3. The Police Are the Reform

Let me return to the words with which I began—to let the phrase “the future remain the same” echo and reverberate. This chapter builds on earlier suggestions that law and police were part and parcel of a program of reform from the start. First, I emphasize how postemancipation and colonial logics of the benevolent civilizer have been reproduced in continuity with contemporary social-liberal explanations of “crime” or violence. Kant and Hegel’s approach to race and civilization is central to understanding the legitimation of the infinite postponement of emancipation, which upheld movements for abolition that reformed slavery and deferred freedoms.1

In this light, rather than focusing on modernity’s racialized temporalities, or arguing that the chronopolitical exclusion of Black people promotes a future as white destiny, I show how the irrevocability of Blackness indexes a fissure within modernity’s teleology. I suggest that the conjunction police-reform indexes a specific mode of history, in which history’s (a)sequentiality relies on both the inescapably regressive status of Black people and their eventual annihilation. The problem of modernity is not a white destiny that excludes all others—it is that white destiny is both necessary and impossible. The universality of anti-Black policing forms both the unthinkable ground of modernity’s futurity and its irredeemable failure to petition the new.

The 1999 Macpherson report was perhaps the most significant call for police reform in recent British history. The prior investigation of the police response to the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence found the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist. The finding seemingly represented a significant shift from the Scarman Report of nearly two decades earlier that investigated the 1981 Brixton uprising. Lord Scarman had pitched the blame for “tensions” between Black communities and the police at perceptions of institutional racism and the nature of Black family structures, while conceding that there were a few bad apples within the police force. Scarman spoke of “understandable” failures of Black communities to deal with oppression and poverty, suggesting that unemployment and family structure lay at the root of the uprising.2

In contrast, Macpherson argued for action to be taken across police and social agencies. The report called for seventy reforms to policing and criminal law as well as suggestions for reforming local government, the National Health Service, and the school system. At the time, the report was widely decried by stakeholders in white supremacy, but over time—and particularly at points where the compact is again at risk—those reforms are said to have been embedded into a transformed police force. In 2020, for instance, Metropolitan police chief Cressida Dick stated that the police had embraced Macpherson’s challenge:

I was the person charged with implementing the recommendations and I’m very proud of what we did. I think we’ve come a very, very, very long way.3

The repetition here—very, very, very—indicates both movement and punctuation. Social progress is tied to a dialectical relationship between police as institution and the progressive social movements from which oppositions to specific instances of policing arise. The temporalities of progress and reform are compressed as if an incantation that would confine anti-Black policing to the past.

Even aside from the arguments made in previous chapters, social pressures on policing cannot be simplistically indexed either to historically contingent societal norms or to relatively universal structures of law and civil order. Moreover, as critics have long argued, reforms embedded into policing operate as part of a machinery of deferral through which progress can be produced and measured within the frameworks of liberalism.4

But this suggests a more deeply embedded problem. Resistance to police is dealt with insofar as reforms are the process through which oppositions to police can be internalized and policing remade. Reforms are counted as progressive insofar as they are also the stasis of return to and “making good” with the anti-Black state. Calls for reform embed a promise of progress into a political time that will never arrive.

As such, police-reform can be considered a conjunction that not only defines and delimits police opposition with consequences that ensure the deferral of progress by oscillating around stasis and progress but also encapsulates a fundamental temporal operation of colonial modernity that thrives on anti-Black violence as its condition.

It is often supposed that history was brought into being through colonial modernity insofar as linear temporality was produced through its categories.5 Thus a sequential form of temporal order—of progression, development, and expansion—was set against the state of nature (embodied by Black African people) and toward a future determined by (European) man.6 Blackness is both necessary to and also positioned outside of time—as anachronistic and subject to nature’s caprice.7 Concepts of backwardness and pastness provided a framework that justified colonialism as part of the process of evolution toward modernity, as Walter Johnson writes.8 The sequentiality produced ensures that Black African people would perpetually be in a position of “catching up” to white time or consigned to a regressive past. The myth accepted by both critics and advocates of imperialism as civilizing mission is, therefore, that the force of imperial conquest imposed backwardness on the colonized.

