White Police Officers Research Articles

Nobody's Protest Novel: Novelistic Strategies of the Black Lives Matter Movement

Nobody's Protest NovelNovelistic Strategies of the Black Lives Matter Movement Vincent Haddad Though the medium of the novel may seem anachronistic for a Black liberation movement founded by three queer Black women—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi—on Twitter, the stunning blockbuster success of Angie Thomas's 2017 debut novel The Hate U Give represents a high-water mark for an already-rich archive of what we might label BLM novels.1 A fictionalized representation of the precipitating events and formation of BLM, the retrospective quality of this realist novel offers an opportunity to reflect on the novelistic strategies pursued by African American novelists since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and to interrogate which formal commitments and affective states best align with and provoke the Movement's radical imaginary. While similarities in content are evident in a survey of these novels (nearly all, for example, focalize from the perspective of young Black adults and feature violent and sometimes fatal confrontations with police officers), there is significant diversity in the novelistic strategies and forms these works undertake.2 When measured against the now fully developed Movement for Black Lives platform, fissures between some novelistic strategies and the Movement become visible, whereas others demonstrate the potentiality of the novel to expand and animate the politics of Black liberation. More specifically, the conservative impulses I will identify in The Hate U Give as compared to the Movement's political objectives, in terms of race and even gender and sexuality, are embedded in the conservatism of its commitment to the historical form of literary realism.3 In contrast, experimentations on linearity and fictionality like we see in Kiese Laymon's 2013 debut speculative novel Long Division, which I see as the first contribution to this growing and impressive archive, not only connects more closely to the politics of the Movement, but also offers it an aesthetic, if also dissonant, vision for Black liberation. Through a comparative analysis of The Hate U Give's realist construction of empathy and Long Division's speculative strategy of collective revision and queer love, this article assesses the aesthetic and political potential of novels that claim a relation to the BLM movement and outlines what different and successful forms the BLM novel can and should adopt.4 Told from the grief-stricken perspective of teen-aged Starr Carter who witnesses her close friend Khalil fatally shot by a white police officer, The Hate U Give delivers [End Page 40] a powerful first-person account of the impact of racial terror on a young Black woman within the conventions of literary realism. Stocked with real-life references and allusions to BLM, readers are granted unfettered access to Starr Carter's inner life as she grieves the unjust slaying of her friend, navigates between her poor, urban neighborhood in Garden Heights and a wealthy, mostly white suburban private school, and comes into her own as an activist following the inevitable and predictable acquittal of the guilty officer. The linear plot charts out a clear progression from rising action (biased criminal investigation of the guilty police officer) and climax (BLM protest compromised by violence) to a clean and uplifting resolution. Through this structure, the novel fulfills a commonplace, transcendental view of the novel as a privileged aesthetic to produce empathy; in Guido Mazzoni's words, "its ability to make us see the world through the eyes and conscience of someone else, its ability to allow us to step into a possible life that is not ours" (55).5 Yet, as calls for empathy have become a ritual and hollow imperative after the video documentation and circulation of the murders of unarmed Black citizens by police,6 tracking the ways a BLM novel actually functions to produce empathy, and calling these processes into question, is crucial. The Hate U Give re-asserts what Saidiya V. Hartman calls the "precariousness of empathy" from 19th century accounts of racial terror, in which there becomes an "uncertain line between witness and spectator" for the reader, and demonstrates how the direction of empathy all too easily shifts away from victims and towards the perpetrators of state-sanctioned violence (4...

