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DYING FAST AND DYING SLOW IN BLACK SPACE

Stop and Frisk’s Public Health Threat and a Comprehensive Necropolitics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2018

Naa Oyo A. Kwate  and
Shatema Threadcraft
Naa Oyo A. Kwate*
Affiliation:
Department of Africana Studies, Center for Race and Ethnicity, and Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Shatema Threadcraft
Affiliation:
Department of Government, Dartmouth College
*
*Corresponding author: Professor Naa Oyo A. Kwate, Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 55 Dudley Rd., New Brunswick, NJ 08901. E-mail: nokwate@africana.rutgers.edu
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Abstract

Aggressive policing strategies have come under scrutiny for stark racial and ethnic inequities. New York City, home to the United States’ largest police force, was subject to a federal class action lawsuit that culminated in its “Stop, Question and Frisk” policies being ruled unconstitutional. In this paper we argue that Stop and Frisk not only violates constitutional rights, but also constitutes a public health problem. Operating as one process in the death world, Stop and Frisk transforms urban space from a resource to a source of danger; induces perceptual dysfunctions that stymie possibilities for Black engagement with the state and make blackness a metonym for crime and disorder; depletes economic and civic resources; and is embodied, by imprinting on the Black body, physically and mentally. Taken together this policing practice induces stress, fear and trauma, marks the Black body as the proper target for erasure by those who would restore the moral order of the polity, and sets Black lives on a trajectory of debility. Stop and Frisk, whatever its intent, is a necropolitical project. Though Achille Mbembe defined necropolitics as the sovereign determination of who lives and dies, we argue that necropolitical projects need not produce a dead body immediately to function. We extend Mbembe’s concept to include diffuse, environmental factors that scale up from individual encounters to Black communities. Though Foucault’s widely cited analysis sees the prison as central in the management and regulation of populations, we hold that Stop and Frisk has more in common with necropower than with biopower, producing dysfunctional bodies awaiting death.

Keywords

African American/BlackPoliceStop and FriskNecropoliticsNeighborhoodsHealthNew York City
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , Fall 2017 , pp. 535 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2018 

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