For instance, Kant’s cosmopolitanism has usually been understood as a kind of gradual perfectibility in which the goal of history lies with the global ordering of humanity under universal principles of law and morality. Hegel also judged that history proper begins only with the Caucasian race.9 The blame is placed with a supposed incapacity of Black Africans to determine a universal order from nature, which causes their enslavement to arbitrariness.10 Humanity is here defined through the cultural achievement of history. Hegel writes that “what we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the condition of mere nature.”

Hegel shares Kant’s insistence that rational law is the basis of freedom requiring the subordination of naturalness to order-as-progress. For Hegel, Black Africans are bound to their senses and so incapable of the negation of the given that would be required to distance themselves from nature and become part of history. They are entrapped within immediacy. So, to paraphrase Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, Hegel formulates a conception of “the African” that is of time but not in time.

The binding of the political remaking of the world within the present is possible on condition of future novelty. It is important to foreground that the future cannot merely be a given but must be constructed, because futurity is not by itself necessarily novel. Change occurring through contingency and chance must therefore be subordinated to progress that is built through the actions of human reason. Any supposed “civilizing mission” of imperial expansion must then re-form the earth through culture in accord with reason and law, so recursively embedding the global development of history. In Kant’s later work, the actions of reason are thereby understood as a constructive project that turns the material of the earth into the world. As Kant writes, “without man all of creation would be a wasteland, gratuitous and without final purpose.”11 This project is teleological. Growth from a “lawless state of savagery” is intertwined with a developmental theory of natural order that promises the remaking of the earth in the image of a Europe to come.

In this light, Robert Louden suggests that Kant is committed to all humans eventually sharing a common destiny.12 For example, Kant writes that “the oriental nations would never improve themselves on their own,” that “all peoples on earth . . . will gradually come to participate in progress,” and that “we must search for the continual progress of the human race in the Occident and from there spreading around the world.”13 But this global ordering of humanity is to be enforceable under violence against any society not yet deemed to have escaped the “lawless state of nature.”14

This prepared the path for Hegel’s dialectical movement through history toward freedom understood as a correlation between the rational human mind and the institutions that humans create.15 Building on Kant’s concern with policing self-interest to support the a priority of reason, Hegel is concerned to see how history and culture set in motion the process of reason’s self-realization in the world. World history is constituted through the integration and absorption of alterity through a process of negation and overcoming of prior civilizations that consolidates advanced forms of culture. European culture emerges as a series of dispositions of reciprocal limitation and adjustment along a racialized hierarchy of perfectibility that relies on the progressive manufacture and artificialization of the earth as the world.16 This is a generative and reciprocal relationship of poiesis between reason and its external scaffolds that is also reliant on a story of progression and the temporality of a world to come.17

As Andrea Long Chu suggests, for Hegel, world history is the dialectical process through which freedom is actualized in the form of the rational state.18 This dialectic is inherently expansive, moving to envelop a world and, as Hegel writes, “drives a specific civil society to push beyond its own limits . . . in other lands, which are either deficient in the goods it has overproduced or else generally backward in industry.”19 This is justified, because “only certain races produce peoples,”20 as Hegel wrote, so “one must educate the Negroes in their freedom by taming their naturalness.”21 Deracination, enslavement, and plantation work formed the basis of “education” for Hegel.

Similar logics were prevalent across postemancipation Barbados. For example, Reverend William Marshall Harte took a then controversial stance that, even given the supposedly low capacity of Black people, they could be improved through ongoing instruction, even becoming equal with their white masters.22 This equality-to-come was used to preempt and tackle resistance to the criminalization of Black people. For example, refusals to allow children to be bonded by apprenticeships was quickly met with paternalistic calls to apparently help those children from a listless and immoral state. Similarly, an attempt to pay the equivalent wage that planters had previously provided in rations was justified by arguments that increased wages would make the laborers lazy and lacking in impetus to develop skills.23

