Can a nation built on genocide ever be truly free of state-sanctioned violence?
The Emancipation Proclamation was hailed as a victory for African-Americans. It is taught in American history classes as the hail Mary brought in by Abraham Lincoln to free all the slaves. Growing up, I only remember learning about the Civil Rights Era after that; overall, not much time was dedicated to the trials and triumphs faced by African Americans post-slavery. Until I entered adulthood, I had never heard of the Page Act, the Act to Encourage Immigration, or even knew that the war on crime declared by Nixon ended up fueling one of the largest mass incarceration projects in the world. When the dominant narrative told through the lens of white supremacy is discarded, one can see the truth: centuries of state-sanctioned violence and power used to promote white supremacy. Only by using the lens of state-sanctioned violence and power can we begin to discredit commonly held today which include: police “protect & serve” those in their communities, the issue of police abusing their power has only come to light recently in the age of mass media, and that police merely uphold notions of “law and order” without full understanding of the context surrounding “order.” Once the common theme of white supremacy is recognized (with the help of Andrea Ritchie, Kelly Lytle Hernández, and others), we can acknowledge the dominant use of state-sanctioned violence from the inception of the United States.
Through law, policing, and arrests, a more comprehensive history unfolds and one learns that the use of state-sanctioned violence and power has not diminished over time – it has only manifested in other ways. Instead of directly owning a person as property, that person is now labeled a criminal. Instead of public lynchings, Black men are shot by police and other “officers.” Dialogue eerily similar to that found in the Immigration Act of 1882 – barring entry of “idiots, lunatics, convicts, and persons likely to become public charges” (Nevins, 2001:2) – can be found over 130 years later in policy being put forth by the current President of the United States to “allow immigration officials to refuse admission and deny extensions to those who might become ‘public charges’” (The Hill, 2018:1). These are just a few of the numerous examples showcasing the changes, not the lack of, state-sanctioned violence and abuse of power. Over the past 4 centuries, white men inhabiting this continent have established both a criminal justice system and an immigration system to promote white supremacy over every other race, class, and gender through maintenance of order, control of social and physical mobility, detainment and imprisonment, allocating citizenship, and policing. Through these five themes, the criminal justice system and immigration system both utilize state-sanctioned violence and power to reinforce white supremacy.
A common argument heard today in favor of police power is that they are here to “protect and serve” those within their communities. This has led me to question, who are they protecting and serving? Andrea J. Ritchie points out that “the St. Louis, Missouri, police force was founded in 1808 to ‘protect’ residents from Native Americans” (Ritchie, 2017:24). This elevated the role of police from merely enforcing laws to outright targeting groups of a specific race/ethnicity. The group of people that police actually “protect and serve” is highlighted particularly well by Murakawa as she describes the race riots of 1943 that took place in the North, primarily Detroit. As notions of “racial tensions” and “law and order” grew, riots erupted and “law enforcement officers openly allied with white rioters” (Murakawa 2014:32). This manifested primarily in their actions over the course of the riots, which included when Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries put into force a massive amount of officers, and “in the three-day uprising, Detroit police killed 17 people, all of whom were black” (Murakawa, 2014:33). Kelly Lytle Hernández points out that similar tactics were used with the discourse of “public charges” – as mentioned earlier – and police were deployed to force Mexican immigrants into the labor pool by arresting them as vagrants. She concludes that in addition to other laws and ordinances targeting use of public space instead of being employed, “vagrancy charges, in other words, were used to compel Mexican labor” and that “such evidence offers a glimpse into the ways in which local employers and authorities leveraged public order charges to incarcerate Mexicans who organized to alter the conditions of their labor and, thereby, life in the United States” (Hernández, 2017:148). She also notes the implementation of the 1892 Geary Act, which required all Chinese immigrants to register with the federal government. After several judicial interventions and hearings, a judge ordered a Chinese immigrant to be deported from the United States (citing he could not find one credible white witness on his behalf), “meaning that the Geary Act amounted to an extraordinary assertion of white supremacy in the occupied territories of the U.S. West” (Hernández, 2017:84). Through these examples, I appeared to have answered my own question: police are used to “protect and serve” state interests and white supremacy.
