Black Criminality Research Articles

‘A deadly weapon aimed at our hearts’: the scope and composition of Lord Scarman’s 1981 public inquiry

ABSTRACT State-led inquiries have been prominently positioned within British political and social cultures, seemingly popular with its citizens. They are often tactically utilized to depoliticize issues and provide the appearance that ministers share public concern, arguably acting as a political device to maintain the state through apparent declarations of unfailing commitment to ‘accountability’ and ‘legitimacy’. Lord Scarman’s 1981 inquiry into anti-police uprisings, portrayed by the State as violence belonging in ‘less-civilised countries’, provoked opposition to its unrepresentative membership and narrow focus. Some local groups, such as the Brixton Defence Campaign, viewed Scarman’s inquiry as the state’s attempt to legitimize characterizations of the ‘riots’ as ‘blameless forces of law and order [battling] black criminals’. Characterizations of the uprisings as simply ‘irrational’ criminality attempted to remove legitimacy from actions by politically marginalized Black Britons, previously denied access to processes more widely defined to be ‘legitimate’. Throughout, this article highlights the colonial legacies of inquiries, through their aims, operation, and membership. Scarman also refused to investigate accusations of police misconduct, which depict a different situation than accepted narratives, demonstrating the state’s influence on knowledge production and suggesting the potential for such records to reveal violence conducted in the name of the state. By marginalizing certain voices and limiting the inquiry’s scope, the uprisings were characterized as simply a ‘crisis’ of law and order. This aspect of discussion adds to recent debates on the use of the concepts of ‘’militarisation’ and ‘martial politics’, demonstrating practices that reproduce violence in the name of liberal governance.

WHEN BLACK MOVEMENTS MATTER: CONTROLLING IMAGES AND BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTESTS IN MEDIA ATTENTION TO U.S. POLICE KILLINGS

This study investigates how the portrayal of Black criminality influences Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and media attention to police-related deaths of Black individuals. While prior work examined how media norms, political contexts, and movement infrastructure influence media attention, little research has questioned whether the perceived worthiness of movement's claims shapes the capacity of protests to direct attention. Applying scholarship of controlling images, I test how victims’ armed status moderates the effect of BLM protests on media attention to Black policing deaths. Negative binomial regression analysis on coverage of 678 Black Americans killed by police from 2014-2016 in over 300 print media indicates local protests directly increased attention to nearby Black Americans but were moderated by armed status. Neither political contexts nor organizational presence influenced attention, suggesting BLM relied on the discursive power of protests. Findings highlight how controlling images and racialized threats influence movements along a matrix of domination.

Is White-Collar Crime White? Racialization in the National Press Coverage of White-Collar Crime from 1950 to 2010

While much is written about racialization of street criminals in the American media, racial dimensions of the media framing of white-collar crime remain underexplored. To address this issue, we analyze the coverage of bribery, electoral fraud, tax evasion, and insider trading in five national newspapers between 1950 and 2010. Drawing on John Hagan’s (2012) work, we trace the racialization of white-collar crime in the press back to Richard Nixon’s presidency and the beginnings of the War on Drugs. We also find that race is a significant predictor of offenders’ individualization, or the length of description accorded to them by writers. We argue that by individualizing black offenders significantly more than white perpetrators, reporters connote their oddity in the context of white-collar criminality and contribute to their collective framing as an exception. Finally, we find that black perpetrators receive significantly more positive coverage than white offenders, which serves to further underscore their distinctiveness from stereotypical black criminals and their similarity to nonthreatening (white) Americans. These findings support Hagan’s (2012) argument that racialization of street crime is mirrored by the collective framing of elite economic crime as white and, by extension, a nonthreatening side effect of American capitalism.