Dawn Harris discusses how terms like “idle” and “unsettled” were used in the Apprentices Act to suggest that Black people would exist in a state of unproductive wandering without plantation oversight.24 Punitive measures and incarceration were given credence by appeal to the improvement and protection of Black people against this idleness. Harris goes on to write of how these ideas became particularly evident in how important labor was thought to be in transforming potential criminals into law-abiding citizens.25

So, imprisonment was coupled with penal labor, and techniques like using treadmills in prisons encapsulated the myth of improvement through pointless labor. Similar justifications were used to motivate the policing of movement, with the guiding thought that the plantation was the central place where otherwise troublesome Black people could be made productive.26 Restrictions on emigration, for example, were justified by humanitarian safeguarding of those requiring protection from the ignorance produced by their recent absolute dependence.27

The interplay of explicit violence with the violences of moralistic paternalism was particularly evident in the much later process of emancipation and attempted reconstruction on mainland North America. In the South, violent reaction against emancipation was widespread, with organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Redeemers operating a war of terror and frenetic order against the backdrop of radical reconstruction. As W. E. B. Du Bois discusses, this paramilitary violence, including “lynching and mob law . . . murders and cruelty,” was an attempt to maintain and reassert white governance.28 This, as Du Bois suggests, was the result of a strengthening (“merging their blood so completely”) of the ties between the plantocracy and the “rising poor whites.”29

However, where this violence was obviously antagonistic to the northern movement toward freedoms, ultimately both operated to ensure that white supremacy would be maintained.30 The violence of moralizing reform was ingrained in the white desire to rehabilitate the Black slave through the civilizing narratives that governance and control were required. So, for instance, Hartman describes how marriage, which had been previously denied (not only in contract but also in practice), became not just permitted but actively enforced as a form of social control, and through which Black men were often required to assume responsibility for the offspring of slaveholders and Black women.31

In this context, we can focus on how the discourse of paternalism and protection functioned to position the state, planter, and white community as “civilizer” of Black people for the good of “all.”32 Systems of apprenticeship and tied work, criminalization and continued colonialism, were justified through this discourse of racial maturity. White authority over slaves could be continued through emancipation by invoking an obligation on behalf of white people to reform and civilize Black people. As a result, as Binder details, the supposed incapacity of the slave became conjoined to the suggestion that they might become eligible for freedom only through the perpetuation of white command.33 The burgeoning liberal emphasis on the self-sustaining individual within a free market was held together with the subordination of Black people’s concern for movement and work to the “collective good.”

Together with imperial expansion, transformations from slave societies to postslavery colony were saturated with this idea of the “civilizing mission.” In this moment, European thought provided justifications for the continuation of subjugation and control—the general suggestion being that European enslavement, instruction, and control were vital to the future inclusion of all people within the unfolding story of humanity. So, inclusion under the domain of universal humanity continued core aspects of slavery in that the Black person remained under the “care” of a whiteness ordained with the determination of life and violence.34

Across this long history of reformist progress, endless deferrals of emancipation have further submerged the violences of policing “below the corporeal schema,” to draw on Fanon.35 Finding its culmination in Hegel, the hierarchy of perfectibility attributes universal moral properties to white Europeans, which relies on exclusions and subordination of Europe’s “others.” Many have argued that the so-called education and imperial support offered require the deferral of progress through a logic of endless postponement.36

However, in this context, we can revisit how Fanon’s analysis of the Hegelian dialectic pushes beyond more standard critiques that center a humanity foreclosed by the European as the universal archetype of humanity.37 The binding of the Black African into temporality cannot be processed as a chronopolitical exclusion that focuses exclusively on the endless deferrals of a continually postponed freedom.38

Wrenching history into being such that modernity’s novelty could be unshackled from nature’s contingency requires rupture from, rather than exclusion of, Blackness. The settler makes history, Fanon writes: “He is the absolute beginning, ‘This land is created by us.’”39 The impossibility of ordering the symptomatic disorder ensconced in the Black African ensures the universalization of anti-Black violence, but it also indexes colonial modernity’s aporia: anti-Black violence is the necessary motor for white destiny. For example, race is irrevocable for Kant: “race, when once it has taken root and extinguished the other seeds, resists all further transformation because the character of race at one point became dominant in the generative power.”40 Any commitment to the progression of the human species cannot possibly involve Black people, who compromise Kant’s understanding of human destiny.41

