Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Crime seen

2020; Wiley; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/amet.12887

1548-1425

Shanti Parikh, Jong Bum Kwon,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

Lezley McSpadden, Brown's mother, outside the crime scene as her son's dead body lay in the street, Ferguson, August 9, 2014. (Screenshot, "A Look Back at the Events after Michael Brown's Death," FOX 2 St. Louis, uploaded August 7, 2019, 5:04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a86DHJGwi7U) They shot big Mike Mike. I saw him dead in the street. Saturday, August 9, 2014, at about noon, in Ferguson, Missouri: white police officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown Jr., an unarmed Black 18-year-old, at least six times, killing him after a confrontation on a subdivision street outside the Canfield Green apartments.1 "Within minutes, residents began pouring onto the street" (DOJ 2015b, 8). They captured video and still images of the young man's body lying facedown, uncovered, as a "ribbon of blood" flowed several feet down the street. The images, along with commentary, began circulating on Black Twitter. Videos showed Brown's distraught mother clutching the back of her head, frantically pacing and calling for answers: "Where's the ambulance? Why isn't any anyone helping him?" Yellow crime scene tape and police officers kept her from her son's lifeless, bloodied body. Relatives tried to approach Brown but were pushed away from the police cordon. People continued to gather, agitated and searching for answers. More images and videos circulated of the quarantined space, Brown's body, and the increasing presence of a militarized state. People consoled and hugged each other, walking around the perimeter of the crime scene. Brown's killing was a historic instance of what we call racial terror—a shorthand to name the many and varied ways that racialization determines, naturalizes, and normalizes the question of whose life is worth protecting and whose life is both not valued and considered a threat to the social order and to those whose lives matter. Racial terror is ultimately the power to control the technologies that establish and protect one race's entitlement to live a valued life that is worth protecting while establishing and maintaining structures that shape another race's life as one of precarity, disposability, presumed guilt, and fear of prosecution. Here we find Achille Mbembe's (2003, 11) concept of necropolitics a useful analytic to think through racialized violence in colonial and contemporary governments. Necropolitics—the power "to kill or allow to live"—challenges notions of historical progress as a movement from rituals of sovereign power (violence and condemnation to death) to rationality and expert administration over the welfare of populations (modern biopolitics). Violence and rationality, terror and reason, are not opposed, Mbembe argues, but are intimately conjoined in modern statecraft. Furthermore, state violence is not merely instrumental; rather, it is also culturally productive, creating what Mbembe describes as "relations of enmity," in which the Other (as in the case of Mike Brown) becomes a mortal threat or manufactured danger (to white safety), one that must be vanquished and excluded from the social order (of white supremacy). From the state's point of view, terror is "a way of marking aberration in the body politic" (Mbembe 2003, 19). Thus marked, such aberrations therefore reasonably can, and in some cases must, be condemned to death. "Race" is vital because it marks the limit of human belonging, setting the "precondition that makes killing acceptable" (Foucault 2003, 256).2 Racial terror has historically been tethered to and bolstered by white supremacy through the construction of anti-Blackness. We take racial terror as both an affect—one that hovers as a psychological trauma caused by fear and uncertainty—and as a material reality that has deadly consequences, as in the cases of Michael Brown and Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy brutally beaten, murdered, and thrown into a river in Mississippi in 1955. Some may argue that racial terror—given the rhetoric of our post–civil rights, advanced liberal democracy—is too extreme a framework for understanding contemporary race relations, an exaggeration abstracted from tragic but supposedly isolated events. We'd argue otherwise. It is difficult to overstate the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in the United States, both today and in the past, and the resulting death, debilitation, and constrained possibilities of living. Our use of racial terror does not assume that all Black people experience its impact in the same way, and, in fact, the "Black community" in St. Louis, as elsewhere, is greatly stratified. Lezley McSpadden, Brown's mother, outside the crime scene as her son's dead body