Slave Patrols Research Articles

Towards the South as a Carceral Landscape: The Historiography of Slave Patrols in the Antebellum United States

Towards the South as a Carceral Landscape: The Historiography of Slave Patrols in the Antebellum United States

Did American Police Originate from Slave Patrols?

Did American Police Originate from Slave Patrols?

Qualified immunity: unveiling police violence and misconduct in the United States

Police violence and misconduct have been evident throughout American history. The earliest forms of policing began in the 1700s in the Carolinas with “Slave Patrols”. It was established to terrorize and suppress enslaved Africans and to apprehend and return the runaway slaves to their owners.1 During the 1960s, direct causations of racial tension and riots was also a conjunction with President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Crime” initiative. This section documents the history of police violence and misconduct between the periods of 1960 through the early 2000s. The overlapping theme of qualified immunity highlights a prominent role in issues arising from civil rights and accountability.

#TheTalk for Black Men: Understanding Survival Strategies for Black Masculinity in US Law Enforcement Interactions

ABSTRACT: Contemporarily and historically, American police have stigmatized, racially profiled, stereotyped, used excessive force, and often brutally killed Black men who were unarmed and not resisting. Beginning as “slave patrols,” policing has long targeted and dehumanized Black bodies. Using the Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation, this study answers (a) what do Black/African American males describe as their (taught) preparation for police interactions, and (b) how, if at all, do Black American males prepare themselves in moments leading up to (potential) law enforcement interactions? The current study revealed two key findings, “Exploring the Talk” and “Appearing Normal, Covering the Survival Checklist,” respectively. Investigating these phenomena provides Black individuals with how to best engage in such preparations for law enforcement and law enforcement personnel with insights into Black perspectives and an attempt to improve policing tactics in Black communities.

#TheTalk for Black Men: Understanding Survival Strategies for Black Masculinity in US Law Enforcement Interactions

ABSTRACT: Contemporarily and historically, American police have stigmatized, racially profiled, stereotyped, used excessive force, and often brutally killed Black men who were unarmed and not resisting. Beginning as “slave patrols,” policing has long targeted and dehumanized Black bodies. Using the Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation, this study answers (a) what do Black/African American males describe as their (taught) preparation for police interactions, and (b) how, if at all, do Black American males prepare themselves in moments leading up to (potential) law enforcement interactions? The current study revealed two key findings, “Exploring the Talk” and “Appearing Normal, Covering the Survival Checklist,” respectively. Investigating these phenomena provides Black individuals with how to best engage in such preparations for law enforcement and law enforcement personnel with insights into Black perspectives and an attempt to improve policing tactics in Black communities.

Introduction toVisual Arts ResearchSpecial Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices by Toby Beauchamp