As such, the universalizing movement of liberal modernity would seem to lead inexorably toward racial genocide.42 Indeed, as Kant put it in his notes on anthropology, the progression of Man tends toward an end in which “all races will be extinguished . . . only not that of the Whites.”43 The future of the world is therefore a White destiny grounded on the eventual wiping out of “all of the Americas.”44 Although opposed to active genocide, Kant considers it to be predetermined by nature as its “hidden plan”: “not through the act of murder—that would be cruel—but they will die out.”45 For Kant, the progress of the world will ensure that it is remade as white.46

As sketched, for Hegel, world history is produced through the subordination and dialectical overcoming and subsequent absorption of alterity. The condemnation of Black Africans to absolute alterity and regression thus requires imperial intervention that could ensure the global advancement of civilization. However, Hegel agrees with Kant’s judgment that “Negroes . . . cannot move to any culture,”47 because their “condition is incapable of any development or culture, and their condition as we see it today is as it has always been.”48 Denied the possibility of development, Black Africans are frozen in and through time.49

There is a fissure within modernity’s teleology. Fanon draws attention to the fact that “at the basis of Hegelian dialectic [is] an absolute reciprocity that must be highlighted.”50 The dialectical machinery of history operates through mutual recognition, with alterity moving to reinvent both past and present as a process of overcoming by sublation.51 The attempted sublation of prior stages requires shared purpose and ground with the subject of a recognition because a “one-sided activity would be useless.”52 But situated in the Manichean world of plantation and colony, Fanon argues that where for “Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave.”53

So, considered from within Hegel’s vision of history, dialectical circuity is shut down, making any “two-way movement unachievable.”54 The abrogation of history from Black people must operate by rupture such that Blackness cannot possibly be recognized. But in the process, as M. R. Habib points out, white people thereby disable themselves from entry into the recognitive process.55 The Manichean world of mutual exclusion—of absolute oppositions that cannot be unified, neither interdependent nor interpenetrating—indexes a nondialectical antinomy that short-circuits historical progress.56

If modernity were to be eventually capable of achieving its asymptotic goals, it would seem to require not the dialectical progression of the entire species but the annihilation of those who were deprived of entry. However, the movement of history itself requires the irrevocably atemporal status of the Black African to serve as the Other who must be sublated such that European freedom can be realized.57 This is to say that Hegel’s dialectical machinery is aporetically reliant on the eternal suspension of the Black African as outside of history,58 together with the supersession of that stage of history by European interaction and transformation.

As such, the logics of colonial modernity seem to require the destruction of their own conditions. Put bluntly, temporal progress would require the annihilation of those it requires as its basis for defining time.59 Explicating Fanon’s argument, Habib clarifies this point by describing how Hegel places Africa in a permanent state of nature that simultaneously deprives those supposedly later historical stages from being able to develop through dialectical interaction with former stages.60 The problem of modernity is therefore not a white destiny that excludes all others; it is that white destiny is both necessary and impossible.

These tensions lead to an aporia that requires impossible suture. The infinite postponement of white destiny effectuates everywhere more vicious and yet more petrified violences. The “seeming infinitude of total war”61 cannot be shifted into a domain of reciprocal relation. As Marriott writes, Blackness cannot be a possible object of knowledge—neither explicable nor experienceable by the systems through which it is produced.62 As Marriott writes of Fanon’s n’est pas of Blackness,

the thing that Blackness is is not—and accordingly, our relation to it—the mark of a rupture which is both exterior and radically intimate, an abyss which is situated at the limit of judgment, thought, and desire: a monstrance without center or end.