lay in the street, Ferguson, August 9, 2014. (Screenshot, "A Look Back at the Events after Michael Brown's Death," FOX 2 St. Louis, uploaded August 7, 2019, 5:04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a86DHJGwi7U) Critics might argue that racial terror is analytically fatalistic, fixating on suffering Black bodies or overemphasizing structural violence while ignoring the creativity and agency of the oppressed. Here, too, we see the concept differently. We agree that racial violences "shape, but do not wholly define, black worlds," as Black feminist geographer Catherine McKittrick (2011, 947) has insisted. To say that Black people's disproportionate encounters with police emerge from and are experienced as acts of racial terror can be true even as we appreciate acts of liberation and humanity. As Black, Latina, and Indigenous feminist scholars have reminded us,3 attending to the reality of terror allows us to move beyond coping and grieving as merely essentialized cultures or as blind acceptance of subordination, and toward a nuanced understanding of forms of resilience and acts of liberation emerging from particular local histories and demands. The creative, liberatory acts in St. Louis can be fully understood only against the racialized backdrop that animates them. In the case of Brown's death, local activists had to contend with two technologies of racial terror crystalized by the incident: state domination over Black bodies and racialized geographic containment and control. In the hours after Brown's death, social media continued to chronicle the state's increasing presence at the crime scene. Armored tanks. Police in riot gear with rifles. K9 units. Grieving, pain, confusion. State authority thickened. Brown's dead body lay for over four hours in the street in the humid afternoon heat (DOJ 2015b). People continued to gather. Videos caught voices of the crowd in confusion, disbelief, asking for answers: "The police shot this boy?" "What he do?" "The police killed him for no reason."4 There was tension and grief. The Department of Justice report (DOJ 2015b, 8) notes that "by 12:14 PM, some members of the growing crowd became increasingly hostile in response to chants of '[We] need to kill these motherfuckers [the police].'" Then a consciousness was sparked. What began as confusion and concern transformed into outrage. An outrage that had been simmering long before Brown's death. An outrage over the documented and unapologetic excessive policing of Black residents. An outrage that many speculate played a role in Brown's alleged "noncompliance" with Wilson's demand that the young man and his friend get out of the middle of the small street, a finable misdemeanor called "manner of walking in roadway," or jaywalking (DOJ 2015b, 12). An outrage over the psychic trauma caused by the disproportionate stops, searches, and citations that Black residents experienced compared to whites in the region (DOJ 2015a, 4–5, 62–78). The Ferguson uprising was born that evening and intensified in the coming days, transforming at times into a collective, public memorializing not just of Brown but of Black death, suffering, and survival in general. Ferguson became ground zero for the Black Lives Matter movement. A diverse group of protesters from around the country gathered in the streets of Ferguson and St. Louis to demand police and criminal justice reform. They were met with highly militarized riot police and the deployment of tear gas, rubber bullets, smoke bombs, flash grenades, and other crowd-dispersal tactics. One hundred and seven days after Brown's death, the St. Louis region reached a breaking point. On November 24, 2014, county prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced that a grand jury, convened to review charges against Wilson, had decided not to indict him. Using a legal defense for killing Black people that has long granted impunity to state agents, the grand jury determined that Wilson's use of "deadly force" was likely in "self-defense [and] thus not objectively unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment."5 In anticipation of the grand jury decision, Governor Jay Nixon again declared a state of emergency (the first was on August 16, 2014) and mobilized the National Guard. After McCulloch's announcement, protests and confrontations with riot police became increasingly volatile (Davey and Bosman 2014). The Ferguson uprising escalated in St. Louis, and while riot police protected the Ferguson police department and City Hall, the commercial section of Black Ferguson burned. The rows of militarized riot police clamped down on the protests in an attempt to discourage and threaten large-scale assemblies. Resistance groups, however, continued to organize smaller direct actions and disruptions throughout the region into the early months of 2015, and another wave of protests emerged on the first anniversary. A member of the