Abstract
Excerpted From: Ciji Dodds, The Exigencies of Black Existence: The Blue Gaze, the State of Exception, & Racialized Policing in Carceral Internal Colonies, 104 Boston University Law Review 233 (February, 2024) (339 Footnotes) (Full Document)
Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. I need to turn around. I accidentally turned down the boulevard of “dream[s] deferred,” boulevard that in many cities throughout America signals your entry into the carceral spaces that we call the hood, the ghetto, the inner city, the bad part of town, or the “whatever you do, don't go over there” part of town. Everyone knows to stay away from MLK. Irony.
Vice. I see the word liquor in bright red lights, flashing on and off from behind black metal bars. The store owner is inside. The store owner is encased in fear and suspicion. His fear and suspicion are encased inside of bulletproof glass. The bulletproof glass is encased inside of the visual range of a surveillance camera. Leaning over the counter, a customer strains to speak to him through the holes in the bulletproof glass. When they finally understand each other, the owner extends the gray aluminum drawer to the customer. The customer places her money inside of the drawer. The owner retracts the drawer, places the item inside, and extends the drawer back to the customer. The customer retrieves her item. If the item is too large, the owner pushes it through the rotating service window next to the drawer. The exchange is both personal and impersonal.
Enmity. I swallow the visual landscape of racialized structural violence and historical trauma. A brown brick project building surrounded by a black wrought iron fence emerges. To enter the building, you must maneuver the full-height turnstile gate. More bars. I peer through the disintegrating facades and boarded-up windows of barely standing row houses. With their caved-in ceilings and eerily empty blown-out interiors, they look like they were intentionally destroyed. Perhaps they were the homes of Black radicals. It looks like the aftermath of a Counter Intelligence Program (“COINTELPRO”) operation or a *236 Philadelphia Police Department bombing the homes white supremacists bombed in Chicago between 1917 and 1919. People sit on the collapsing porches of their homes, which have been declared habitable by the city. I pass depressing school buildings with their barely legible signs, faded paint, barred windows, metal detectors at each entrance, and rusted playgrounds. Neglected storefronts that are partially enclosed by metal accordion gates. Corner stores instead of grocery stores. Carryouts instead of sit-down restaurants. Dilapidated, abandoned factories in need of demolition. I confront the foreseeable consequences of Reaganomics and segrenomics. Black lives do not matter.
Sabotage. An underground maze of decaying, lead water pipes trigger sewage disruptions and boil water notices. I reduce my speed to navigate through craters and potholes. Piles of black trash bags on the sidewalks. Overflowing trash dumpsters behind buildings. Broken glass, aluminum cans, Styrofoam food containers, empty liquor bottles, and Black & Mild filter tips litter the ground. Faded street signs, broken traffic lights, bent stop signs, and splintered street light poles. Sagging power lines. In the name of crime prevention, at around 8:00 p.m., strategically placed nighttime lighting units, like the types used at construction sites, will emit bright white lights that glare brighter than the lights at Yankee Stadium. Poor Black people do not deserve restorative sleep. They do not deserve to sleep without piercing light seeping from behind their window shades or penetrating through their closed blinds.
The infrastructure and physical environment traumatize those who are born there, live there, or want to escape but cannot. They announce the population's rank in the racial hierarchy. The infrastructure and physical environment evoke haunting feelings of inferiority, suffering, imminent danger, and death. These are the consequences of endless wars--the War on Blackness, the War on Crime, and the War on Drugs, where the state denies its “systematic sabotage *237 of the enemy's [(Black population's)] societal and urban infrastructure” and explains away the conditions as the results of Black moral failings and pathologies. I am in a theater of war.
KRS-One. I see the Ford fleet. I become fixated on looking in my rearview mirror. The police are everywhere. They cruise the streets with their blue and red lights flashing and their sirens letting out the occasional, “woop-woop.” Officers display their necropower on their hips, walking around and engaging in “mere police questioning” and consensual encounters. They have the Supreme Court's ear. They have the discretion to choose who lives and who *238 dies. Officers are the “masters of violence,” whom the state has charged with normalizing white supremacist power relations and extrajudicial violence. Police do the dirty work: a few bad apples, a few descendants of the police officers of Redemption and Jim Crow, and a few “wicked overseer[s].”
The Blue Gaze. The ubiquitous glare of the blue gaze signals to me the depth of the white supremacist police power that bears down on me. Emanating from the eyes of We the People--the collective consciousness of America--the blue gaze is the gaze of racialized policing. It is the downward gaze that America uses to conjure Black criminality and to project it upon Black bodies. Consequently, it is the lens through which the police audit Black bodies in the name of public safety. Within the blue gaze, I am a singular object of suspicion. My criminality is a rebuttable presumption.
Survivor's Guilt. I resist the contemporary experience of human destruction that has swarmed me with increasing intensity since I turned down the boulevard of dreams deferred. In this carceral space, the racialized state of exception necessitates the nullification of my legal subjecthood due to my Blackness and the exigencies of concentrated Blackness. I want to leave. My liberty makes me feel guilty. I don't live here. I can leave. I leave.
Where the Black body resides, so resides the suspension of law and juridical order. In this Article, I argue that the concatenation of the blue gaze and the racialized state of exception has materialized in numerous predominantly Black cities, towns, and neighborhoods throughout the nation. There, the blue gaze and the racialized state of exception acquire a self-evident topographical presence, appearing as carceral spatial arrangements where racialized policing is the dominant instrumentality of governance. These carceral spaces are internal colonies where the suspension of the rule of law has been deemed necessary to respond to America's enduring state of emergency and national security threat, which is Black existence.
