Settler Policing as Foundational Force of U.S. Racial, Legal, and Political Order

• In Event: Policing

Abstract

Studies on politics and race seem yet to explore policing as a fundamental force in the creation of Whiteness and the US political economic and racial order.(1) This paper addresses that gap by investigating the material, communicative, and constitutive role of policing in the Baconite and Paxtonite settler colonial uprisings of the 1670s and 1770s. The paper makes the new argument that policing, in Anglo North America, acquired political importance as a labor form to communicate geographic, trade, and racial boundaries necessary to organize White sovereignty over frontier land, markets, and the state. I show that lay-agents – organizing within and against the constraints imposed by early British legal, military, and economic colonial structures – took up police labors as means to assert new representations of racial difference, associate those differences with presence on the land, and mark anti-Indigenous violence as necessary performance of belonging and authority in the emerging US settler colonial state.
I arrive at these findings by using WEB Du Bois’s (1905; 1920; 1935) ideas to do something he did not, namely, analyze the relation of racialization, land acquisition, and power formation in North American settler colonial development. I derive from Du Bois the concept of ‘labor performance’ which attends to how creative embodied actions organize political force as they impact material systems in ways that also communicate meanings. In this paper, the labor performance concept focuses attention on how policing asserted systems of land use, slavery, trade, law, and governance through creative labors of violence and productivity that communicated new representations of land, racial and political personhood, and sovereignty.
My original notion of ‘settler policing’ conceptualizes how frontier settlers organized political authority against Royal and elite authority through violent enforcement of racial, trade, and geographic boundaries as law. Settler desires for Indian lands and bodies (Bruyneel, 2021), I show, gained social enactment in labors of essentialist anti-Indigenous police violence. Those lay-police actions performed a new White settlerness uniquely entitled to own and control land and Indian bodies and participate in colonial political economy. Settler police violence that then directly targeted ruling authorities additionally performed the political authority of White settlerness above the state. Using primary and secondary sources, I genealogically trace settler policing from treasonous act against the Crown to right and duty of White male citizens enshrined in founding documents of the US state system. The study argues for a new understanding of policing as more than an expression of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, more than a means of legalized violence used to reinforce racial and class domination. Instead, the paper reveals policing as a creative force used by lay-agents from below, as well as elites from above, to violently articulate the form of racial domination as part of larger struggles to acquire sovereignty over colonial territory and institutions. This interdisciplinary work connects studies of the politics of colonization and race with a growing body of work in communication studies and critical criminology that sheds new light on processes of policing, infrastructuralization, and racialization that continue to shape US political development.
1. My search of Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics find no articles on the seventeenth and eighteenth century role of policing in the organization of Whiteness and the settler colonial state. I used the search strings: “policing” AND “north america”, “policing” AND “colonization”.

Author

• James Earl Owens, Williams College