St. Louis County Police tactical team fires tear gas into a demonstration in Ferguson, August 18, 2014. (David Carson / St. Louis Post-Dispatch / Polaris) Brown's killing was not an isolated incident of highly publicized Black death by police. In the 12-month period surrounding his death, five unarmed Black men in other states were killed by police, and a Black woman died in police custody. All these incidents gained national attention, sparking outrage and calls for reform.6 Viral videos of police killings and beatings circulated globally, but it was Brown's fatal shooting—and more precisely the public display and disrespect of his dead body—that sparked a local uprising and in turn the dramatic images of angry protesters and militarized riot police captivated global attention. How did the police killing of Brown differ from others that occurred in this period? Why did Brown's killing spark a rebellion? Why did it mobilize such a broad and diverse coalition of people willing to sacrifice on the front line? Brown's death lacked the graphic close-up footage of his killing—of his body going from living to dead in a struggle with a state agent, like the 2020 slow murder of George Floyd and many others. Instead, the visual archive of Brown's "crime seen" is state control over (and disregard for) his dead body, as it lay lifeless and bloodied in the street for four hours, surrounded by yellow crime scene tape that separated him from his mother, father, and neighbors. The crime seen was the mastery of domination displayed by the state's fleet of police cars, military vehicles, and armed and armored officers to "keep the peace" and segregate Brown's loved ones and neighbors from his body. The crime seen of his dead body lingered (and still does in St. Louis) for public viewing and narration, fixing itself to the geographies of domination that led to his death in the first place. Indeed, the spectacle in this case wasn't the display of excessive use of police force over a "hulking" Black body, as Wilson described Brown. Rather, the racial terror in this case was enacted even in the afterlife, as the state maintained control over Brown's body. The image of his body, like that of Emmett Till (whose mutilated body was made visible at his open-casket funeral), publicly displayed the disposability of Black life and white domination over it. "Dogs came before the ambulance did," we heard people recalling during various five-year anniversary events (see also Hunn and Bell 2014). "They kept his mother away from her son, didn't provide answers," another said. Critical to maintaining white supremacy and domination over Black citizens, as scholars of slavery and lynching remind us, is the "display of mastery" (Hartman 1997, 4) in representing power, a display that reproduces terror (of Black residents) and pleasure (of white supremacy). The scene of Brown's unattended dead body reestablished logics of borders configured around race and space, as did the Jim Crow era's lynchings, in which limp, hanging bodies reassured white people of their protection and signaled their surveillance of Black people (E. Alexander 1994; Carby 1985; Young 2005). A protester takes shelter from tear gas exploding around him, August 2014. (David Carson / St. Louis Post-Dispatch / Polaris) The sight of Brown's dead body signified a performance of racial terror. But it was neither the killing of Brown nor the inattention to his dead body that captivated the attention of the mainstream media and their casual consumers. Rather, it was media coverage of the Black outrage—the iconic images of the burned QuikTrip gas station and other destroyed businesses, angry protesters confronting police, stores looted, and trash scattered on the streets—that turned the small suburban town of Ferguson into the unlikely symbol of the contemporary United States' deep and abiding racial divisions and tensions. The Ferguson uprising surfaced and codified preexisting cleavages in ideologies of racial inequality. Some people sympathized with protesters' demands for criminal justice reform or joined the uprising themselves, but there were others for whom the images of the protests reinforced and justified the excessive policing of Blackness. The spectacle of Black protest and defiance captivated the world, but for different reasons. The state violence, together with the disregard for Brown's dead body, his grieving relatives, and residents, evokes centuries of state tactics that made the St. Louis region one of the most racially segregated and stratified in the US (Cambria et al. 2018). Dominated, contained, beaten, jailed, and killed Black bodies such as Brown's were not exceptions in the US social order. On the contrary, the exercise of state violence against Black bodies has been the very means by which white comfort, belonging, property rights, and supremacy have been performed, articulated, and maintained. In other words, we