Reviewed by: Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices by Toby Beauchamp Finn Johnson (bio) Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices Toby Beauchamp. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019, 196 pp., $24.95 paper. In 2015, I was interviewed by The Guardian for an exposé entitled "TSA Agents Who Flag Trans People Cause Trauma and Don't Make Us Safer," by Zach Stafford. In this piece, I was asked to retell my experience with TSA-related transphobia in the Portland International Airport in 2014. For transparency, I identify as a white, transgender, disabled, queer man. I was subjected to increased security screening in this TSA interaction after the millimeter-wave scanner detected an "anomaly" on my body. I was then forced to stand behind a tiny screen and remove my gender-affirming items in front of two TSA agents. In the United States, people who are seen as threats to national security based on their race, gender, disability, primary language, or bodily presentation are subjected to increased surveillance and scrutiny by the state. Such interactions with the neoliberal security state have become so quotidian for many that they no longer question the rationale of surveillance. Surveillance practices are framed as being rooted in the interest of national security and safety; however, they fuel xenophobic, ableist, racist, transphobic, and homophobic notions of citizenship and belonging. The experience with TSA was just one of many for me, and it was undoubtedly disturbing and embarrassing, but being subjected to surveillance practices is not uncommon for marginalized populations. In Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices, Toby Beauchamp pointedly argues that we must view these disturbing but seemingly quotidian (and expected) interactions with surveillance as instances that "should prompt critical analysis of the ways that gender deviance is produced, coded, and monitored not only in these spectacular moments but also in the every day" (Beauchamp 5). Through a discussion of identification documents, TSA procedures, policymaking, and Chelsea Manning's trial, Going Stealth investigates the United States' neoliberal security practices. Beauchamp's analysis of surveillance practices places race at the center of the framework through which the reader should understand how interactions with the surveillance state are usually gendered but always racialized. Going Stealth is a groundbreaking text in transgender studies and illustrates the urgent need for scholarship within transgender studies to engage with intersectional texts that center race. In Chapter 1, "Deceptive Documents," Beauchamp draws attention to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security memo where DHS uses fears of the gender transgressing terrorist to bolster their push to increase surveillance measures at airports. Fears of gender deception are so great in this country that it is impossible to view gender deception as not directly tied to notions of citizenship, belonging, and national security. Going Stealth argues that fears of gender transgression affect transgender and cisgender people alike. Drawing from Joy [End Page 220] James, Beauchamp notes that "state practices of surveillance and discipline read sexual and social deviance through racialization processes" (39). In this chapter, he uses examples of voter fraud ads, the trans panic defense, and medicalized racism to outline how fears of gender deception are not only rooted in transphobia but are deeply connected to xenophobia and racism. Hypervisibility is a crucial factor in maintaining a neoliberal security state. Critical of visibility politics, Going Stealth argues that transparency and hypervisibility from all citizens maintains the neoliberal security state and the boundary between deviant/nonconforming and good, compliant citizens. In the first chapter, Beauchamp highlights the difficulty trans people encounter navigating state by state variations in ID laws and restrictions, pointing out that notions of universalized national security are often disrupted by individual state policy. Drawing connections between the racialized history of ID documentation in the United States, for example, how ID documents were used to enforce slave patrols and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Beauchamp illustrates how "state power might use formal identity documents to produce free or unfree subjects: documents generate a certain truth about individuals, and so they do not merely attest to one's identity but also create it" (25). Thus, the United States not only regulates but also...

“Employed at the Works of the City”

Abstract Despite the successful maneuvers of many runaways to escape slavery in the slaveholding South, considerable numbers did not make it and were apprehended by slave patrols, civilians, or watchmen. What happened to those among them who were subsequently not reclaimed by their legal owners? To answer this question, this paper focuses on the punishment and forced employment of runaway slaves by city and state authorities rather than by individual slaveholders. It follows enslaved southerners into workhouses, chain gains, and penitentiaries, thereby connecting different institutions within the nineteenth-century penal system. Exploring collaboration and clashes between slaveholders and the authorities, it will discuss how the forced employment of runaways fitted in with the broader understanding of Black labor and the restructuring of labor demands in the antebellum US South.

Under the Brutal Watch: A Historical Examination of Slave Patrols in the United States and Brazil During the 18th and 19th Centuries

Though less discussed in the literature, slave patrols played a significant role in continuing and sustaining the system of slavery. While few scholars have dedicated attention to exploring the history of slave patrols in the United States (US), there remains a dearth of research analyzing the slave patrol system in Brazil, despite the existence of slavery in this area of the African Diaspora. Using a historical perspective, this article compares and examines the establishment, function, expansion of slave patrols in the US and Brazil between the 18th and 19th centuries. This article adds to the scholarly discourse and historical literature on the experiences and conditions of enslaved people in the African diaspora (i.e., US and Brazil) under the brutal watch of slave patrols. Future research and investigation is needed to gain nuanced understanding of slave patrols not only in these two specific geographical regions, but globally across the African diaspora.

The Black Lives Matter Movement: A Call to Action for Couple and Family Therapists.

