Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy: From Slave Catchers to Petty Sovereigns
Theoria, 2014, Vol. 61 (4): 30-54
This article develops a historico-theoretical account of U.S. policing as a distinctive state institution whose enduring mandate is the production of social order through racial domination. Building on Mark Neocleous’s theory of police as an institution tasked with producing order and administering poverty, the article argues that the specific order produced in the United States is inseparable from the construction and maintenance of the color line. Drawing on Joel Olson’s account of the United States as a white democracy, it shows how white citizenship and cross-class white solidarity have depended on coercive control of Black life and political possibility.
The article provides a historical account of policing in the Herrenvolk era, emphasizing slave patrols and later fugitive-slave enforcement as foundational influences on American policing—institutions organized around surveillance, disruption of Black gathering, and the prevention of insurrection. It then explains why racist policing persists in the post–Civil Rights, officially color-blind order: legal and political adaptations grant officers expansive discretion, allowing them to operate as “petty sovereigns” whose violence helps reproduce racialized citizenship and criminality.