should not be surprised by Brown's killing. Proclamations of surprise function as alibis for the state, failing to recognize the settler-colonial and imperial foundations of the US and the violence inherent to forming and maintaining the integrity of whiteness, both symbolic and territorial. The neglect of Brown's body enacted and confirmed the disposability of Black life, or "bare life," as a perpetual outcast unworthy of sacrifice (Agamben 1998), intensifying anger, frustration, and protests. The burned-out QuikTrip gas station in Ferguson, September 12, 2014. It became a national symbol in the debates surrounding the uprising, becoming both a staging ground for future demonstrations and an example of the damage caused by unruly rioters. (Eric Pan) In responding with militarized force, the state displayed its will and right to kill, and protesters became symbolic extensions of the disobedient Brown. State responses to Black bodies (alive and dead) exposed in spectacular fashion the enforcement of the boundaries of the white racial order. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007, 28) argues, racism is "state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death." The spectacle of the militarized police and National Guard at the protests should be seen as a show of disproportionate state power—a well-rehearsed drama (e.g., Selma, Newark, Watts, Detroit, Los Angeles, East St. Louis) of state defense against "Black terror." Black bodies and fear are mutually constituted in the borderwork of the police, and white fear always-already legitimizes police lethality. The trope of the dangerous and threatening "thug-bound-subject"7—a racialized subject predetermined to be a thug in the social imaginary and hence a disposable nuisance to white patriarchal order and comfort—features as a central "fact" in the legal defense of police officers charged with killing or using excessive force against Black people.8 Brown resided in a space of social death and was consequently already deemed an unworthy life, ineligible for rights, legal recourse, and protection. In other words, Brown was not mistaken for a criminal posing danger; to the state, he was a criminal, a thug-bound-subject, embodying white terror and justifying the continued domination of Black citizens (Cacho 2012, 6–7). The St. Louis metropolitan region is an anti-Black archipelago, shaped over generations by laws and spatial controls that form a material type of racial terror. Racial terror in this sense is a form of boundary making and border patrol that structure the logic and practice of regional segregation, multiply white sovereignties, differentiate racialized lives, and justify the state's killing of Black people. Racial occupancy by block group, Greater St. Louis, 2010. Source: HUD data (Segregation Patterns 2010), courtesy of Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council. Reprinted with permission from Colin Gordon, Arresting Citizenship: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 130. The region does not reflect popular binary imaginaries of Black inner-city ghetto and white suburb. Rather, the region was "fragmented by design" (Jones 2000) and is currently divided into nearly 100 separate municipalities and unincorporated communities. Most municipalities were founded as segregated cities and incorporated to defend against "Negro invasion." Incorporation granted political autonomy and authorized the exercise of "police powers" (which broadly encompass protection of safety, health, morals, and general welfare) to exclude and contain Black populations. As noted by a longtime scholar of the region, "Political jurisdictions are created for the express purpose of segregating and excluding populations, avoiding burdens, and hoarding opportunities" (Gordon 2019, 12). Furthermore, within municipalities, isolated Black enclaves were spatially contained with often only one or two access points, feeding into secondary roadways or dead ends, like the Canfield Green apartments where Mike Brown was killed. Ferguson, which was one of the first to incorporate (1894), was 99 percent white and just 1 percent Black in 1970.9 While the notion of segregation has become widespread and commonplace, especially in describing rustbelt cities such as St. Louis, it is often misconstrued as simply the outcome of racist practices and policies, the sedimentation of past racist ideologies and interests. We emphasize, however, that the archipelagic racial landscape is not simply the background or history of racial inequality and violence; rather, it constitutes the racialized logic and structure of differentiated human life—technologies of racial terror. Riven into manifold sovereignties and tangles of borders, it maps out the inequitable distribution of wealth and resources—the material infrastructures of making life. But it also overdetermines risk for anti-Black violence and terror—to kill and