The frequent police killings during the COVID-19 pandemic forced a reckoning among Americans from all backgrounds and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into a global force. This manuscript addresses major issues to aid practitioners in the effective treatment of African Americans via the lens of Critical Race Theory and the Bioecological Model. We place the impacts of racism on Black families in historical context and outline the sources of Black family resilience. We critique structural racism embedded in all aspects of psychology and allied fields. We provide an overview of racial socialization and related issues affecting the parenting decisions in Black families, as well as a detailed overview of impacts of structural racism on couple dynamics. Recommendations are made for engaging racial issues in therapy, providing emotional support and validation to couples and families experiencing discrimination and racial trauma, and using Black cultural strengths as therapeutic resources.

Black cargo

Black cargo

Racial burdens, translations, and chance

Racial burdens, translations, and chance

Weaponized Whiteness: The Constructions and Deconstructions of White Identity Politics by Fran Shor

Reviewed by: Weaponized Whiteness: The Constructions and Deconstructions of White Identity Politics by Fran Shor Michael Ezra WEAPONIZED WHITENESS: The Constructions and Deconstructions of White Identity Politics. By Fran Shor. Leiden: Brill, 2020. This short collection of the author’s essays, some of them revised versions of earlier publications, uses key turns of phrase to shed new light on enduring issues in whiteness studies. With two caveats, even those scholars familiar with the literature may find new ways of thinking and writing about the subject via their engagement with this book. First, portions of various essays are positioned within contemporary news stories that no longer resonate as much as they once did. These pieces seem to lose a sense of immediacy that they may have packed upon their initial publication. Second, informed readers will have to sift through a good deal of familiar conceptual material on whiteness. Shor’s main argument throughout the essays is that whiteness was the founding organizing principle of the United States of America, a powerful motivating force that has yet to run its course. The nation’s earliest wars were racialized, Shor asserts, and that pattern has continued all the way through the country’s most recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Riffing on Martin Luther King’s iconic quote, the book asserts that “The long arc of racial injustice…bends towards whiteness” (9). Aspects of society that had never been racialized anywhere else in the world quickly evolved as such in this country. State-sponsored law enforcement and military forces like slave patrols and the Buffalo Soldiers existed solely to enforce and entrench a national racial caste system designed to be permanent and unchanging. That nonwhite groups have carved out independent and oppositional identities in resistance to such forces reflects their magnificent, multi-century struggles. Although these multiracial freedom struggles, which sometimes include white allies, may give life to an illusory notion of national progress, they do not actually represent any particular slippage in the foundational national character of white supremacy. In fact, these protest movements face fierce resistance by the most powerful segments of white society, even as they incorporate the support of thousands of white allies. In Shor’s framework, Trumpism and majority-white support for it is nothing new, but may serve as an inflection point for whites who can no longer envision themselves [End Page 69] aligned with a particular brand of white grievance that is too explicitly associated with Nazism. It may drive an extraordinary number of whites into roles where they serve temporarily as allied appendages to the black vanguard, to use the author’s terminology. But, Shor warns, the white ally will always struggle with a kind of double-consciousness between her own privilege and the arc of justice that would replace it, and only the destruction of whiteness could really serve as a precursor for such radical change. In a sense, the term white ally is an oxymoronic one. Shor’s prescription for the affliction of whiteness is a hoary one; he calls for whites to reject racial identity politics in exchange for a more powerful class solidarity. Otherwise they will continue to chase guns and god as compensation for their lost privilege, as once observed by President Obama. Only when citizenship and democracy exist without racialized privilege will this country reach its potential. Michael Ezra Sonoma State University Copyright © 2020 Mid-America American Studies Association

Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt

Reviewed by: Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt Matthew E. Stanley (bio) Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South. By Keri Leigh Merritt. (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 371. $59.99 cloth; $29.99 paper; $24.00 ebook) American slavery was not only a racial system. It was also a labor system—a part of what Cedric J. Robinson terms "racial capital-ism"—that was designed to control workers and prevent the unity of oppressed people across racial lines. Writing in 1855, abolitionist Frederick Douglass made clear which white people benefited and which white people did not when it came to American slavery—the slaveholders, "by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the black," succeeded "in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself. . . . Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers" (pp. 62–63). Keri Leigh Merritt's superb study, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, echoes Douglass's point, arguing that black slavery and white poverty went hand-in-hand. Overturning Frank Owsley's influential but outmoded analysis of southern "plain folk," Merritt maintains that slavery kept the Deep South's white underclass—roughly one-third of the white population—perpetually land scarce, unemployed, and poor. Scholars have long debated the cause of material disparities between black and white workers and the degree to which slavery and constitutive race discrimination confer advantage—either in [End Page 113] the mostly psychological and illusory realm of Friedrich Engels's "false consciousness" and W.E.B. Du Bois's "psychological wage," or in terms of something more material—on white workers. In the context of the Old South, Merritt's stance is straightforward: slavery drove down conditions for all workers and, to the extent that poor whites accepted slavery and white supremacy, they contributed to the ability of planters to exploit them. Typically, the extent of what Theodore Allen theorized as their "white privilege" was to merely not be enslaved. "Burdened—not elevated—by the peculiar institution," it was not simply the case that poor whites experienced white privilege differently than propertied white, black slavery was actively bad for them (p. 61). The portrait of the antebellum Deep South Merritt paints is one of extreme compressions of wealth and highly stratified socioeconomic divisions. Perpetuated by inheritable slave property, class barriers were largely nonporous. Slaveholders were shrewd capitalists, even if the region's social relations were not capitalistic. Poor whites—landless, slaveless, and mostly propertyless—were concentrated in the foothills, the mountains, the wiregrass, and the pineywood regions. The same elite and bourgeois institutions that sustained slavery also oppressed poor whites, leading to low wages and unemployment; an almost total lack of public schools and access to credit; slave patrols, behavioral laws, and community surveillance as forms of social control and retributive justice; and the slaveholders' monopolization of land, resources, and political power. In this sense, poor white existence constituted what antislavery North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper, whose writings and ideas Merritt heavily cites, deemed a "second degree of slavery" (p. 326). Yet Masterless Men transcends neo-Helperism by sophisticatedly arguing that poor whites were, from food scarcity to sexual violence, subject to many of the same physical and material vulnerabilities as black slaves; that through "Snopesian crimes," they resisted oppression in many of the same ways slaves did; and that they developed class consciousness even as the South's rurality and lack of industrialization [End Page 114] stymied their solidarity and labor power. Persistent class anxiety both spurred secession and contributed to Confederate defeat during the Civil War. Even though planters won support for secession by ginning up fears of neo-John Browns and an impending Haitian-style "race war," many poor whites remained deeply resentful of the planter class. Although poor whites joined the Confederate armies for a variety of reasons, ranging from being targets of conscription to adherence to the masculine or honor-bound values, deserters were disproportionately poor and from the laboring classes. Other pauperized dissenters, whom William W. Freehling labels "anti-Confederates," contributed mightily to Confederate defeat through...

Driven from Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis by David Silkenat