Black Lives Matter Toward Afromodernity: Political Speech, Barbarism, and the Euromodern World

This paper proffers an Afromodern analysis of black liberation, embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing so, it revisits the historical concept of barbarism as a critical modality for human silencing, in order to make sense of anti-black racism in our extant social order and its re-articulation through systematic discourses of black criminality. The essay explores two dialectically opposing modernities as having differentiated effects on the construction of the human being. Euromodernity barbarizes the black subject as a carceral being, absent political speech. Afromodernity, contrastingly, fashions the black subject as a communicative being endowed with political speech and as such, black politics becomes not a relic of barbarism, but in lieu, embodies a modern re-enactment of political society. The paper concludes that Black Lives Matter functions as an Afromodern displacement of Euromodern anti-black racism by contesting American democracy as a carceral apparatus to ensure a democratic revolution.

The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation

The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation

Does the Critical Scrutiny of Drill Constitute an Epistemic Injustice?

Abstract In this paper, I look to draw novel connections between critiques of drill and epistemic injustice by addressing the question of whether the critical scrutiny of drill constitutes an epistemic injustice. I argue that these critiques constitute two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. We see testimonial injustice in how courts and police do not give credibility to drill artists’ testimonies about the storylike nature of their songs, and these credibility deficits are based in racist stereotypes about black criminality and believability. We see contributory injustice in how courts and police, through wilful ignorance, see drill music as violent and criminal rather than expressive and fictional – as drill artists do – which thwarts drill artists’ ability to contribute to shared knowledge.

Black Psychology and Black Criminality: Myths and Reality on the Origins of Black Street Life

This work interrogates the long-held assumption that captive Africans exited slavery exhibiting psychological damage that blocked their progress as free men, women and families. As a counter narrative to the deficit perspective on Black life, the literature on extreme poverty and fluctuating unemployment patterns are summarized to show how the importance of social class has too often been underestimated, and the assumed negative, psychological effects of slavery, overestimated. Post WWII economic trends of the 1940s and 1950s are highlighted. The contemporary political economy of Black people is shown to reveal a diunital, paradoxical pattern, with many educated Blacks having access to life among the elite or top 10%, while less educated Blacks are forced to live in extreme poverty that approximates a modern caste system. The Black experience with poverty, tracked from Emancipation up to the present, is best explained by economic rather than psychological causes and dynamics.

Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945 by Brandon T. Jett

Reviewed by: Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945 by Brandon T. Jett Theresa Jach Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945. By Brandon T. Jett. Making the Modern South. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 235. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7507-1.) In Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945, Brandon T. Jett looks at how African Americans responded to crime and policing in three southern cities from 1920 to the end of World War II. While James Forman Jr.'s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York, 2017) explores this theme from the 1960s on, Jett provides an important look at a critical period in the development of policing in the Jim Crow South. As police forces expanded and professionalized, African Americans found ways to use the police to clean up their own neighborhoods. Focusing on agency, Jett shows that Black southerners were not just victims of police indifference or brutality. Using extensive police records, newspaper accounts of crime, court records, and witness statements, Jett gives voice to both victims and perpetrators of crime in Memphis, New Orleans, and Birmingham. Jett chooses these three southern cities for his study because they all were legally segregated, and they all greatly expanded their police forces, but had no Black police officers, during the period covered in the book. African American communities in these cities wanted police involvement in their neighborhoods to cut down on crime. Jett thoroughly delineates the ways African Americans manipulated the police to serve their own needs. While Black residents did not want the police to target them, they did want the police to treat them fairly and to prevent and punish crimes committed against them. The African American community was not only overpoliced but also underpoliced. The police saw African Americans as likely criminals and yet rarely went after those who committed crimes against them. Police often ignored or half-heartedly investigated crimes committed against African Americans. Jett argues that focusing on intraracial crime allows him to center the reactions of Black southerners rather than white fears of Black crime. He convincingly shows that both working-class and middle-class African Americans wanted the police to stop crime in their communities. They found ways to manipulate and use the police to their own ends. They sought fair administration and application of the law, due process, more police in their communities, and the hiring of Black officers. However, because Black communities had little formal political power, city governments were not responsive to their demands. Jett uses a multitude of sources to show that African Americans often used self-policing to combat crime. And significantly, he proves that the police needed the help of the Black community to arrest Black criminals. African Americans often went to the police station or called the police for help if they witnessed a crime. Witnesses turned over weapons and, in some cases, captured and held suspects. African Americans routinely did their own investigation before contacting the police and provided names, addresses, and other help in solving the crime. In fact, in many instances, they did the policemen's jobs for them. [End Page 799] Working within a Jim Crow system that demanded deference to white supremacy, African Americans found ways to combat crime in their neighborhoods. They would, at least on the surface, acquiesce to the system, in order to get the police to combat crime, trust Black witnesses, protect Black victims, and help return stolen property. Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South provides a much-needed and nuanced look at African American interactions with the police in the urban South. It adds an important perspective on how the Black community used its power and agency to compel the police to combat crime and protect their neighborhoods. Theresa Jach Houston Community College–Northwest Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

