Introduction: Lynching from the Days of Slavery

Why do we need police? Why do we police one another? Why feel this pull, this desire to police and to be policed?

Stephen Lawrence was eighteen when he was stabbed to death by a group of white racists in Southeast London. His best friend, Duwayne Brooks, later described his murder as “like a lynching from the days of slavery.” Speaking amid Britain’s Home Office hostilities and institutionalized anti-Blackness, Doreen Lawrence also located her son Stephen’s killing within what Derek Gregory terms the “colonial present”:

[The police] treated the affair as a gang war and from that moment on acted in a manner that can only be described as white masters during slavery. . . . Everything in this country has Black people who have played a part in it. . . . We helped to make the National Health Service what it is today, we have good transport, you name it and we have been a part of it. . . . My feelings about the future remain the same as they were when my son was murdered. Black youngsters will never be safe on the streets. . . . The police on the ground are the same as they were when my son was killed. I am hearing killing on the streets and in the back of police vans and it is clear that nothing has changed.

Considering the content of this statement and Doreen Lawrence’s invocation that “nothing has changed,” I want to read the phrase “future remain the same” as not only an expression of feeling. I read “future remain the same” as also expressing the colonial present by situating anti-Black violence across the reverberating spatiotemporalities of colonial modernity. The colonial present denotes more than how trajectories of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism continue into the present. The colonial present also suggests how colonial modernity shifted to accommodate formal equality while leaving its frameworks unexamined and the plantation system reorganized rather than ended.1 That “future remain the same” does not collapse histories into analogy, nor does it suggest that history is static. Rather, the death of Stephen Lawrence is articulated as a multifaceted moment within transatlantic slavery, plantation, apartheid, segregation, colonization, dependency of the Global North on the labor of peripheral nations, the police van.

It has been central to abolitionist thought and praxis to articulate policing and incarceration as infrastructures for anti-Black violence within the colonial present. Foregrounding the circulations of police and control that reverberated across colony and metropole also centers how policing has been a constant variable in violence perpetuated in white capitalist society.2

For example, on Barbados, slave resistance was considered as both pervasive atmosphere of potential disorder and contingent eruption of rebellion.3 There slave codes and patrols set up structures that were later translated across what became the United States, empire, plantation, and colony. The codes both justified and wrote Blackness into law, while also signifying the existence of early forms of institutionalized police in slave pass check searches, patrols, and targeting.4

These connections have long been drawn by abolitionist writers, who consider the origins of the police as invested in racial hierarchy, punishment, and exploitation. They are vital to understanding how policing employs colonial counterinsurgency (COIN) strategies that envelop the polity within the operations of a domestic “colonizing army,” as Salmon Rushdie wrote of 1980s Britain. These trajectories of thought consider how police exist to protect and produce systems of exploitation and inequality.5

What follows in this book attempts to push further through these accounts that situate policing in the context of slave patrol and colonial counterinsurgency. Reverberating across the colonial present, and practically universally, as Frank B. Wilderson III identifies, Black people are policed all the time and everywhere. But as such, articulating the universality of policing moves beyond police exceptionalism.6 I want to think about how policing was embedded into the structures of white society, with the armed police force its overt manifestation. This is to concentrate less on its institutionalization and more on how the world itself came to be shaped in the image of police.

I will suggest that across colonial modernity, police emerged as a world-shaping force as well as the form of both civil society and the world under creation. As Sylvia Wynter teaches, the European understanding of the world ruptured and coalesced amid the globalizing traces of Columbus’s landing in the Caribbean in 1492. Modernity’s imaginary trailed and consolidated in the wake of the European expansionist project.7 The radical breach of the Middle Passage was an epochal trans-formation inaugurated on a global scale.8 Across the attempted installation of a Manichean infrastructure, as Frantz Fanon describes, this led to struggles to create a world through this breach of order and disorder, slave and master, colonizer and colonized, law and nature. Transatlantic slavery, Rinaldo Walcott writes, was a route “for the invention of blackness; death—the central motif of Black life, its birth through death.”9

Reaching toward the reorganization of the earth as “world,” the tendrils of the breach were woven from the expulsion of the Moors from Iberia, early enslavement of Black Africans by the Portuguese, plantations on São Tomé worked by Congolese slaves.10 Through the vehement conscription of non-Europeans into the project of modernity, discontinuity and partition were shaped in the force of genocide, destruction of religion and culture, deracination, concentration, working people to death.11 The breach was inaugurated by a material and sociopolitical barrage of practices that make Black people legible to Europeans as a “source of their own renewal and future possibilities.”12 As Tyrone Palmer suggests,

the World here names an ensemble of processes that function to ensure Europe’s domination of the globe and the genocidal mode of its expansion. It also names a space of enclosure and violently imposed order.13

The glistening utopia of Enlightenment has been a shivering carapace of retraction and deceit—a world sutured under terror and brute violence.