Reviewed by: Driven from Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis by David Silkenat Mary A. DeCredico (bio) Driven from Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis. By David Silkenat. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. 290. Cloth, $49.95.) The literature on the Civil War experience continues to grow, as scholars begin to address new issues within the context of older historiography. David Silkenat’s Driven from Home continues this trend by addressing and updating Mary Elizabeth Massey’s pathbreaking Refugee Life in the Confederacy. Published in 1964, Massey’s original manuscript ran over six hundred pages and addressed “‘all groups uprooted by the war— Confederate and Union sympathizers, Negroes, Indians, and whites’” (2). As Silkenat observes, Massey’s external reviewers pressed her to pare down her manuscript. As a result, she focused on southerners who were forced to refugee within the Confederacy. Given the extant primary sources, the book’s central characters are members of the southern white elite who were literate. Silkenat seeks to accomplish what Massey originally intended, but his focus is on the North Carolina piedmont region. He notes that his endeavor, unlike Massey’s, was aided inestimably by the creation of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project in 1976 at the University of Maryland. He places his work within the context of the work of other scholars who have also focused on the experience of African American slave refugees. According to [End Page 151] Silkenat, Driven from Home “recognize[es] that one of the most important and distinctive features of the Confederate refugee crisis was its diversity, as Southerners of all races, genders, classes, and political alliances chose or were forced to move as a consequence of the Civil War” (4). In his investigation of the refugee experience in the piedmont region, Silkenat examines “five distinct elements”: African Americans, white southern Unionists, Confederate whites, Confederate whites who brought along their slaves, and southern women enrolled in North Carolina boarding schools (6). Throughout the book, Silkenat refers to the refugee “crisis.” As he notes, “I use the term ‘crisis’ not only to reflect the number of refugees and the difficulty of their circumstances but also because the response of governmental and charitable organizations was often woefully inadequate” (7). According to Silkenat, the North Carolina refugee crisis began early, when Union general Ambrose E. Burnside captured Roanoke Island in February 1862. The first wave of refugees to flee to the interior were African American slaves. Acknowledging the dearth of primary sources, Silkenat pieces together the slaves’ refugee experience using accounts written by Union soldiers and relief workers. What those sources reveal is that in March 1862, New Bern became the “heart of the Union occupation” of the North Carolina piedmont, and as a result slaves flocked to New Bern for the protection afforded by the occupiers (13). Slaveholders in the region did not sit idly by as their property fled into the interior. Locals significantly increased slave patrols, and home guard units added to the effort to stem the flood. The slaveholders also directed the slave patrols and home guard “to use lethal violence,” which was a far cry from the antebellum practice of merely returning the runaways to the rightful owners (23). Despite such vigilance, African Americans continued to seek refuge in the New Bern area. General Burnside alerted Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that he was putting the bondsmen to work. But the tide of refugees soon convinced Burnside he needed assistance. On March 30, 1862, Burnside appointed New Yorker Vincent Colyer as “superintendent of the poor” (27). A former member of the U.S. Christian Commission, Colyer opted to do relief work on behalf of African Americans in the field. Subsequently, he journeyed to Burnside’s command and assisted the Union general in hiring the former slaves to do manual labor. The influx of the slave refugees produced what could be considered culture shock to the Union soldiers. Having only dealt with “slavery in the abstract, the arrival of hundreds of refugee slaves challenged their ideas [End Page 152] about race and slavery” (30). Many were surprised that their stereotypes of an ignorant race were challenged; others saw nothing but...

Black Bodies on the Ground: Policing Disparities in the African American Community—An Analysis of Newsprint From January 1, 2015, Through December 31, 2015

This article tests the thesis that policing today is a consequence of its history with the Black community. The author provides a brief historical account of policing in America as it pertains to Blacks from slavery to the 21st century. An account of the role of the slave patrols and the various codes and laws enacted to control Blacks are also discussed. This research will examine the historical relationship between police and the Black community by taking a closer look at the killing of unarmed Black men from January 1, 2015, to December 31, 2015, using and analyzing newsprint retrieved from two data sources. Specific cases are discussed, and the author provides possible solutions to address the social problem of the killing of unarmed Black males by police.