Whitening Black Men: Narrative Labour and the Scriptural Economics of Risk and Rehabilitation

Abstract ‘You know what? You can’t be a “Black Man” in prison.’ Negative impositions of Blackness, grounded in the myths of Black Criminality, shape assessments of risk and rehabilitation within the scriptural economy of the contemporary prison. This creates a rehabilitative colour line that results in specific forms of narrative labour, whereby prisoners attempt to control the recording and interpretation of their Black identities. From Social Relations, to Appearance, to Language Use, more of the life of a Black prisoner is interpreted negatively than other prisoners. This paper explores how Black lifers, are forced to adopt narrative labours that ‘whiten’ their ‘Blackness’ in order to mitigate their perceived risk and navigate the prison’s pathways to release. This article is based on quasi-ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two prison sites between 2011 and 2014 in which more than 120 indeterminately sentenced prisoners were consulted.

Black Blockchain: The Future of Black Studies and Blockchain

Black Blockchain: The Future of Black Studies and Blockchain Nishani Frazier (bio) Lt. Nyota Uhura, a fictional character performed by actress Nichelle Nichols, is a much beloved figure of the Star Trek universe. MSNBC commentator Jason Johnson features her Ebony Magazine cover in his virtual background. CBS’ All Rise fictional character, Judge Lola Carmichael, furiously rebuked another judge who removed Uhura’s picture from her office. Former President Barack Obama confessed to a youthful crush, and Star Trek fan, Whoopi Goldberg, joined the second iteration, Star Trek: Next Generation, because Nichols characterized for Goldberg a black woman on television who could play someone other than a maid. The attachment to Lt. Uhura epitomizes Black possibility in spite of a subjugated past. Scholars define this interface of imagined Black future and technology as Afro-futurism. While Afro-futurism exists mainly as a cultural field of study, futurism permeates Black daily life, in sometimes dark, problematic ways. Recent works like Coded Bias expose how new technologies, like AI and big data, increase surveillance, reinforce racist notions of Black criminality, and apply discriminatory treatment in Black patient care. Scholarly attention rightfully centers on the negative impact of futuristic machinery, but these technologies can either empower or suppress. Block-chain embodies this tech duality and concomitantly stores within it the key to self-determination, sovereign identity, and community empowerment while divergently acting as an instrument for oppression. How Black Studies adopts blockchain can determine black people’s political, social, cultural, and economic futures. But without the philosophical intervention of Black Studies, blockchain’s potential for people power becomes subjugated to individuals, entities, and institutions insensitive to the issues impacting the black community. [End Page 13] For these reasons, there can be no blockchain without Black Studies, and no Black Studies that can ignore blockchain. Black Futures and Technology Few understand blockchain or the technological processes by which it came to be created. Undeniably, blockchain is a frustrating mixed bag of “smart contracts,” “crypto currency,” “NFTs,” “interoperability,” and other terms that obscure more than reveal. However, technical expertise is not the sole determining factor for engagement with blockchain, nor is Black engagement with futuristic technology antithetical to the Black experience. Many scholars rightfully argue that Afro-futurism can act to insert the cultural, historical Black self into tomorrow. Or, it can assert the future as a site of survival, and in doing so make it a tool of liberation.1 Alternatively, the future can collide into Black people extending real world racist belief systems into digital outcomes that hamper and damage Black freedoms. Scholar Ruha Benjamin examines this issue by merging Critical Race Theory and technology in what she terms “race critical code studies.” Benjamin explains that “technological benevolence” conceives futuristic machinery as an unbiased solution to societal conflict, and yet these efforts to address bias ultimately “end up reinforcing the New Jim Code.”2 The solution is to “demand that tech designers and decision-makers become accountable stewards of technology.”3 Black digital humanists suggest a similar approach, insisting that the presence of blackness can change the landscape of technology.4 Yet these mediations are not enough. The future is a contestation of power, and the fight for power requires our active presence and vigorous implementation of self-determination.5 Within this chaos, Black Studies is best poised to enter the bedeviled crossroads by bridging blockchain’s meaning for Black people and Black people’s import for blockchain. As participatory players, scholars of the Black experience can direct technology for Black people’s emancipation. Blockchain in Black Studies: Sovereignty and People Power Entre into blockchain is much more than a gesture toward blackness in the future. Blockchain has the ability to incorporate community defined concepts of Black identity and peoplehood within computational structures. This is not just an abstract notion. Heir property is one significant area where the Black community can insist that self-determination merges with blockchain in a real-world application that helps preserve Black land. According to ProPublica, the U.S. Department of Agriculture lists heir property as the leading impetus for Black involuntary land loss. Black owners distrusted southern courts and circumvented estate probate by allotting ownership interest to each...