Many of the discussions today surrounding the excessive use of force and abuse of power at the hand of police officers seem to treat this phenomenon as if it is new. The reaction to Black Lives Matter also appears to take a tone of surprise, as if these racial tensions appeared out of nowhere. I will admit that the age of mass media has brought these issues to light in a new way (such as not being able to deny the existence of police brutality), however I also have to acknowledge the centuries of time in which this brutality has occurred and been resisted. Ritchie provides us with a detailed timeline that dates back to early colonization of this continent, especially noting that “as the Continental Congress met to draft the Declaration of Independence proclaiming all men to be equal, ‘Rangers,’ members of settler militias … tortured, killed, and scalped women and children of the Delaware and Cherokee nations, ‘sparing no one in their blood-drenched raids on Indigenous villages’” (Ritchie 2017: 20). She also notes that from the beginning of African-Americans being forcibly brought here for slavery, “African-descended women have been subject to – and have be resisted – brutality by state-sponsored police forces and state-condoned extralegal violence” (Ritchie, 2017:25). When a deadly massacre of Chinese immigrants unfolded in the streets of Los Angeles in 1871, Hernández points out that among the white participants were “a local judge, the district attorney, the county sheriff … the mayor temporarily resigned his post to take part in the riot” (Hernández, 2017:66-67). Ben Brucato mentions how the Herrenvolk era “ascribed formal political standing to whites and denied it to all others” (Brucato, 2014:36). This paved way for lynchings, segregation, etc., which ultimately led to the Civil Rights Congress filing a petition with the United Nations in 1951 charging “the United States with genocide against African Americans as a people under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” (Ritchie, 2017:31). State-sanctioned violence and power has existed to reinforce white supremacy from the inception of this nation and has been resisted fiercely ever since both at the macro and micro levels.
Some of those that still uphold the notion that police protect “law and order” might not understand the use of the term order in the context of state power and police. Mark Neocleous notes that the police project has its roots at the end of the Middle Ages as feudalism saw its decline when “the absolutist state stepped in to to impose this order amidst a society of increasingly independent ‘individuals’” and that “as ‘masterless men’, free from the traditional authorities that existed under feudalism, their social, economic, and political condition appeared to undermine social order: as masterless men, they were considered disorderly” (Neocleous, 2000:3). Thus, the police were created in order to maintain order – no matter what kind. Although their inception took place under the guise of social order in Europe around roughly the 15th century, the same language of order and disorder is used today to justify the use of police. Interestingly, Ben Brucato notes that “especially in the U.S., the social order has always been distinctly racialized due to the founding of the state through conquest and colonialism” (Brucato, 2014:35). Ritchie points out the rise in cross-dressing laws at the turn of the 18th century that aimed to “impose a moral order in municipalities in order to make them safe for ‘good’ white middle- and upper-class citizens” (Ritchie, 2017:40-41). Laws surrounding order seem to become a theme, considering in Los Angeles “eighty-six percent of the 76, 327 arrests of Mexicans made by the LAPD between 1928 and 1939 were for public order charges,” which sent more Mexicans to jail than any other type of crime during that time frame (Hernández, 2017:147). Murakawa analyzes the use of Bigger Thomas (Richard Wright’s protagonist character) by law-and-order liberals and concludes that “this frame was used as a call for political change to improve the lives of black people, lest a generation of Biggers come to express their frustration through criminal acts that destroyed white lives and social order” (Murakawa, 2014:15). Thinking back to the policy attempting to be put forward by the current administration, it would appear the use of police for enforcing “order” is yet another term for widespread institutionalized violence reinforcing white supremacy.
The dominant narrative found in American history today drastically skews the truth of state-sanctioned violence and abuse of power at the hands of police to reinforce white supremacy. Through administration and enforcement, the criminal justice system and immigration system have both played into this narrative. This began with the birth of our nation and has not diminished, but rather changed in form, since then. It is going to take more than reform – we need to look at the entire picture and approach from that angle – if we are ever going to see a true escape from state-sanctioned violence.
References
Brucato, Ben. 2014. “Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy: From Slave Catchers to Petty Sovereigns.” Theoria61(141).
Hernandez, Kelly Lytle. 2017. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Murakawa, Naomi. 2014. The First Civil Right: Race and the Rise of the Carceral State. New York: Oxford University Press.
Neocleous, Mark. 2000. The Fabrication of Social Order: a Critical Theory of Police Power. London: Pluto Press.
Nevins, Joseph. 2010. Operation Gatekeeper and beyond: the War on "Illegals" and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. London: Routledge.
Ritchie, Andrea J. 2017. Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color. Boston: Beacon Press.
Weixel, Nathaniel. 2018. “Top Trump Immigration Official Downplays Impact of 'Public Charge' Proposal.” TheHill.
