Eating the Poor: Revanchism, the Body Politic, and Racist State Violence

• In Event: Theorizing Racial Injustice

Abstract

This paper unpacks the racialized politics of McGruff the Crime Dog and his infamous slogan “Taking a Bite Out of Crime!” It is easy to dismiss an English-speaking bipedal canine cloaked in detective-esque trench coat as mere comedy or harmless slogan. But this would be a mistake. To flip the security state’s language back on itself, McGruff the Crime Dog isn’t innocent, which means McGruff did, and still does, ideological work in maintaining the revanchist, and racist, status quo. The birth of McGruff in 1980 is not insignificant as it marks symbolically an elite-coordinated revanchism in response to the failures of liberal urban policy and the gains made by the civil rights movements. After briefly sketching the racialized (in)security projects which McGruff emboldened – the wars on crime/drugs, broken windows, mass incarceration, community policing, and police “militarization” – I address the symbolic politics of this animalized representation of the domestic security state. What might “Taking a Bite Out of Crime” teach us about the animus, and animality, of a racist state violence that encourages a disfiguration of the “criminal body” so that the figural unity of the body politic – the “body of the people” – remains whole.

Author

• Tyler Wall, University of Tennessee, Knoxville