Racialization within Antitrafficking Interventions Targeting Migrant Sex Workers: Findings from the SEXHUM Research Project in France

This article draws on the findings of the research project Sexual Humanitarianism: Migration, Sex Work, and Trafficking (SEXHUM), a study investigating migration, sex work, and human trafficking in Australia, France, New Zealand, and the US. In this article, we focus on how racialized categories are mobilized in antitrafficking practices in France. Since April 2016, the French government has enforced a prohibitionist and neo-abolitionist law criminalizing the demand for sexual services. This coincided with the targeting of Chinese and Nigerian cis-women and with the neglect of Latina trans women working in the sex industry according to racialized and sex-gendered understandings of victimhood. Whereas Chinese women tend to be presented by humanitarian rhetoric as silent victims of Chinese male-dominated mafias, Nigerian women have come to embody the ultimate figure of the victim of trafficking by an overpowering Black male criminality. Meanwhile, (sexual) humanitarian actors have neglected Latina trans women’s ongoing experiences of extreme violence and marginalization.

An own-race bias in the categorisation and recall of associative information

ABSTRACT People tend to better remember same-race faces relative to other-race faces (an “own-race” bias). We examined whether the own-race bias extends to associative memory, particularly in the identification and recall of information paired with faces. In Experiment 1, we presented white participants with own- and other-race faces which either appeared alone or accompanied by a label indicating whether the face was a “criminal” or a “victim”. Results revealed an own-race facial recognition advantage regardless of the presence of associative information. In Experiment 2, we again paired same- and other-race faces with either “criminal” or “victim” labels, but rather than a recognition test, participants were asked to identify whether each face had been presented as a criminal or a victim. White criminals were better categorised than Black criminals, but race did not influence the categorisation of victims. In Experiment 3, white participants were presented with same- and other-race faces and asked to remember where the person was from, their occupation, and a crime they committed. Results revealed a recall advantage for the associative information paired with same-race faces. Collectively, these findings suggest that the own-race bias extends to the categorisation and recall of information in associative memory.