This “is not” confounds both Kantian limit and Hegelian negation. As I suggested in the earlier discussion of Kant, Blackness cannot register as alterity because that would also register as a limit with attributes and referent, so allowing the machinery of dialectics to grind into motion. But because Blackness is both intimate and unassimilable—as a void that resists knowledge—dialectical movement necessarily always falters and stutters.63

This trajectory of thought draws attention away from dismissal or philosophical analysis of history’s fissures and modernity’s problems; rather, embedded within the colonial situation, their aporetic form both conditions and confounds resolution. This is to say that the tendency and drive of colonial modernity toward extinction would create “a void which empties foreign domination of its content and its object: the dominated people,” as Amílcar Cabral put it. The urge to destroy the colonized would “amount to the immediate destruction of colonization,” as Fanon cited of Sartre. Modernity’s dependence on those it requires as its basis for defining time indexes a terminal aporia in which history is driven through the management and staving off of anti-Black genocide. What is set in motion as a project of infinite postponement is therefore not characterizable as the white paternalist or temporizing universalism in which freedoms are endlessly deferred; rather, this is an infinite postponement of the progressive political structure of the world as white destiny.

We see this dialectical machinery at work in embedding strategies of counterinsurgency into mainland British policing.64 As explained by Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, among others, the postcolonial immigrant and his family were framed as causing the extinction of British order—making way for the reproduction of the unpoliceability of those seen as intrinsically antagonistic to British values. For instance, just prior to the Brixton uprisings, on March 28, 1981, Enoch Powell gave a speech in which he warned of the dangers of a “racial civil war” in Britain, later echoed by the Daily Mail’s headline “Black War on Police.”

After the 1981 uprisings, policing models were developed that drew directly on those used in Northern Ireland and Hong Kong. These distilled decades of British colonial policing into command-and-control networks, riot suppression units that were armed and flexibly deployed, and street patrols for curfew enforcement. As Gerry Northam writes, their

public order tactics are a compendium of methods which have been tried and tested for forty years in all the former colonies. They have repressed dissent and put down uprisings in the Caribbean, up and down Africa, in the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent and in the Far East.65

In consultation with the Hong Kong police, a public order manual was developed advising tactical options in the face of rioting that included use of smoke, baton rounds, tear gas, and, in the case of lethal rioting, firearms. This found justification in Lord Scarman’s report on the Brixton uprising, in which he had written that “the police must be equipped and trained to deal with this [disorder] effectively and firmly whenever it may break out.” For similar reasons, Kenneth Newman was appointed commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1982. He had previously worked for the British Palestine Police and most recently as chief constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

The militarized policing of targeted communities had focused attention on race and threat against the state. As Salman Rushdie noted in the early 1980s, “for the citizens of the new, imported empire, for the colonized [Asian and Black people] of Britain, the police force represents that colonizing army, those regiments of occupation and control.”66 However, an explicit war between the state and Black and Asian communities was causing the legitimacy of the police to come under fire.

As the Institute of Race Relations had put it shortly after the 1981 uprisings, “the actions of black youth on the streets destroyed at a stroke the myth of police invincibility.” In 1983, Ferdinand Mount, head of the prime minister’s policy unit, wrote in the London Evening Standard that “the conduct of the police is being brought into question, not among parts of the working class who might regard themselves as the hereditary enemies of the constabulary, but among the respectable middle classes.” Amid this, Newman recognized that it was imperative to “educate the public that the ‘battle’ analogy is inappropriate”—propping up policing would require the attempted sublation of violence.

Criminalization became central to this attempted sublation, developed most proximately from the strategy of “Ulsterization” in 1970s Northern Ireland (itself drawn from strategies that the United States used in Vietnam). Under the command of renowned proponent of counterinsurgency Frank Kitson, Northern Ireland saw methods of pacification and stabilization focusing on population control combined with coercive and covert murder and systematic torture that would “squeeze the Catholic population until they vomit the gunmen out of their system.” Counterinsurgency, for Kitson, was a contest for legitimacy that could not be won through a military solution, “because insurgency is not primarily a military activity.”

