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Original Article
To Protect and Serve Whiteness

By Orisanmi Burton

Introduction

Critics of policing often utter the phrase, “To Protect and Serve,” in order to point out the gap
between discourses of ethical policing and practices of punitive policing in black communities. This
refrain, deployed at some moments with irony and at others with supplication, reveals a widespread
comprehension that black communities are not the subjects of police protection, but the objects of police
coercion and that individuals belonging to the category of black — whether by virtue of phenotype,
family history, economic status, or geographic location — are not citizens for whom the public good is
extended.1 As the title of this article makes clear, I suggest this tagline is woefully incomplete and that
a more appropriate representation of the policing function is “To Protect and Serve whiteness.”
The present moment has presented an opening for appraisals and critiques of policing and its
relationship to race. During the summer of 2014, police killings of Eric Garner and Michael
Brown — both unarmed black men — stimulated widespread protests and political organization.
These mobilizations were informed and inflected by the long durée of resistance against antiblack
police violence (Williams 2015). Since the 1990s, the application of “order–maintenance,” a pervasive
policing philosophy that prioritizes low-level “quality of life” violations over violent crimes has been
subjected to sustained criticism for the harm it has inflicted on black communities (Giroux 2003;
Harcourt 2001; Herbert 2001; Howell 2009; Wacquant 2009b). 2 Touted by law enforcement enthusiasts
as a proven method for enhancing public safety (Bratton and Knobler 2009), critics argue that order–
maintenance functions as a “social cleansing strategy” for eliminating undesirable populations (Smith
2001).
This analysis shifts the locus of critique away from the problems of “racially discriminatory” policing
practices and “excessive” police force. Although it is critically important for scholars and activists to
uncover, critique, and interrupt these forms of structural and direct state violence, the conceptual
differentiation between mundane and excessive acts of police abuse betrays a general incapacity to
think about extrajudicial antiblack violence as imbricated in policing itself. As Martinot and Sexton
(2003:172) argue, policing is a “regime of violence that operates in two registers, terror and the
seduction into the fraudulent ethics of social order; a double economy of terror, structured by a ritual
of incessant performance.” A black person is killed by a police officer, security guard, or vigilante every
28 h (MXGM 2013), while past and present order–maintenance regimes inflict an incalculable number
of non-lethal, civil, and human rights abuses against black people every day (CCR 2012). Thus on the
one hand, extrajudicial violence occurs so often that it has become a banal fact of American life. While
on the other hand, the aggregate effect of order–maintenance policing is nothing short of extraordinary.

1
It is instructive that in 1950s, when the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) adopted this phrase as its official motto, LAPD Police Chief
William Parker at the same time wielded the organization as a weapon in his racial crusade against “interracial vice,” public housing, and
a drug epidemic that was conveniently localized in black South Central and Latino East Los Angeles (Davis 2006).
2
Order–maintenance has also had devastating impacts on LGBTQ people, homeless people, youth, non-citizens, Muslim communities, and
South Asian communities.
North American Dialogue 18.2, pp. 38–50, ISSN 1556-4819. © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/nad.12032

38 North American Dialogue

The problematization of “police brutality” tacitly naturalizes the forms of psychic violence, dehuman-
ization, and dispossession inflicted in routine and professional encounters between police and black
people.
This article opens with an account of a mundane instance of racialized police violence; an encounter
I observed in which the officers involved performed their duties with the utmost professionalism, yet
still enacted antiblack violence. Next I assert that policing in the United States is always already
racialized policing. It is an enterprise centrally concerned with the protection of whiteness and the
regulation of black life. I then present a genealogy of the order–maintenance approach, and of policing
more broadly, through an examination of slave patrols in the US south. I argue that not only is policing
an instrument of law enforcement, but that it also shapes and maintains racial meanings. I close by
demonstrating that the extrajudicial killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, which sparked wide-
spread unrest, occurred within a milieu of pervasive structural violence and that the intensification of
political mobilization around policing, although sparked by direct acts of police violence, are in fact a
generalized rejection of policing itself.

