Race, class and persistent coloniality: US policing as liberal pacification

Abstract

This article argues that US policing ends up maintaining and reinforcing substantive intersecting racial and class divisions, precisely because of its avowed formal neutrality. The article is divided into two main sections. The first section sets up a theoretical apparatus for conceptualising the seeming contradiction between general and specific social control. This section argues that US policing has a colonial genealogy but now serves to reproduce a neo-colonial order characterised by both formal legal equality and substantive racial and class inequalities. Moreover, this section shows that the transition from a colonial to a neo-colonial order has been effected by a change in policing’s strategic focus from classical colonial pacification to liberal pacification, which combines coercion with developmentalism. Through a genealogy of US policing, the second section will demonstrate empirically how US policing’s shift towards a strategy of liberal pacification has enabled and continues to facilitate the (re)production of a neo-colonial social order. Since this genealogical section covers quite a long historical period, it will primarily draw on secondary sources. By developing a more nuanced and finely grained policing-as-pacification model that highlights both the colonial genealogy and the contemporary neo-colonial ontology of US policing, this article helps us better understand how and why formally neutral law enforcement ends up producing and reproducing racial and class divisions.