However, Bloody Sunday raised the specter of war and enemy, giving credence to the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s (PIRA) framing of “civil war” with a discredited colonial army. Kitson was removed soon afterward with a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire, which is the highest-ranking award excluding knighthood/damehood), and Newman was installed to reorganize the RUC and work within a modified legal and criminal justice system. This process of Ulsterization would diffuse the remnants of enemy-centric war through the professionalization and militarization of the police, forming tactical support units and intelligence-led targeted operations. The RUC taking the primary role in policing the PIRA allowed for criminalization to transform acts of colonial war into crime scenes and PIRA members into criminals. The intent of the policy was to reconfigure political conflict as an operation against criminal gangs. As Newman later stated, the aim was to separate insurgents from community support:

The object is to prise open and progressively widen a gap between the terrorist and the ordinary people so that they will be increasingly perceived as criminals and not as wayward political heroes.

As such, disorder was distributed across the population, making way for more complex and indirect forms of power and surveillance, with the police supposedly acting on behalf of a unified people, where that “people” also contained the enemy within. This wasn’t an act of depoliticization so much as the sublation of an ongoing war against political actors with the potential to upturn existing colonial power relations.

Criminalization and professionalization thus strengthened the legitimacy of coercive force while further undermining political action against the British state by ensuring the pervasiveness of policing across people’s lives. Seemingly paradoxically, the militarization of policing and the framing of threats as criminal were part and parcel of the manufacture of political consensus upholding policing by consent.

These struggles were far from disconnected to those in mainland England. With some prescience, in 1973, Conservative MP John Alec Biggs-Davison stated, “If we lose in Belfast we may have to fight in Brixton or Birmingham. . . . Perhaps what is happening in Northern Ireland is a rehearsal for urban guerrilla war.” In 2014, declassified files showed that Thatcher had also made these connections explicit in 1984, centering fears about the relationship between Catholic alienation in Northern Ireland and struggles of Black and Asian people in maintain Britain:

If these things were done, the next question would be what comes next? Were the Sikhs in Southall to be allowed to fly their own flag?

Unsurprisingly, Newman’s mainland strategy closely followed Ulsterization, with criminalization and militarization essential to transforming Black and Asian communities from enemy of the state into enemy of “the people of Britain.” The enemy within would therefore become the enemy of all, because, as criminals, they would embody a struggle against social order. As Newman stated, “it would be better if we stopped talking about crime prevention and lifted the whole thing to a higher level of generality represented by the words social control.”

In part, this maneuver was brought about by the “professionalization” and reorganization of policing as structure that comes to be identified with both the “people” and the domain of politics proper. New regulations instituted practices drawn from Northern Ireland across Britain, bringing social services under the banner of community policing, and a new Police and Criminal Evidence bill sought to expand powers of surveillance across public bodies. Multiagency information collection and Neighborhood Watch were integral to this reform, implicating many into routine and formalized low-level intelligence gathering that was used to justify passport raids, raids on Black clubs and meeting places, and arbitrary arrests by Special Patrol Groups.

Criminalization manufactured the normalization of this pervasive and coercive policing, with communities targeted as criminal and “constitutionally disorderly,” as Newman characterized Jamaican people, now indexing not a rupture in the fabric of warfare but a break in the “normal” social order. In this way, a far more militarized police force was, by the end of Newman’s tenure in 1987, granted a greater legitimacy than it had had before. The impossible limits of a total war were thereby installed and reconfigured such that violence itself is plunged into the unknowable depths of the world. The fragile dependencies of the colonial present employ practices of reform and social inclusion not as a progression but as an operation of the attempted suture of white order.67

Taking dependence and postponement as a spiraling point of entry into the colonial present is inimical to temporalities of succession and repositions the phrase “future remain the same.”68 This fragile setup requires the winding of violence into presence and temporal movement through which racial slavery’s occult presence, as Marriott writes, is a “dead time [that] never arrives and does not stop arriving.”69 So, if “future remain the same,” this is because, as Nadera Shalhoub suggests, Blackness is perpetuated death that generates the potential of life for others.70 Indefinite postponement operates through the movement of social inclusions and exclusions in a supposedly dialectical motion as a process of management reliant on anti-Black violence.