Note from the Editor

152 CLA JOURNAL Note from the Editor With this second-born digital issue, the College Language Association Journal proudly takes its place among other major academic periodicals that reap multiple benefitsfromthisalternativeplatform.AsEditor,IamhappytoreportthatCLAJhas just entered a Hosting Agreement with JSTOR with the full support of the CLA Executive Committee. Beginning with issues 61.1-2 and going forward, JSTOR will be responsible for disseminating subsequent issues of the journal and making it accessible to our many institutional subscribers at jstor.org. This agreement with JSTOR to serve as the journal’s hosting platform will assure greater access and wider circulation of our published materials. JSTOR is “a highly selective digital library of academic content in many formats and disciplines. The collections include top peer-reviewed scholarly journals as well as respected literary journals, academic monographs, research reports from trusted institutes, and primary sources.” It provides “full runs of more than 2,600 top scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences”and“works with a diverse group of nearly 1,200 publishers from more than 57 countries to preserve and make their content digitally available.” For more information on this service, go to https://about.jstor. org/whats-in-jstor/. Questions regarding current issue subscriptions to CLAJ may also be directed to px@ithaka.org. As a reminder, CLA members will continue to have easy access to CLAJ through the CLA portal. Joining this league has required an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work that included doing comparison research on services offered by various digital hosting organizations, holding weekly conference calls with JSTOR officials and CLA Executive Committee members, reading through thick documents, and, finally, entering an agreement with what we determined to be the best hosting venue for CLAJ. Subscribers will also note that the momentum of CLAJ’s publishing schedule was impacted as we worked out terms of a win-win agreement with JSTOR. Now that both organizations have sealed that agreement, we turn our full attention to bringing the journal back in line with its publishing commitment. Of course, this enterprise will not only involve CLAJ’s internal operations. You can also play a role by assuring that we keep a healthy reserve of scholarly articles from which to choose for each new issue. Moving forward, CLAJ will also actively pursue new ideas to continue to engage our many faithful subscribers. The depth, breadth, and quality of the five essays in this issue affirm that CLAJ continues to evolve with excellence! In “Marronage and Re-Creation in Assata,” Dominick Rolle analyzes Assata Shakur’s rich autobiography in which she relates her experiences as a black female soldier in a para-military, black power organization—the Black Liberation Army. While doing so, he explores her arrest and subsequent periods of incarceration by the New Jersey legal system after she CLA JOURNAL 153 Note from the Editor is accused of killing a white police officer on a New Jersey turnpike in 1973. He asserts that Assata represents herself as a female maroon figure to critique the horrendous ways in which the American legal system continues to position black women as property in prison, while she indicts the prison-industrial-complex as orchestrating a system of neo-slavery which entraps people of color across the African Diaspora. Assata’s escape from prison and her subsequent exile in Cuba also suggests the capacity of blacks to fight against this egregious system of confinement through flight and resistance. During the first Red Scare of 1919, the state department’s Bureau of Investigation (BI) hired investigative agents who were trained by Yale University’s Department of English in biographical criticism to surveil the lives and works of African American writers for evidence of radicalism and sedition. Cognizant of such surveillance, Claude McKay fled the U.S. and embarked on a decade-long transatlantic journey to escape surveillance in America. Employing recent work in surveillancestudies,KelseyKiser’sessay,“‘Howcomeyoujustvanishedthatawaylike a spook’: Global Surveillance in the Transatlantic Novels of Claude McKay,”reveals how McKay’s transatlantic plots exposed the state’s shift from local surveillance methods of panoptical physical enclosure to bureaucratized fluid surveillance that tracked expatriated black writers abroad. Kiser asserts that we...

#IfTheyGunnedMeDown: The Double Consciousness of Black Youth in Response to Oppressive Media

Following the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, at the hands of a white Ferguson police officer in 2014, a social media hashtag emerged drawing attention to the power (and potential bias) of the media in representing Black youth. #IfTheyGunnedMeDown asked the semi-rhetorical question, “Which picture would the media choose to represent me if I were killed by police?” and offered a choice between two contrasting images—one a presumably positive representation and the other stereotypically negative. Through a content analysis of 100 pairs of juxtaposed images from the first 24 hours of the hashtag, I examine the ways Black youth negotiate oppressive media representations and produce their own self-images. Through their strategic political response, the users of the hashtag demonstrate their “double consciousness” in a Du Boisian sense as well as their acute understanding of the specific symbols that mark a Black body as threatening and those that mediate the supposed threat. In doing so, however, they expose the limited number of templates available to them for performing an identity interpreted positively by the mainstream media and broader social world, as well as the continuing role of respectability politics in shaping public perceptions of Black youth.