let die. Segregation structures social vulnerability. The vulnerability is, on the one hand, the slow violence of unemployment, educational inequality, toxic environments, housing and food insecurity, and lack of access to health care. The stark marker of Black social vulnerability is 18 years—the difference in life expectancy between two zip codes, one predominantly white (Clayton), the other Black (Jeff-Vander-Lou), separated only by about seven miles (Purnell, Camberos, and Fields 2014). On the other hand, the archipelagic formation of the region magnifies Black exposure to state surveillance and the risk of fatal encounters with the police. Black residents, we often forget, must move through and between white spaces for employment, education, and access to ordinary resources and amenities (Boyles 2015). The reticulated tangle of borders in the region reinforces racial-spatial divisions and entraps Black residents in the racist machinery of local judicial-police systems. Revenue policing in St. Louis County, 2013. Source: Better Together St. Louis, General Administration Study, report no. 2, table 3 (December 2015). Reprinted with permission from Colin Gordon, Arresting Citizenship: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 140. African Americans account for 85% of vehicle stops, 90% of citations, and 93% of arrests made by FPD officers, despite comprising only 67% of Ferguson's population. . . . From 2011 to 2013, African Americans accounted for 95% of Manner of Walking in Roadway charges, and 94% of all Failure to Comply charges. Notably, with that while African Americans made up 67 percent of Ferguson's population from 2012 to 2014, they were policed by a nearly all white force. Blacks comprised nearly 90 percent of documented cases of police force, 93 percent of arrests, and 90 percent of citations. (DOJ 2015a, 4–5) General fund revenues by source, Ferguson, 1973–2015. Source: Ferguson Combined Annual Financial Reports, 1973–2015. Reprinted with permission from Colin Gordon, Arresting Citizenship: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 134. Predatory policing is sanctioned by a fragmented judicial system to supplement declining municipal revenues in the wake of white flight/fright. Like many peri-urban suburbs in the region, Ferguson faced fiscal crisis, one that started gradually in the 1990s and accelerated after the 2008 housing crisis. This led to deteriorating infrastructure and increasing public-service needs. As property values plummeted, poverty and unemployment rates doubled, and underfunded school districts, such as Normandy, where Brown had graduated, lost accreditation (Gordon 2019, 131). Traffic fines, petty citations, and court fees—which are disproportionately levied on Black residents—make up a large part of municipal revenues, what residents began calling the "Black body ATM" after the DOJ's findings were released (St. Louis American 2020a, 2020b). When Black and poor folks can't pay fines, fees, or jail bonds, they are jailed and often shuffled among municipal courts. Because many poor Blacks have warrants for petty violations in multiple jurisdictions, they are caught in what residents call the "muni shuffle," incurring debt from each municipality (Harvey and Roediger 2016, 63). This form of expropriation is not simply a consequence but a driver of Black poverty, even as it enriches and sustains white institutions. Black bodies continue to serve as currency, and debt remains a tool of subjugation, from colonial ventures, slavery, post-Reconstruction vagrancy laws and prison labor to the contemporary business of warehousing Black and brown bodies, in the metropole and at the borders. The police do not merely enforce white power and privilege. They categorize and classify a social-moral world, communicating authoritative meanings about order and disorder, morality and criminality, normality and deviance (Garland 1993; Loader 2006). They enact "the thin blue line that underscores the fragility of [white racial] order" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2004, 823), dramatizing, often through violence, white anxieties of racial encroachment and danger (Martinot and Sexton 2003; see also Low 1997, 2001). And as mundane and unlikely as police stops may be for white drivers, for Black people they nonetheless replay a history of racial subordination, conveying their already criminal status and telling them that they are watched and that they are disposable and vulnerable to violence (M. Alexander 2010; Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel 2014).12 Racial terror suffuses the everyday in the white supremacist archipelago. A protester moves away from the line of riot police in Ferguson during the week after Brown's death, August 13, 2014. (J. B. Forbes / St. Louis Post-Dispatch / Polaris) Anti-Blackness in St. Louis, and elsewhere in the contemporary US, is a form of "slow violence," as