For example, the 2021 Sewell Report chartered by the Conservative Party seemingly to appease itself (and all stakeholders in white supremacy) after antipolice protests earlier in the year similarly announced that we have reached the end of institutionalized British racism. Emerging in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police Department officer Derek Chauvin, British protests were barely acknowledged before they were sanctioned for their violence by prime minister Boris Johnson.71 Set in another moment of potential destabilization of the police–public compact, the report stated that incremental progress is beyond doubt, drawing attention to the relationship between progress and fatalism:

You do not pass on the baton of progress by cleaving to a fatalistic account that insists nothing has changed.72

Attending to anti-Black violence operates as a fatalism in this logic—attempting to cleave stasis against progress.

Reforms are often felt as stasis and deferral. Cue the multiple reports, articles, statements analyzing progress after ten years, twenty years, forty years. These engagements often implicitly reify a notion of progressive policing, making room for reform’s dialectical movement to grind into motion once more. So, in seeming opposition to Cressida Dick and the Sewell Report, a Home Affairs Committee report published in July 2021 considered the Macpherson Report twenty-two years on, bemoaning how a representative police force would not be reached at the current rate of progress for another twenty years.73

The oscillation continues. The 2021 Home Affairs Committee report called for reattention to Macpherson’s suggested reforms and targets, centering the need for diversity within policing and the criminal justice system, and attention to stop-and-search disparities. As if in conversation with Doreen Lawrence and the Sewell Report, discussing the report, Labour MP Yvette Cooper stated,

We have found that in too many areas progress has stalled. . . . Without clear action to tackle race inequality we fear that, in 10 years’ time, future committees will be hearing the very same arguments that have been rehearsed already for over 20 years.74

The dividing line between reform and a politics of equal-opportunity law and order is tipped out as a continuum along the binary of stall and progress. They are together productive of a state whose benevolence and viciousness are modalities of the colonial present.

The inertia and petrification of the colonial situation, which is characterized in the Sewell Report as “cleaving to a fatalistic account,” is here both violence’s cause and effect. The production of time as fatal (as incomplete death) operates through a fatalism (as permanent state of nature) that is both necessary and illegitimate for colonial modernity.75 But, far from indexing stasis and fatalism, the temporality of “future remain the same” indexes a sprawling temporality that is unthinkable as temporality (or at least within temporalities marked by progress), while also providing the conditions and context for the construction of temporality as such. Thus there is no progressive possibility for Blackness in the absence of violence, just as there is no possibility for modernity to petition a future in the absence of Blackness.

Both social inclusion and exclusion operate as part of the management process of infinite postponement. The superficial antagonisms articulated in the logics of reform and progress provide the “motionless movement” in which dialectics becomes merely a “logic of equilibrium,” as Hegel writes.76 It is this dialectical machinery that functions by moving toward the impossible suture of the colonized into a social whole.77

For instance, the British Conservative Party quickly capitalized on its 2021 election mandate to ramp up law-and-order politics. Just before the general election, home secretary Priti Patel said she wanted criminals to literally feel terror,78 and leader Boris Johnson announced plans to make criminals afraid.79 But, though many across the political spectrum painted Conservative plans as uniquely severe, at their core is a whole-society approach to tackling serious violence that has cross-parliamentary support and deep historical roots.

This is clearest with a legal duty to prevent and tackle serious violence that was originally put to consultation by then prime minister Theresa May. Building on the supposedly antiterror duty Prevent, this will require organizations like National Health Service trusts and schools to identify “warning signs” and share information about people deemed vulnerable to perpetrating serious crime.80 The duty is backed up by discourses of violent youth radicalization from gang crime to extreme ideologies, a new Offensive Weapons Act, and Violence Reduction Units (VRUs) that integrate military, police, and civil power.

