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In the United States, race and police were founded along with a capitalist economy dependent on the enslavement of workers of African descent.
Race and Police builds a critical theory of American policing by analyzing a heterodox history of policing, drawn from the historiography of slavery and slave patrols. Beginning by tracing the historical origins of the police mandate in British colonial America, the book shows that the peculiar institution of racialized chattel slavery originated along with a novel, binary conception of race. On one side, for the first time Europeans from various nationalities were united in a single racial category. Inclusion in this category was necessary for citizenship. On the other, Blacks were branded as slaves, cast as social enemies, and assumed to be threats to the social order.
List of contents
Preface
Introduction
Part I: Critical Theory of Race and Police
1. The Peculiar Institution of Police
2. The Peculiar Institution of Race
Part II: The Police Law of Slavery
3. The Genesis of Race in Colonial Virginia
4. The First Black Slave Society
5. Acquiring a Slave Society
Part III: Black Insurrection and White Counterinsurgency in Colonial America
6. A “Patroll” to Suppress Domestic Dangers
7. Policing the Chesapeake
8. Enemies of their Own Households
Conclusion: Peculiar Institutions
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the author
BEN BRUCATO is an interdisciplinary theorist of race and police and a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