'Cause for Concern'? Policing Black Migrants in Post-War Britain (1945-68)

ABSTRACT This article explores how Black migrants were routinely considered to be a ‘cause for concern’ in post-war Britain, identified as ‘undesirables’ and subjected to discriminatory policing practices. Despite the police’s professed ‘colour-blind’ approach of ‘non-differentiation’ – often raising difficulties or contradictions when called on for their observations – characterisations of Black people as ‘more predisposed towards criminality’ led to their being disproportionately targeted by the police’s discretionary powers. Utilising Home Office and Metropolitan Police Office records, this article demonstrates how the police’s professed attempts at liaison with Black communities and recording of ‘racial disturbances’ were in reality efforts to monitor and ‘prove’ notions of Black criminality, which, in some cases, led to calls from the police for the mass deportation of so-called ‘undesirables’.

Black “Crime,” Public Hysteria, and the Cinema of Containment: Black Cinema Aesthetics from Willie Dynamite to The Interrupters and a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert

This essay will explore the ways in which African American visual culture has attempted to negotiate criminalization and the current situation of what Richard Iton rightfully characterizes as “hyperincarceration.” It will explore the ways in which contemporary African American visual culture is engaged in negotiating between the literal material realities and consequences of mass incarceration and aesthetic constructions of violence. While mass incarceration is increasingly becoming understood as “the New Jim Crow” for African American political organizing, Black criminality has become the key lens through which questions of masculinity, class exclusion, gender, and selfhood get negotiated in African American visual culture. This essay will argue that the “subtext of ongoing Black captivity” is the pretext for much of what drives Black action genres and African American representation in general as a key signifier of a racialized identity and as an indicator of a Black subjectivity fraught with complexities of non-belonging.

Amplifying Community-led Violence Prevention as a Counter to Structural Oppression

Street outreach is a violence prevention model in which organizations hire residents with strong relationships and local expertise to mediate violent conflicts in their communities. We present the results of a two-year co-design engagement between a street outreach organization and academic researchers in which we collaboratively designed, built, and deployed a mobile application (the Street Peace app) to support street outreach workers (SOWs). Three different street outreach organizations in Chicago adopted the app for two months. Results suggest that the app supported SOWs' transformative justice practices to build a counter-structure to traditional policing, which is historically oppressive to Black communities. The SOWs used the app to mediate potentially violent conflicts without police involvement, build community through in-person events, and extend their communities of care through positive stories and narratives that countered harmful stereotypes about Black criminality. By affording SOWs more agency over their communication with each other, the app enabled SOWs to connect their strengths and scale their existing practices that combat structural oppression and prefigure liberatory futures.

Knowing How to Feel: Racism, Resilience, and Affective Resistance

AbstractThis article explores the affective dimension of resilient epistemological systems. Specifically, I argue that responsible epistemic practice requires affective engagement with nondominant experiences. To begin, I outline Kristie Dotson's account of epistemological resilience whereby an epistemological system remains stable despite counterevidence or attempts to alter it. Then, I develop an account of affective numbness. As I argue, affective numbness can promote epistemological resilience in at least two ways. First, it can reinforce harmful stereotypes even after these stereotypes have been rationally demystified. To illustrate, I examine the stereotype of Black criminality as it relates to false confessions (Lackey 2018). Second, it can encourage “epistemic appropriation” (Davis 2018), which I demonstrate by examining the appropriation of “intersectionality” and #MeToo by white culture. Finally, I conclude that resisting harmful resilience requires affective resistance, or efforts that target numbness via different kinds of affective engagement. I consider Kantian “disinterestedness” as a candidate.

A House but Not a Home: How Surveillance in Subsidized Housing Exacerbates Poverty and Reinforces Marginalization

AbstractA robust literature has shown that surveillance disproportionately targets poor people of color through the criminal justice and welfare systems. However, little empirical research traces the mechanisms through which surveillance reproduces inequality in other domains, such as subsidized housing, where private actors including property owners and landlords do the work of surveilling tenants. In this article, I apply the theoretical lens of surveillance to the case of subsidized housing to explore the symbolic and material consequences of being monitored at home. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 67 low-income Black mothers in the Sunnyside neighborhood in Houston, Texas, I argue that the scrutiny mothers face in and around their homes reproduces inequality through two key mechanisms. First, surveillance creates a home environment devoid of privacy, that mothers liken to being in prison. Mothers interpret this scrutiny as an effort to control and contain them because of their race, reinforcing racialized notions of presumptive Black criminality. Second, surveillance heightens the material risk for mothers of being caught breaking rules, which paves the way for eventual eviction and exacerbates poverty. Although mothers develop strategies to counter and at times resist disciplinary monitoring, these efforts come with drawbacks that can make surviving poverty harder. Taken together, these findings suggest that being surveilled at home not only diminishes low-income Black mothers’ status in society, but also pushes them into deeper economic precarity. This research extends our understanding of the reach of surveillance into the lives of the poor even in spaces considered to be private.