More Black than Blue? Comparing the Racial Attitudes of Police to Citizens

How are the racial attitudes of police officers distinct from those of the public? How might the officer's own race shape those attitudes? Recent high‐profile cases of contested uses of lethal force by white police officers against citizens of color have reanimated a long‐established debate about the way(s) that race shapes police contact. While research has documented substantial racial disparities across a variety of criminal justice outcomes, little is known about how law enforcement officers might differ from citizens in the way that they think about citizens of color. Existing studies of such attitudes are often limited by the idiosyncrasies of small and unrepresentative samples. The present study overcomes these limitations by employing the first nationally representative survey comparing citizens and police a range of racial attitudes. Findings suggest that white police are, indeed, more racially resentful, more likely to see blacks as violent, and more likely to minimize anti‐black discrimination than are white nonpolice. Black police officers, however, are not significantly more racially conservative than black citizens on any of the measures examined, lending modest evidence to the “selection effect” theory of Police Personality.

Positive and negative intergroup contact predict Black and White Americans' judgments about police violence against Black Americans

AbstractWe examined whether past positive and negative interracial contact predict people's views of interracial police violence. White (N = 207) and Black (N = 116) Americans reported on their past intergroup experiences before viewing information about one of two true events involving the death of a Black man at the hands of a White police officer. For White Americans, negative contact predicted a reluctance to blame the officer and a willingness to believe that people's responses to the events involved “playing the race card.” For Black Americans, positive contact predicted marginally less officer blame and lower beliefs that the victim was racially profiled. This suggests the potential for a vicious cycle, whereby past contact experiences color perceptions of intergroup conflict in the present.

Black Lives Matter and the Limits of Formal Black Politics

For nearly two weeks, residents of Ferguson, MO, led a series of nightly protests over the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by a white police officer. The protests emerged outside the auspices of any mainstream organizations, lacked identifiable leadership, and never made clearly articulated demands of the state. This contrasted sharply with much of the black political commentary on Ferguson, which thought about these events in the still intelligible language of liberal-democratic redress: increased black electoral participation, more black elected officials in local government, more black police officers, and white recognition of black humanity. Such proposals never asked whether the Ferguson protests articulated, on a certain frequency, a refusal of the possibility of the normal processes of redress available in a liberal democratic state. I argue that Ferguson lays bare the limitations of a normative black politics, and taken together with the ontological claim underlying the Black Lives Matter (BLM), calls into question whether it is possible for black lives to matter within the colonial assemblage that is the United States. I frame this discussion through the lens of the politically unimaginable to suggest the possibilities available in viewing Ferguson through the lens of coloniality and decolonial thought.

A Study of Angry Expressions in Response to the Shooting of Michael Brown

2014년 8월 미국 퍼거슨시에 일어난 마이클 브라운 피격 사건은 그 사건을 보는 관점에 따라 다양한 분노 반응을 유발했다. 같은 사건에 대해서도 서로 다른 관점에서 첨예하게 대립하는 상반된 해석이 가능하다는 것은 여러 인종이 모여 사는 미국 사회의 다양성을 반영하는 것이기도 하지만 다른 한편으로는 인종 문제가 미국 사회의 근간을 흔들고 통합을 저해할 수 있는 아킬레스의 건임을 보여준다. 따라서 공권 력의 정당한 사용과 인종차별적 법집행 여부를 둘러싼 여러 관점과 이런 상이한 관점 에서 비롯된 분노 발화의 특성을 이해하는 것이 중요하다. 본 연구에서는 해묵은 인종 갈등을 재점화한 계기가 된 백인 경찰 대런 윌슨에 의한 흑인 청년 마이클 브라운의 피격 사건 보도를 둘러싼 네티즌들의 분노 반응 발화를 조사하고, 백인 경찰 옹호 관점과 흑인 청년 옹호 관점 및 중립적 관점이라는 세 가지 서로 다른 관점에서 표현된 발화의 분노 충동성과 집중성 및 명시성을 분석한다. 특히 이런 분노 발화의 질적 특성을 객관적으로 계량화할 수 있는 방법을 제시하고 그런 계량적 분석 결과에 대한 함의를 살펴본다.This paper explores pragma-linguistic aspects of angry responses to the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. The incident immediately prompted a storm of heated debates on the Internet and a number of angry threads were posted. This study identifies three different perspectives from which those threads were written, viz. the perspective that advocated Darren Wilson’s shooting (Perspective A), the perspective that advocated Michael Brown’s behavior on the day (Perspective B), and the perspective that is neutral between the white police officer and the black teenager (Perspective C). A total of 647 tokens of angry expressions are analyzed in terms of their anger realization strategies and the three key traits of anger expressions — compulsivity, convergence, and explicitness. A set of evaluation formula to measure the three traits are proposed and the findings are discussed.

