact of systems of racial dominationparticularly slavery in the United States-in shaping state apparatuses, such as the criminal justice system (Muhammad 2011;Steinmetz, Schaefer, and Henderson 2017; see also Fanon 2007). As compared to whites, people of color are more likely to be stopped, detained, arrested, convicted, and sentenced to harsher terms of punishment.…”

“Other than the Projects, You Stay Professional”: “Colorblind” Cops and the Enactment of Spatial Racism in Routine Policing

“…In contrast to the implicit bias literature, recent literature on (1) how colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2013 informs the administration of justice and (2) the intersection of racism, space, and policing provides a more substantive consideration of how structural racism reproduces racial and spatial inequalities generally and in criminal legal contexts (Armenta 2017;Delgado 2018;Golash-Boza 2016;Manning, Hartmann, and Gerteis 2015;Milner 2020;Steinmetz, Schaefer, and Henderson 2017;Vargas and McHarris 2017). 4 Nicole Gonzales Van Cleve's (2016) ethnographic analysis of how colorblind racism obfuscated the extent to which racism permeated the daily operations of Chicago's criminal court system is especially instructive.…”