The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation by Adam Malka

Reviewed by: The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation by Adam Malka Adam Rothman (bio) The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation. By Adam Malka. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 352. Cloth, $39.95.) "The whole sentiment of Baltimore was murderous," recalls Frederick Douglass in his autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom. He had been brutally attacked by four white workmen at Gardiner's shipyard and barely escaped with his life. Douglass laments that "Lynch law" prevailed in Baltimore, "nor was there much of any other law toward colored people, at that time, in any other part of Maryland."1 Adam Malka's The Men of Mobtown takes issue with Douglass's claim of lawlessness. Rather, he argues, white male power was legally authorized, so what appeared to be the absence of law when it came to black people was in fact a legal regime. A professional police force emerged in antebellum Baltimore, but it shared its duties with ordinary white men, who were empowered to regulate the racial order of the streets. As the free black population grew, so too did white Baltimoreans' anxiety over black criminality. That anxiety intensified with the abolition of slavery in Maryland in 1864, which was accompanied by a substantial increase in the incarceration of black people, especially black men, as state-run jails and prisons took over from the slave owners' private tools of coercion and white vigilante justice. A real shift occurred in the 1860s. According to data that Malka compiled from Baltimore city jail and Maryland Penitentiary reports, the percentage of people committed to the Baltimore city jail who were black doubled from 17 to 34 percent from 1861 to 1870, while the proportion of people in the Maryland Penitentiary who were black rose from 30 to 70 percent from 1863 to 1872. Those who see abolition and emancipation as marking an important stage in the development of the mass incarceration of black Americans will find supporting evidence here, although the total numbers of incarcerated people in 1870 pale in comparison to what takes [End Page 118] place today. Perhaps the best analysis of the shift with emancipation comes from the warden of the Maryland Penitentiary. "Where masters formerly punished their servants for petty crimes," Malka quotes him as writing in 1866, black men "are now, under existing laws, carried to the Criminal Courts, and punished by sentence to this Institution" (224–25). But for Malka, that shift is not the whole story. He holds liberalism responsible for the racist carceral order. He argues that "the very developments that ushered in a new liberal order … also played a critical role in subjugating black people" (14). Over and over, he links developments in policing to a liberal commitment to protecting property rights (which includes, in his view, the patriarchal household). Even black people were complicit in this ideology, according to Malka, who writes that "freedom for black Baltimoreans … amounted to the right to earn a wage no less than it did for white Baltimoreans" (102). This is a very narrow, if not altogether false, view of what freedom meant to Americans in the nineteenth century. As Martha Jones argues in her recent book Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), which also focuses on black Baltimoreans, freedom meant citizenship and the rights and privileges that came with it, not just earning a wage. The Men of Mobtown argues that policing black people was one of the privileges of white manhood in the antebellum era and that white men derived their political identities as citizens from that policing. This argument is consistent with the now-extensive historiography on whiteness. On the other hand, Malka's evidence shows that white men often found themselves on the wrong side of the law, because in the antebellum era the majority of people arrested and incarcerated were white. Indeed, the professionalization of policing and establishment of carceral institutions in antebellum Baltimore were more of a response to the emergence of socalled dangerous classes of white men, especially Irish immigrants, than to the growing free black population...

"Steal or Starve": Black Women's Criminal Work in New York City, 1893 to 1914

"Steal or Starve": Black Women's Criminal Work in New York City, 1893 to 1914