Remembering Robert Charles: Violence and Memory in Jim Crow New Orleans

Remembering Robert Charles:Violence and Memory in Jim Crow New Orleans K. Stephen Prince (bio) In I938, jazz legend Jelly Roll Morton told folklorist Alan Lomax about a song that was too dangerous to sing. It described the events of July 1900, when the city of New Orleans erupted in a four-day spasm of racial violence after a black man named Robert Charles shot and killed several white police officers. Though Morton remembered many details of the riot (and fabricated several others along the way), he adamantly insisted that the words of the Robert Charles song were lost to history. "This song was squashed very easily by the [police] department," Morton said, "due to the fact that it was a trouble breeder. So that song never did get very far. I once knew the Robert Charles song, but I found out it was best for me to forget it and that I did in order to go along with the world on the peaceful side."1 Perhaps Jelly Roll Morton had truly forgotten the ballad of Robert Charles by the time of his interview with Lomax. Perhaps he was simply unwilling to share it. Either way, Morton's peculiar relationship with the Charles story—unable to forget but unwilling to remember—offers a striking point of departure for a study of popular memory and racial violence in the Jim Crow South. Relying on Jelly Roll Morton's recollections, a number of scholars have argued that the tale of Robert Charles's stand against the New Orleans Police Department was kept alive in the city's African American homes and workplaces for decades. In Carnival of Fury, an impressive piece of historical detective work first published in 1976 that still stands as the only book-length study of the Robert Charles riot, William Ivy Hair writes, "Among lower class blacks [Charles] became [End Page 297] an immediate folk hero and 'the Robert Charles song,' praising his exploits, would occasionally be played at all-black gatherings for years to come."2 Other scholars offer similar assessments, using Morton's reminiscences to make a claim for the clandestine persistence of the Charles story.3 In these treatments, Robert Charles is elevated to mythic status, a part of the folk culture of black New Orleans in the early twentieth century. There is much that is satisfying about this narrative, which treats the durability of the Charles story as evidence of deep-rooted cultural resistance to the Jim Crow regime. At the same time, such a framing has limitations. It assumes that the veneration of Charles took place exclusively in secret gatherings and behind closed doors. An unknown, unseen cast of thousands may have cultivated the memory of Robert Charles through whispers and late-night jam sessions, but historians are denied access to their deeds, their thoughts, and even their names. Such details would seem to be lost forever, along with the words to the Robert Charles song. This willingness to simply assert or assume Charles's status as a folk hero has prevented historians from asking further questions about the legacy of the 1900 New Orleans riot and, by extension, about the nature of popular memory and its role in resisting racial oppression. It is possible, and necessary, to move beyond generic references to the lost ballad of Robert Charles. The subject demands much greater analytical specificity, in terms of personnel, content, and context. We do not need to settle for a faceless and nameless black working class; it is possible to bring actual people into the study of folk memory—to learn who remembered the Robert Charles story, when they remembered it, and why they remembered it. This approach creates memory studies from the bottom up, a social history of popular memory. [End Page 298] This article uses the commemoration of Robert Charles and the 1900 riot to explore the relationship between popular memory and black resistance in the Jim Crow South. In so doing, it extends the discussion of early-twentieth-century black resistance to Jim Crow from the organized—streetcar boycotts and antilynching campaigns—to the realm of everyday life.4 The story of Robert...

Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton

Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton

The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness by Paula Ioanide

Reviewed by: The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness by Paula Ioanide Erin L. Murphy Paula Ioanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 288 pp. In the social sciences, there is a dearth of scholarship connecting the politics of emotion with the politics of racism. Paula loanide's work in The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness makes a significant contribution toward filling this gap by showing the ways in which emotion reinforces structural and institutional racism. With this project, she argues that we need to recognize public feelings as currency in emotional economies, a metaphor that captures how many US citizens feel about an investment in gendered and racial discrimination and violence, which comes to be expressed through political desires, pleasures, fears, and/or anxieties. By focusing on the impact of emotions on political debates, Ioanide beckons us to consider how to more effectively achieve racial and gendered justice when skeptics and opponents dismiss and/or disavow social scientific facts that have been carefully accumulated over decades of research. As she astutely frames it, the problem is that, unfortunately, facts by themselves don't debunk the stereotypes. This is because emotions shape our "sense of realness" and buttress racial and gender ideologies (2). Therefore, loanide rejects notions that only gathering more data to disprove the latest neoliberal, racist, and sexist discourse blaming the most marginalized groups for their discrimination will be effective in itself. Rather, she argues persuasively that anti-racist and feminist scholarship and practices need to incorporate knowledge of emotions as well as account for the weight of ideological fantasies in constructing realities. She aptly characterizes her book in the title, which also signals the structure of the text as she takes four cases where emotional [End Page 323] attachments to racist stereotypes are marshaled against the groups who are under attack. As she covers the expansive ground laid out in these cases, her narrative is sensitive, moving, and necessarily upsetting. She follows in the steps of Herbert Blumer (1958) in his classic work on race prejudice. He asserted that race is socially constructed through the sense of being part of a racial group and that that sense of groupness has influential feelings attached to it. Ioanide also considers feelings of race prejudice from the "emotional and psychological impact of losing white cultural dominance" with local demographic shifts to the "pleasurable thrills or psychological losses" when white police officers sexually and physically brutalize immigrants and people of color (2). Along with the sense of racial groupness comes the ideology of American exceptionalism, which is the belief that the United States and its people are morally and politically superior to other nations. Ioanide also builds on insights from critical American Studies scholars, like Amy Kaplan (1993) and Donald Pease (2009), noting how ideological fantasies of American exceptionalism and white superiority are built upon practices of "disavowal," where facts or arguments that would contradict beliefs in American superiority are conveniently ignored, denied, or dismissed. After a gripping and theoretically grounded introduction that assesses the violence and racism of the color-blind era, Part I transitions the reader to the strongest chapter for demonstrating how to connect the historical details of a case to the theoretical insights raised in the introduction. Chapter 1 covers the rage of white police brutality in New York through the horrors of the physical and sexual violence the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima suffered in 1997. After it became public that police officer Joshua Volpe raped Louima with a broomstick in the police department bathroom as he was held for questioning, the public became horrified, and Louima's allies immediately marched to protest. Giuliani had set the stage for the brutality by passing punitive policing measures with racially coded law and order rhetoric to protect corporations and the wealthy, while further marginalizing impoverished populations. The story of Volpe's wanton violence and Louima's resistance afterward shows how police can experience incredible rage at the thought of people, like a Haitian immigrant man, challenging their authority. Louima's perseverance...