noted by George Lipsitz (2015, 123–24), "perpetuated by unemployment, education inequality, environmental racism, housing and food insecurity, and aggressive and oppressive police harassment and brutality." It was in this context, Lipsitz adds, that the "sudden death" of Mike Brown took place. The pressing question is, How is it that the Black body count seems normal and justified, being merely the consequence of bad neighborhoods, crime, accident, self-defense, negligence, or so-called implicit racial bias? How do we account for both the hypervisibility of certain forms of Blackness and the invisibility of other forms? Technologies of racial terror—the spectacular, mundane, spatial, and material—intensify racial categories and harden sociocultural and spatial borders. Resulting geographies of Black dispossession and white privilege, however, are neither complete nor impermeable; rather, they are spaces of encounter that reveal the joys and struggles of human living. There is resistance, refusal, creativity, caring, laughter, and what Saidiya Hartman (2019, 3–4) calls "beautiful experiments," or living as art—that even in their most modest challenges to existing structures of oppression may hold new possibilities and imaginings of the future. Black disposability and death are a crucial starting point for our analysis, but not the end of it. The contributions to this forum provide such possibilities. The notion of terror is more than theoretical. It is a weapon of the state, but it is also wielded as a shield. Terror can be diffuse and fluid but also enacted through tangible methods and instruments. Whom or what do we fear? For Black, brown, and indigenous people, racial terror indexes the horror and violence of white supremacy. For white folk, terror takes the form of Black bodies. But whose terror is recognized, legitimized, justified? Under white supremacy, white people's fear is always-already recognized as legitimate, justifying violent reprisal, death. As refracted through patriarchy, white supremacy constructs women and children as fearful and needing the protection of white men, whose sovereign right to property and position in the "natural order" should remain unquestioned. White supremacy is authorized by the presumption of what Gloria Wekker (2016, 2) calls "white innocence" and the convenient denial of the brutal history of colonialism and white supremacy; white people's terror is presumed as "reasonable" (Cacho 2014, 1087). In what other way can we explain the legal efficacy of white "self-defense" and consequent Black expendability? How do we account for the disproportionate police stops of Black citizens and the state's use of "excessive force"? Our argument is not that terror solely defines the existence of Black residents. It is that terror has been a constituent aspect of white supremacy's long reign in the St. Louis region. For those involved in antiracist work in post-uprising St. Louis, being "still here" is therefore to feel rage and sorrow. It is to recognize that Black death is not randomly distributed violence but an accumulation of lives lost in zones of abandonment where Black people are disposed among the refuse of deindustrialization, white flight, disinvestment, and criminalization, with little to no public notice or care. It is to recognize that when institutions of the states kill or condone public violence—making a show of strength through disposability—the intention is to incite terror on one collective and comfort on another. It is a reminder of the sovereign authority of white supremacy. Remaining engaged in antiracist work in the post-uprising is also to feel hope from the unstoppable acts of liberation around us. As contributor and artist Damon Davis stated, "For a people so far from freedom, our creative expressions are the most free." As our collaborators in this forum remind us, to pursue antiracist work post-uprising is to recognize that hope is found amid and despite the everyday terror of white supremacy in the production of a "black sense of place" (McKittrick 2011). This Black sense of place does not indicate a discrete space of opposition or resistance. Rather, as McKittrick (2013, 2–3) proposes, Black life can indeed emerge from violence and death, and this life may hold "secretive histories," decolonial poetics, and practices as acts of liberation. A Black sense of place "accepts that relations of violence and domination have made our existence and presence in the U.S. possible as it recasts this knowledge to envision an alternative future" (2013, 14). In the afterlives of (another premature) Black death, an uprising that captivated the world, and unplanned bonds of joy forged along the way, to be "still here" is ultimately to recognize that we honor the dead with life, in all of its complexities, protean possibilities, and fierce acts of liberation against the United States' enduring racism and white supremacy.