Much of this is deemed acceptable by the socially liberal so long as the upstream explanations for violent crime are social exclusion and poverty rather than race and immigration status. The Public Health Approach that was advocated by the Labour Party has been promoted as a reformist model of policing that is antagonistic to the aggressive style of current Conservative discourse and policy. However, in essence, these are different management styles of the same approach, with people who represent the potential for violence requiring preemption, tagging, and risk assessment.

Discourse on “serious violence” suggests that knife crime and other street crime cannot be prevented or solved without community effort. So, ending the stabbing and killing of young (Black) people is not just the job of the police: it has passed that point and now involves the community. Yet, this community is associated with serious violence in that they are implicated. What is implied is that “the Black community” is to be blamed for not trusting the police or relying on the police too much to solve a problem not of their own making.

This requires the increasing conscription, consent, and complicity of British citizens in policing. Vital youth and community services that have been wrecked by funding cuts are to be offered grants under a new Youth Endowment Fund provided they work to prevent involvement in crime, are open to evaluation under violence reduction, and share their data. Shifting narratives away from a primary focus on gangs to specific group-oriented violence is being used to better aid community buy-in to violence reduction.81 The Behavioral Change Campaign overseen by VRUs will work with successful recipients to influence behavior and generate counternarratives. This implicates and conditions community groups to reproduce the discourses and practices of their own criminalization, while making them complicit in the idea that inner-city Black young people are at once the inevitable source of violent crime and responsible for working to undo its causes and conditions.

So, what is at stake is not merely citizens, civic officials, authorities, acting as police. The Serious Violence Duty legalizes partnerships and relationships between the police and their familial or social counterparts. Transinstitutional cooperation combines coercion with early intervention to produce precriminal spaces in which suspicion continues to be the foundation for pervasive intervention. Violence reiterated and refigured as excessive to traditional categorization of criminal offenses (immeasurable, unquantifiable) supports and maintains a duty premised on social response to a violence that is non–terror related, a social response that encompasses health, educational, and housing services. With the whole-society approach, policing doesn’t simply reflect and reinforce popular morality or political aims; rather, policing actively crafts and arbitrates on people’s lives, differentiating the relative viscosity and peril of movement through education systems, health care, welfare, services, employment, and communities.

Dylan Rodriguez calls our attention to reformism as the position that takes reform to be the primary engine of social change.82 I have suggested analogously that the conjunction police-reform expresses the temporality of progress as stasis—operating as an engine through which policing can be infinitely expanded and embedded into the everyday. Reformism is the logic of supposed dialectical progress, where that process indexes the continued attempt to suture white order under police.

We have seen that the suggestion that police-reform embeds the promise of future progress through which violence may be “solved” by remaking society to be more inclusive has a long and pernicious history. The view coheres with the now near-doctrinal identification of socioeconomic drivers for crime and violence as motivation for “improving” policing. For example, Lambros Fatsis writes of how criminologists consider poverty and inequality to be the key drivers of violence, a focus on which should be central to understanding police and crime.83 However, both the incantation of the end of racialized policing and so-called progressive reforms further embed arrangements of violence that are endlessly re-forming.84

What rolls into motion with programs of social inclusion is not even a one-sided dialectic but rather a neutered dialectic whose condition is also its impossible completion. Put another way, the practice of social inclusion and exclusion is not a matter of progress but rather indexes the continuation of gratuitous violence. Any dialectical movement necessarily always falters and stutters. That is to say, the dialectical unity (whole-society) is neither only internally fractured nor a partial universal; rather, it is a struggle toward closure through the attempted making-universal of police.

The dialectical formation of whole-society is a totality whose ground is the void of anti-Black violence. Characterizing anti-Black violence as anti-Black violence is not a sign of negation or denotation, then, but rather must be everywhere irresolvable as the mark of white destiny’s condition and impossibility. Blackness relies on total war as a negation that cannot negate.85 This is to say that the impossible yet terminal end for the project of modernity (absolute genocide) is retroactively embedded within each temporal moment such that supposed progress is constituted at the attempted suturing of future and terminus.86 The breach that is impossible to suture continues to lend law and police its transcendental condition.