The breach troubles the way attention is often drawn to unilateral conquest and frontier, with “savage” and “civilizer” supposedly bound together at Europe’s expanding edges. It is often said that the modern world was built on a contradiction between emancipation and democracy, on one hand, and enslavement and genocide, on the other.14 The idea is that the violent excesses of the modern world are either an anomaly or indicate the unequal application of otherwise universal achievements in reason, freedom, and law. On this picture, a violent boundary is imposed at the frontier of civilization to maintain and produce the security of civil order.15

Police are written as a thin blue line in the contemporary rewriting of this story: of ever-present crises of potential societal disintegration (knife crime, drugs, gangs, migrants). The underlying myth is that police are required to uphold bourgeois civilization against possible regression. Police supposedly operate at the frontier, where the security of civil order begins to dissipate and relies on violence rather than hegemony.16

The picture relies on a characterization of colonialism as irrational or libidinal excess that can be reduced to violence at the boundaries of an otherwise civil order.17 This is why Enlightenment—as it became known—is seen to contain this contradictory pull toward freedom, on one hand, and enslavement, on the other. This antinomy offers two possible resolutions: the first, that reason, law, and civil order might be redeemed through the enlargement of universal concepts, and the second, that they are irredeemable and therefore must be abandoned.

I aim instead to show how this supposed contradiction is inadequate to the breach. Freedom was defined not simply against slavery but through its universalization as collective mastery; civil order was defined not against brutish violence but through its internalization and legalization. Rather than accepting that the “civil orders” of colonial modernity relied on the elimination of disorder and violence, I want to draw attention to how they required its continued presence.

Explanations for anti-Black policing often swing between economic rationality and racialized violence.18 The policing of Black lives is thought to operate either to shape exploitable subjects or to hasten their warehousing and disposability. I do not think we can “reduce” policing in this way. Positioning police as critical to the manufacture and protection of exploitation and inequality stops short of explaining how policing is embedded and entrenched across the world. Its violences are so built in to the normative ways that we think and order our existence that they are made practically mundane. Both abstract and intimate, the universality of Black policing is a normal part of Black life, as Walcott’s epigraph to this chapter describes.

In Doreen Lawrence’s words, murder is juxtaposed with the capture of labor, the police van with economic dependency: “everything in this country has Black people who have played a part in it.” As such, rather than explanatory reduction, here we are drawn beyond logics of exploitation or/and disposability insofar as we are also drawn beyond the prison and police force. The potential for life in the Global North has continuously relied on slavery, colonial control, imperial expansion, and the hovering specter of anti-Black death. The world has been made hostile and uninhabitable for Black people as much as it is dependent on Blackness both materially and conceptually.

It is for this reason that slave society and colonial modernity more broadly were made in the image of police. The world formed in the image of police has been an attempt to manage and make sense of the tension between the drive to exterminate Black people and thus annihilate Blackness and simultaneously to maintain Blackness as a source of exploitable value and rights and privileges for whites. I will suggest that, born from the ongoing dependence of whiteness on an impossible drive toward anti-Black annihilation, police are less a thin blue line between civility and chaos and more the form of the world itself.

For this reason, I turn primarily to Barbados as the first Black slave society, as Hilary Beckles puts it, alongside a critical reading of Kant, Locke, and Hegel.19 Both Barbados and the philosophical architects of modernity can be understood as attempts to construct a world from a frontier—to fuse a civil society without place for slave and Indigenous—from the furnace of a breach dependent on them. As such, I read Kant, Locke, and Hegel not so much as pioneering philosophers but as symptomatic of colonial modernity as well as recursively consolidating it. Throughout, I take the decisive attempt to consolidate the function of Black slavery as social order in British Barbados as a kind of microcosm of the world produced through colonial modernity. There the world formed in the image of police brought the prison and plantation together—with all whites becoming both prison guard and overseer. Policing is the normalization, internalization, and legalization of anti-Black and colonial violence that pervades the entire social fabric.

I do not intend this as an exhaustive account of policing’s origins or logics, nor as a monocausal account that is simply reiterated across the contemporary world. I am, rather, interested in thinking with the spaces opened through the tensions and aporias of colonial modernity as white violence. Throughout, I am interested in examining the violences encoded within and practiced through white worlding. As such, I propose to consider, in chapter 1, the embedding of gratuitous violence in white civil society; in chapter 2, the property relation as policing; and in chapter 3, how both are entrenched through a continuous project of reform that sutures futurity under policing.