Police Unions and Race

8 | International Union Rights | 24/2 FOCUS | UNITED STATES Police Unions and Race Over the past several years, public outrage over accounts of black men, women and children dying in encounters with police has increased. This mounting outrage has given rise to calls for reforms in policing and the criminal justice system as a whole. Community and street protesters call for ‘justice’, and few American institutions have been spared from at least condemning the deadly acts. Religious organisations, educational organisations as well as local, state and government bodies have entered the fray of discussion. These discussions invariably are forced to take into account the challenges of America’s race and racial disparities. On 14 August 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, white police officer Darren Wilson fires 12 rounds and kills Michael Brown an unarmed 18-year old black man. This killing with its images and details widely carried in national media, sparked outrage that simply would not go away. The killing of Michael Brown came at a time when there was an uptick in the notoriety of such encounters since the highly publicised death of Trayvon Martin. Responding to public outcry from within its membership, in February of 2015, the AFL-CIO (the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations), a federation of 55 national and international labour unions representing 12.5 million organised workers, launched its Labor Commission on Racial and Economic Justice, stating: ‘America’s legacy of racism and racial injustice has been and continues to be a fundamental obstacle to workers’ efforts to act together to build better lives for all of us. Racism has always been a key tactic of employers seeking to divide us. But we also have an ugly history of racism in our own movement…. The demand for racial justice cannot be divorced from the fight for economic justice’1. Ensuing discussions witnessed some union members offering expressions of solidarity with Michael Brown’s grieving mother, a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), while others called for equal or greater solidarity with the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA). Some of these discussions have raised the question of whether police unions should exist and whether they should be in the AFL-CIO. To the extent that police officers organise themselves to fight for better wages, hours and working conditions, they should form unions and join with other workers who are fighting for similar advances in their employment situations. This is equally true for the millions of other workers who are employed in America’s correctional and security systems. From Overseers to Officers The current discussions about police, policing, police reform and criminal justice reform in general flow from the egregious and callous acts of brutality and life ending situations carried out by police and inflicted upon primarily people of colour and African Americans in particular. Such actions are increasingly captured on camera, challenging the viewer to authenticate what they saw. Given the racial character of such brutality, and where the perpetrators are often white and the sufferer is black, again calls into question the lingering racist practices to be found in United States society. Both racist practices and policies have their origins and continuance in slavery and have not been formally acknowledged as being wrong by government, or other major institutions. The union movement has not acknowledged or stated unequivocally that slavery was wrong! Such lack of acknowledgement lends itself to safe haven for those who do not fully accept the equality of all workers, and manifest it in their institutional structures and practices. To varying degrees, unions carry the ideological and practical weight of 246 years (1619–1865) of slavery’s history, when Africans in America were not seen as part of the human family in the body politic. An additional 77 years of Jim Crow [a body of segregationist law] did little to counter murderous ideas, nurtured in the American psych over decades. Thus it was easier to accept police as workers than it was to accept housekeepers and farm hands as workers, the majority of whom were people of colour. Police and police organisations are not creations of workers, brought about by workers’ struggles. They...

The Black Bottom Line: Reflections on Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and White Male Violence in America

During recent decades and especially in recent weeks and days, all walks of life seem to read out in violent terms. Politics, gender, sexuality, entertainment, race, religion, and academics have morphed into venues of violence and cultural mayhem. Journalism still salutes the canard “If it bleeds, it leads!” In present-day reportage, there scarcely seems any other lead. This forum addresses the bound-to-violence conjunctures of everyday life in the US and their entailments in and for the academy. Framing the issue in the context of the police shooting of Michael Brown seems prescient after Orlando and the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. The violence of these scenes allies and signifies along an indisputably violent trajectory of our nation’s founding and its specific gravity of white male privilege and accord. I will return to this point later. Michael Brown was 18 years old and a recent high school graduate. On 9 August 2014, he and a companion entered a convenience store in their hometown of Ferguson. Brown stole two packages of cigarillos, and they shoved the storeowner away from the door, fleeing into the street. A police dispatcher reported the theft. White police officer Darren Wilson, on patrol in his squad car, spotted Brown walking down the street with his friend. He attempted to detain them for questioning. A scuffle ensued: Wilson’s gun fired; Brown and his companion ran; Wilson gave chase, stopped and exited his squad car, and commenced firing his semiautomatic pistol at the fleeing boys; Brown turned to face Wilson. In an instant a bullet crashed through the young man’s skull. Deadly force was the Ferguson police response to two stolen packages of cigarillos.

Do White Police Officers Unfairly Target Black Suspects?

Using a unique data set we link the race of police officers who kill suspects with the race of those who are killed across the United States. We have data on a total of 2,699 fatal police killings for the years 2013 to 2015. This is 1,333 more killings by police than is provided by the FBI data on justifiable police homicides. When either the violent crime rate or the demographics of a city are accounted for, we find that white police officers are not significantly more likely to kill a black suspect. For the estimates where we know the race of the officer who killed the suspect, the ratio of the rate that blacks are killed by black versus white officers is large — ranging from 3 to 5 times larger. However, because the media may under report the officer’s race when black officers are involved, other results that account for the fact that a disproportionate number of the unknown race officers may be more reliable. They indicate no statistically significant difference between killings of black suspects by black and white officers. Our panel data analysis that looks at killings at the police department level confirms this. These findings are inconsistent with taste-based racial discrimination against blacks by white police officers. Our estimates examining the killings of white and Hispanic suspects found no differences with respect to the races of police officers. If the police are engaged in discrimination, such discriminatory behavior should also be more difficult when body or other cameras are recording their actions. We find no evidence that body cameras affect either the number of police killings or the racial composition of those killings.

