People intuit and commonsensically understand
that as a system of violent control over human
beings, slavery required the use of violence
to control people.
And so, for the entire period going back to
the mid-1600s into the early 1700s, colony
after colony, from New York and Massachusetts
to South Carolina and Virginia, passed a series
of Black Codes or Negro Acts, various laws
that were designed to empower everyday white
citizens with the responsibility and, let
me be clear, the duty to serve in an official
capacity to surveil, monitor, to track and,
when caught, to dispense corporal punishment
against enslaved African people in the colonies.
It was the largest bureaucracy dedicated to
a form of policing that we recognize today.
And it was everywhere in the colonies.
By the time the nation was born, in 1790,
while there were gradual abolition laws that
took root in many Northern colonies, the antebellum
experience of free Blacks was little different.
What went from a slave patrol became the responsibility
of a growing cohort of modern police officers.
And this problem, from slavery to freedom,
simply changed uniform and changed the instruments
and tools of keeping track of people of African
descent, and it expanded in the United States
of America.
But there’s another part of this history
that I think is really important, and that
is that policing, in the broadest sense, was
always about policing the essential workers
of this society.
And this is true in societies in countries
all over the globe.
And what do I mean by “essential workers”?
Meaning the people who, at the bottom of the
society, their freedom has always been constrained
by more privileged and more elite, and in
this country, whites.
Now, whites, of course, range in class.
And so, one of the ironies is that both poor
whites in many parts of the country were policed,
especially when they challenged political
authority, when they challenged economic inequality,
but at the same time, they were able to join
police forces.
By the 1840s and 1850s, we see the Irish Americans
beginning to both make their way in America,
but also begin to join the police force.
They direct their sense of belonging in the
United States for policing.
[inaudible] both a reflection of a racial
and class hierarchy and also a way of giving
power to groups that feel like they don’t
have access to the top of the American economy.
So, policing is a reflection of a tremendous
disorder in our economic system.
It is a reflection of racial hierarchies that
are deeply entrenched in our society.
And when we see FOP or union leaders represented
by working-class white men, partly, they have
been empowered to define the profession as
their own, not as a reflection of liberal
democratic norms and universal ideas, but
it is their profession.
So, for me, to talk about the history of policing
is also to talk about the history of white
supremacy and racial capitalism in the United
States of America.
I’m wondering, because this does not only
affect — although it has largely affected
the African American community, but it’s
also been — this method of using law enforcement
and policing as a method of domination has
also been used with other people of color,
specifically Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Native
Americans.
In 1862, President Lincoln ordered the hanging
of 38 Dakota warriors who had gone to war
against the U.S. in the midst of the Civil
War.
And they were hanged as criminals and as murderers,
not as enemy combatants.
And I’m thinking of the Texas Rangers, who
were largely created to control and dominate
Mexicans, who were called “bandits,” because
they were defending their land.
And even with Puerto Ricans, from Albizu Campos
to Oscar López Rivera, all the freedom fighters
were always branded as criminals and dealt
with as criminals within the justice system.
I’m wondering, this whole issue of the territorial
expansion of the country necessitating even
more police repression on these populations
of color, your sense of it in your historical
studies.
Listen, Juan, I mean, the summaries and examples
you just gave are incredibly important, because,
to take it back to the very beginning, my
colleague, Kelly Lytle Hernández, who has
written about the U.S. Border Patrol and its
origins in policing the movement of Mexicans
coming to the country because the country
wanted them here to work — but she also
describes that the infrastructure of American
colonial settlement, the very basis upon which
the country literally expanded, as you say,
the territorial expansion, was the jail.
And she goes back to the very beginning, in
the 1700s, to what is now the city of Los
Angeles, which used to be the Tongva Basin,
which used to be populated by Indigenous populations.
And she said it was precisely the introduction
of the physical jail as the instrument of
control and domination, but a domination that
was always rooted in harnessing the labor
power of people, not to exterminate or to
exclude them altogether, but to ensure that
their labor would be extracted for the purposes
of work, and then everything else would be
controlled, that their freedom would be constrained.
And that story is the story of every group
in every part of the country whose labor power
was the most important contribution that they
would make.
Their civil liberties, their civil rights,
their human rights, their humanity itself,
was optional, was secondary.
Their right to political dissent was secondary.
So, you can look at Chinese immigrants in
San Francisco in the 1880s and see the same
story.
You can look in Chicago in the midst of the
labor upheavals of the 1890s, with foreign-born
immigrant whites demanding fair treatment
in the workplace, and see the same story.
You can look at Texas and look and see the
story of the Texas Rangers, which enforced
literal white property theft of Tejano and
Mexican descendant landowners, people who
not only had once been part of Mexico before
the Mexican Revolution and before the annexation
of Mexico by the United States in 1848, but
people who were law-abiding, respectable citizens
in their communities.
And white settlers showed up and essentially
accused them of false crimes, criminalized
them, and Texas Rangers enforced that.
So, across time, across space and across groups,
policing has a tortured history of being enforcers
of various forms of domination.
