The Violent Routinization of Black Dispossession in the Americas

• In Event: Anti-blackness in Latin America: Neo-liberalism, Urban Renewal, and Resistance

Abstract

This paper examines the intersections of state-sanctioned police violence, gentrification and black displacement in Salvador, Brazil and Kingston, Jamaica. Incarceration represents one crucial consequence of systemic criminalization that drives displacement and gentrification in black neighborhoods throughout the Americas. In this paper, I illustrate how police abuse functions as an integral dimension of government-sponsored practices of forced land expulsion of poor black residents for urban renewal. To understand how police measures operate in a diasporic frame, I outline the gendered, racial and class dimensions of urban revitalization and focus on the global logics that intertwine between surveillance, militarization, and the securitization of public space. These two cities represent key case studies for understanding the spatial segregation of the gendered and racialized poor, dislocation and displacement from valued spaces, and the routinization of corporal punishment, brutality and death. In addition, I take an intersectional theoretical approach, using race, class and gender to analyze spatialized social justice movements fighting this violence. Black women lead and participate in anti-violence struggles, and contribute to and challenge the violent policing taking place within cities (that include stop and frisk as well as beatings and killings) in relationship to the emergence of revitalized neighborhoods. This integrated form of policing has violent corporal and carceral consequences for poor black people, especially black women and girls. This paper adds to the growing body of anthropological knowledge on state-sanctioned violence to include urban displacement as an extension of violent policing and punishment.

Author

• Keisha Khan Y Perry, Brown University