The depoliticized politics of crowdfunding: A critical examination of the Darren Wilson crowdfunding campaign

On 9 August 2014, Darren Wilson, a white police officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri. Soon after the shooting, two crowdfunding campaigns were organized through the GoFundMe platform, one for Darren Wilson and one for the family of Michael Brown. Using the work of Bauman, Dean, and Fuchs, I argue that these crowdfunding campaigns function as neoliberal mechanisms. Through the depoliticization and displacement of political energies, and the redirection of those energies towards the private sphere, these campaigns provide for affective political expression while simultaneously neutralizing its disruptive political potential.

Ferguson: Returning to Popular Sovereignty through Rhetorical Protest

Riots broke out in Ferguson, Missouri (USA) after a white police officer shot and killed a black citizen of Ferguson. We explain how a breakdown of popular sovereignty in Ferguson contributed to the preexisting hostility in Ferguson. The rhetorical appeal of Black Lives Matter will hopefully lead to the restoration of a democratic municipal government in Ferguson and trust among its citizens.

Policing and Violence in the United States: A Comparative Analysis of Protest Against Police Violence in Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, Maryland, and Cleveland, Ohio (2012-2015)

Policing and violence are two central forces that shape our understanding of government from a national security paradox. Yet, they emerge as two contentious issues in our pursuit of effective policing and ending violence across our communities. Increase violent policing that caused the deaths of unarmed citizens of mainly African American background has left us with so many unanswered questions. On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed in Ferguson Missouri by Darren Wilson, a white police officer. On 22 November, 2014, Tamir Rice was shot in the abdomen by rookie patrolman Timothy Loehmann, Cleveland, Ohio. The boy was holding an airsoft gun. And on April 19, 2015, 25-year-old Freddie Gray died shortly after taking into police custody. These deadly policing activities against predominantly African Americans sparked riots in Ferguson, Cleveland and Baltimore. The paper argues that protest against the police in Ferguson, Cleveland and Baltimore are entrenched in grievances for targeting mainly African Americans and the available opportunities to protest police action. Using a clearly defined comparative framework, the paper looks at the grievances and opportunities, examines the strategy (violent and non-violent nature) of the protests across the three major cities, and examines how policing can be more effective.

Urban geography II

In August 2014, a white police officer shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, USA, fueling the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. The following March, the US Department of Justice produced a report showing that the police department of Ferguson had been explicitly tasked by city officials with using nuisance laws and traffic violations to raise revenue for the municipal coffers. In this second of three progress reports I consider both the empirical evidence and analytical tools urban geographers and those in cognate disciplines have produced that can assist in our analysis of the Age of Ferguson. I conclude by considering what the Age of Ferguson demands from urban geographers, and how we might produce anti-racist scholarship from a ‘white discipline’.

Federalism Anew

One of the most remarked-upon events of the recent past is the August 2014 death of a black teenager, Michael Brown, at the hands of a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri. Attention initially focused on individual actions and local circumstances, but quickly expanded to a broader set of injustices. Brown died just days before he was scheduled to start college, a significant accomplishment in his local context. His school district’s graduation rate was less than 62 percent, compared to 96 percent in a wealthier district down the road, belying Missouri’s constitutional commitments to public education and equal protection, and calling into question federal efforts to ‘leave no child behind’ in the new millennium.1 An older federal commitment—to desegregation—had also bypassed Brown’s community. Indeed, federal subsidies and regulatory choices, combined with the legacy of discriminatory, state-sanctioned zoning and real estate industry practices, had helped transform this formerly all-white suburb of St. Louis into a predominantly black “ghetto.” Federal efforts to remedy these patterns (for example, through housing vouchers) had proven less successful.2

Was there a Ferguson Effect on crime rates in large U.S. cities?