I conceptualize an internal colony as “a nation within a nation” wherein a uniquely American form of internal colonialism has replicated the conditions of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and incarceration. As defined by Charles Pinderhughes, internal colonialism is
a geographically-based pattern of subordination of a differentiated population, located within the dominant power or country. This *239 subordination by a dominant power has the outcome of systematic group inequality expressed in the policies and practices of a variety of societal institutions, including systems of education, public safety (police, courts and prisons), health, employment, cultural production, and finance.
I build on Pinderhughes' definition and assert that America contains internal colonies that are the product of the convergence of the blue gaze and the racialized state of exception. In form and function, internal colonies are designed to be punitive spaces that penalize Black existence predicated upon a state of emergency. Consequently, they are, in fact, carceral internal colonies. Everything about them is intended to be punitive. They are conspicuously scarred by racialized structural violence, historical trauma, economic exploitation, environmental racism, and visually aggressive symbols or mechanisms of incarceration. The dichotomy between the carceral internal colony and the rest of the city, town, or neighborhood is a psychic signpost designed to convey the message that the blue gaze is the thin blue line protecting civilization from the uncivilized territory of the native.
The suspension of the rule of law in carceral internal colonies has been unapologetically acknowledged as a necessary response to the exigencies of Black existence, which are amplified where there is a concentration of Black bodies. America has responded to the exigencies of Black existence by declaring states of emergency and using the war metaphor to argue that the only way to respond to these emergencies is to wage wars against them. The first war commenced in 1619, when the colonies, and later the states, openly declared a perpetual race war within society due to the hereditary risks of slavery. The pervasive fear of Black insurrection led to the constitutionalizing of the blue gaze and racialized policing via the slave trade clause, domestic insurrections clause, domestic violence provision, Second Amendment, and Fugitive Slave Clause. Contemporaneously, the states and the federal government created systems of laws and institutions designed to police every element of Black life and to exact vengeance upon the Black body for every infraction against white supremacy. Throughout the Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim Crow eras, white supremacists waged war against Black equality, autonomy, and *240 uppityism. Black equality was equated to white subjugation. Then, in response to the evolution of racism, which was marked by the bifurcation of our legal system into de jure colorblind laws and de facto, white supremacist-oriented laws, the wars that we continue to fight today formally materialized: the War on Crime and the War on Drugs. These wars are de facto wars against Blackness that have helped transform numerous predominantly Black cities, towns, and neighborhoods into carceral internal colonies.
A carceral internal colony possesses five overlapping features that ensure it “remains continually outside the law's normal state.”
1. Carceral internal colonies are “legal Black hole[s].” The rule of law and juridical order have been suspended, predicated upon states of emergency, and Black people have been stripped of their legal subjecthood.
2. The physical boundaries of the carceral internal colony are demarcated by residential segregation, which in some instances rises to hypersegregation. In the instance of carceral internal colonies within a larger city, Black people and white people occupy distinctly segregated spaces. In the instance of a city or town as a carceral internal colony, the city or town is predominantly Black. In all cases, segregation results from laws, policies, politics, social norms, or spatial wars. The physical boundaries of the segregated spaces are maintained using enclosure, isolation, and spatial dominance.
3. The blue gaze and racialized policing are the dominant instrumentalities of governance. Racialized policing is “deemed to operate in the service of 'civilization,”’ and police brutality is “attribute[d to] rational objectives.” Police inflict anomic violence, status-oriented violence, and juridical violence.
4. Symbols or mechanisms of carcerality, such as metal bars on buildings, bulletproof glass, cameras, or police officers, are pronounced. Symbols *241 or mechanisms of carcerality replicate the conditions and sensations of incarceration and project criminality upon the population.
5. Racialized structural violence has damaged the infrastructure. Blight, municipal neglect, pollution, a dearth of affordable and nutritious food, resource deprivation, or segrenomics evince the state's indifference to or antipathy for the residents' health, safety, and welfare. The physical environment bears the trauma of racialized structural violence as residents and visitors face urban decay.
In Part I, I define the blue gaze, which is a construct that I created to explain why and how the criminalization and dehumanization of Blackness impacts the way society and the rule of law engages with Black people. The construct is primarily informed by the theories of Frantz Fanon. The blue gaze is a noun and a verb. As a noun, it is the lens through which society and the rule of law views and interprets Blackness. As a verb it effectuates the “persistent production of [B]lackness as abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational, and infectious,” thereby fueling racialized policing. In Part II, I explain and analyze the racialized state of exception. Part III examines the defining features of carceral internal colonies, hereinafter referred to as “internal colonies.” Finally, in Part IV, I analyze Baltimore as an example of an internal colony.
[. . .]
The albatross of Blackness. What does it mean to be sealed into “crushing objecthood?” What does it mean to be gazed upon as the descendant of women who had been enslaved or lynched, their children cut out of their wombs, the women who suffered infinite dignitary harms? What does it mean to be viewed as a citizen with an asterisk: a *Citizen, subject to the terms and conditions written in the fine print of the of colorblind laws, the fine print that retains the memories of the rule of law, the fine print that contains the vestiges of white supremacy? The blue gaze, the racialized state of exception, racialized policing, and carceral internal colonies answer these questions. They evince the permanence of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism and challenge us to reimagine a world where vast populations of Black people do not internalize “government by terror” and “to live by the sword” as societal norms. A world where Black death is tragic.
Associate Professor, Albany Law School.