War Culture and the Politics of Intolerable Violence

War Culture and the Politics of Violence Henry A. Giroux (bio) The question that really obsesses me today is not whether or not I like violence, or whether or not you like it—unless the situation is ameliorated, and very, very quickly, there will be violence. —James Baldwin (2014, 17; emphasis in original) Living in a War Culture War has been redefined in the age of global capitalism.1 This is especially true for the United States. No longer defined exclusively as a military issue, it has expanded its boundaries and now shapes all aspects of society. As Ulrich Beck observes, "the language of war takes on a new and expansive meaning today. … The notions on which our worldviews are predicated and the distinctions between war and peace, military and police, war and crime, internal and external security; particularly between internal and external in general" are being transformed as they collapse into each other (Beck 2002, 1). Beck goes on to suggest that not only are the "boundaries between the military and civil society [being] torn down, but also the boundaries between innocent and guilty, between suspects and non-suspects" (Beck 2002, 3). As violence and politics merge to produce an accelerating and lethal mix of bloodshed, pain, suffering, grief, and death, America is quickly transformed into a war culture. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out, the veneration of war in the United States has now reached a dangerous endpoint, and has become the foundation of politics itself. They write: [End Page 191] What is specific to our era…is that war has passed from the final element of the sequences of power—lethal force as a last resort—to the first and primary element, the foundation of politics itself. Imperial sovereignty creates…a regime of disciplinary administration and political control directly based on continuous war action. The constant and coordinated application of violence, in other words, becomes the necessary condition for the functioning of discipline and control. In order for war to occupy this fundamental social and political role, war must be able to accomplish a constituent or regulative function: war must become both a procedural activity and an ordering, regulative activity that creates and maintains social hierarchies, a form of biopower aimed at the promotion and regulation of social life. (Hardt and Negri 2004, 2) The violence produced by a war culture has become a defining feature of American society, providing a common ground for the deployment and celebration of violence abroad and at home. At a policy level, an arms industry fuels violence abroad while domestically a toxic gun culture contributes to the endless maiming and deaths of individuals at home. Similarly, a militaristic foreign policy has its domestic counterpart in the growth of a carceral and punishing state used to enforce a hyped-up brand of domestic terrorism, especially against Black youth and various emerging protest movements in the United States.2 A "political culture of hyper punitiveness" (Herbert and Brown 2006, 757) serves not only to legitimate a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is viewed as virtue, but also a racist system of mass incarceration that functions as the default welfare program and chief mechanism to "institutionalize obedience" (Martinot 2015). The police state increasingly targets poor people of color turning their neighborhoods into war zones, all the while serving a corporate state that has no concern whatsoever for the social costs inflicted on millions because of its predatory policies and practices. Moreover, the persistent killing of Black youth testifies to a long history and domestic terrorism representing "an unbroken stream of racist violence, both official and extralegal, from slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan to contemporary profiling practices and present-day vigilantes" (Davis 2016, 77). The historical backdrop to the current killing of black youth, men, and women coupled with fact that "11 million Americans cycle through our jails and prisons each year" and that the United States "imprisons the largest proportion of people in the world [and] that, with 4% of the global population, it holds 22% of the world's prisoners." Moreover, 59% of these prisoners are people of color.3 These figures testify not only to the emergence of...

Conference Examines Cultural Histories Leading to Unrest in Ferguson

Conference Examines Cultural Histories Leading to Unrest in Ferguson

To Protect and Serve Whiteness

Critics of policing often utter the phrase ‘to protect and serve,’ in order to point out the gap between discourses of ethical policing and practices of punitive policing in black communities. However, the present analysis asserts that a more appropriate representation of the policing function is ‘to protect and servewhiteness.’ Drawing ethnographic observations, the Ferguson Report and Officer Darren Wilson’s Grand Jury Testimony, I shift the locus of critique away from the putative problems of ‘police brutality,’ ‘excessive force,’ and ‘police militarization.’ I argue that these critiques naturalize the forms of psychic violence, dehumanization and dispossession inflicted in routine and professional encounters between police and black people. Instead, I argue that anti‐blackness is imbricated in policing itself. Then, by examining the ways in which modern policing and ‘order maintenance’ approaches developed from southern slave patrols, I assert that policing in the United States is always already racialized policing. It plays a foundational role assigning of racial meanings, helping to produce whiteness as a subject of protection and blackness an object of regulation.

What is the Difference between Slave Patrols and Modern Day Policing? Institutional Violence in a Community of Color

Do performances of brutality have to be part of institutional social control in African American communities? Are these communities haunted by historical beliefs, practices, and stereotypes that once disenfranchised them? More important, if so, why in a post-civil rights era do African Americans receive abuse from our institutional sentinels – the police? Why do our guardians utilize informal and formal social control mechanisms, similar in nature, type, and in some instance in kind to slave patrols? This article examines criminologists’ analyses of policing in the African American community. Despite a substantial amount of work addressing the complaints of violence and distrust in the Black community, policy-makers as well as police departments have ignored their findings. Does the will exist to bring about a different form of social change in the configuration of justice or does African American marginalization persist as one of the strongest elements of social stratification.