PurposeThere has been widespread speculation that the events surrounding the shooting death of an unarmed young black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri—and a string of similar incidents across the country—have led to increases in crime in the United States. This study tested for the “Ferguson Effect” on crime rates in large U.S. cities. MethodsAggregate and disaggregate monthly Part I criminal offense data were gathered 12months before and after August 2014 from police department data requests and websites in 81 large U.S. cities. The exogenous shock of Ferguson was examined using a discontinuous growth model to determine if there was a redirection in seasonality-adjusted crime trends in the months following the Ferguson shooting. ResultsNo evidence was found to support a systematic post-Ferguson change in overall, violent, and property crime trends; however, the disaggregated analyses revealed that robbery rates, declining before Ferguson, increased in the months after Ferguson. Also, there was much greater variation in crime trends in the post-Ferguson era, and select cities did experience increases in homicide. Overall, any Ferguson Effect is constrained largely to cities with historically high levels of violence, a large composition of black residents, and socioeconomic disadvantages. ConclusionsThe national discourse surrounding the “Ferguson Effect” is long on anecdotes and short on data, leaving criminologists largely on the sidelines of a conversation concerning one of the most prominent contemporary issues in criminal justice. Our findings are largely consistent with longstanding criminological knowledge that changes in crime trends are slow and rarely a product of random shocks.

Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing US Racisms Past and Present by Moon-Kie Jung

Moon-Kie Jung, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing US Racisms Past and Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 264 pp.The relentless acts of resistance staged by the Movement for Black Lives have made it increasingly impossible for dominant groups to continue ignoring the persistent problems of gendered racial violence and inequality in the US and across the globe. As anti-racist struggles focus our attention on contemporary injustices, it is incumbent upon us to clarify how racism functions on diverse terrains and scales. In his theoretically generative book, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing US Racisms Past and Present, Moon-Kie Jung offers precisely such clarifications. Jung shows that racisms are neither singular nor shallow in their expressions. He refines and reframes our understanding of racisms by attending to their unconscious, durable, and habituated dimensions. Revisiting sociological concepts and methodologies that are generally taken for granted, the book reveals the damaging blind spots created by epistemologies of ignorance and nationalist frameworks.Beneath the Surface is divided into three parts. In Part I, Jung denaturalizes common sense assumptions about race and racisms. Having outlined his key research questions in Chapter 1, Jung devotes Chapter 2 to a new theory of racism. Building on established sociological theories, Jung theorizes racisms' unconscious, habituated dimensions as well as their structural, relational, and global scales. In Part II, Jung denaturalizes the common assumption that the US is a nation-state. Reframing the US as an empire-state, Jung shows how nationalist investments keep us from reading racisms relationally. Re-reading foundational Supreme Court cases in Chapter 3, he demonstrates how the fates of groups and geographies within and beyond the US are inextricably linked. Jung further examines the pitfalls of nationalist frames in Chapter 4. Highlighting the problematic premises of neoclassical and segmented assimilation theories in sociology, he shows how scholarly frames can unwittingly perpetuate racist and nationalist assumptions. Finally, Jung devotes Part III to denaturalizing structures of ignorance in greater detail, meticulously elaborating on two concepts briefly introduced in Part I. In Chapter 5, Jung examines the ways dominant actors ignore subaltern discourses generated by oppressed people, a process he defines as symbolic coercion. In contrast, Chapter 6 shows how dominant actors ignore their own knowledge of racial oppression, a process Jung defines as symbolic perversity.Jung's core contribution lies in his ability to offer theoretical precision and depth about the unconscious, habituated, and taken-for-granted ways racisms function in familiar situations. He examines racisms' operative logics in divergent domains ranging from incidents of police violence, massacres of Filipinos in Hawai'i, mainstream newspaper coverage, legal cases, and scholarly conventions in sociology. He seeks to move us away from narrow readings of racism as individual acts of consciously motivated bigotry toward a layered and relational comprehension of racisms as deep structuring schemas. For example, he opens the book by describing a tragic yet all-too-common scenario in the US: a white police officer's killing of a young Black man. Officer Daniel Norbits's killing of Kiwane Carrington in Champaign, Illinois was, predictably, rendered justifiable. As usual, the police denied that racism factored into the outcome of the encounter. In contrast, Black community members and antiracist advocates claimed that racism was central in Carrington's tragic death. While agreeing that race and racism factored into the incident, Jung challenges us to explain racism's operative logics in police violence with greater precision. If the police fail to utter racist speech, how do we account for racism's presence? Police officers routinely deny that race affects their perceptions, judgments, or actions. …