A Mundane Account of Racialized Police Violence

On a Thursday afternoon in April of 2015, my wife J and I took our 3-year-old son to play in
Community Center Park, an idyllic outdoor space in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The park features a
vast expanse of open space, play equipment for children, a rose garden, a jogging path, basketball
courts, a stream, hiking trails, and picnic tables situated beneath oak trees. The community center
stands adjacent to the parking lot and features public restrooms, indoor basketball courts, and a
swimming pool.
On this particular day, the park was not heavily attended. I saw a man sipping from a Starbucks cup
as he tracked his child on the jungle gym; a woman thumbing away on her phone while playing catch
with three children; but I soon became transfixed with a teenager who was playing outside by himself.
I watched as this black boy, about 16 years of age, repeatedly ran and then tumbled into summersaults.
He leapt to his feet, thrusting his hands into the air. He climbed and then jumped off boulders. With
each jump he executed an air kick or air punch. Upon landing these moves he confidently proclaimed,
“I am the greatest,” or “I’m the best in the world.” I noticed that others were also looking at the boy.
Their faces revealed a range of expressions — from amused to annoyed, yet the boy was undaunted. I
smiled to myself, thinking about how nice it would feel to be so uninhibited. I looked down to find that
my son was also staring at the boy, but on his face was a look of awe. He was clearly impressed by the
boy’s athleticism.
My family began to leave about 30 min later, but before heading to our car we walked over to meet
the boy. He greeted us politely, introducing himself as TK. Now that we were close, I saw that TK was
wearing a World Wrestling Federation belt, the kind with a giant golden crest in the center. Suddenly,
his behavior made sense. TK was an aspiring wrestler who was using the park to practice his form and
showmanship. He bent over and gently shook my son’s little hand. Smiling, TK took off his wrestling
belt and let my son hold it. Before we left, he told us that he would be the best wrestler in the world one
day.
Moments later, as we made our way to the parking lot, a man emerged from the community center,
dashing toward us. “I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, “but did that man threaten you?”
“What?” I blurted, startled and confused by the question.
“Did he threaten you?” the man asked again. “We received a complaint that he is threatening
people.”

To Protect and Serve Whiteness 39

 “No,” J said. “We were just talking to him. He is very sweet. He is having fun and pretending to be
a wrestler. Our son wanted to meet him so we brought him over to talk.”
“Oh, well we had several complaints,” the man said. “But sorry to bother you,” he added, walking
away.
J and I looked at each other and shook our heads, wordlessly acknowledging the racial subtext to this
exchange. I was about to get in the car, but she thought to go back to TK in order to contact a guardian.
After about 5 min of waiting by the car with our son I spotted a police car pulling into the parking lot.
Knowing, without having to be told, that they had arrived for TK, I picked up my son and walked over
to where he and J were standing. She was leaving a voicemail for someone. I told TK that the police
were coming to talk to him and asked if it was okay if we could stand next to him. He nodded silently.
Moments later, two uniformed officers crossed the parking lot, walking directly to TK. When they
asked his name, TK with his head slightly bowed, responded with his full first and last name. This
simple gesture of disclosing his given name as opposed to his nickname spoke volumes. It signaled that
TK knew the drill so to speak. He knew the proper way to engage with state authority. Perhaps he had
been coached, as I once was. The officers also appraised us, but before they could ask we told them we
were his friends. Satisfied, they turned back to TK, verbally assuring him that he was not in trouble.
They asked him where he lived. TK told them his street address, which was just minutes from the park.
“Is your mother at home?” an officer asked. J again interjected, telling the two officers that she left
a voicemail on his mother’s phone.
“Do you come out here a lot?” the officer asked TK.
“Yes sir,” TK said.
The officers then asked permission to walk him home. He verbally agreed. And so TK left the park,
escorted by two officers, one at each side. I did not follow them. Instead, I watched as they walked
away. I felt a profound mixture of anger and sadness, unable to wrap my mind around how it was
possible that I could feel compelled to introduce my son to this young man, to shake his hand and speak
to him, while someone else could interpret him as a threat. Once TK was beyond my view, I saw that
the other park guests had been watching us. One of them, a white man, was sitting on a picnic table,
smoking a cigarette, an unambiguous violation of both park rules and a city ordinance.

Protecting Whiteness/Policing Blackness

The police did not threaten, or brutalize, or kill TK. But what he experienced was racialized police
violence. His play was perceived as a threat, and for that he was questioned and expelled from a public
space by state agents authorized to use lethal force. The insistent question of whether or not the officers
involved acted out of conscious or unconscious antiblack bias is irrelevant because in their role as police
officers they are structurally placed in opposition to blackness.
In using the terms “blackness” and “whiteness” I am not attempting to reify historically contingent
categories of human difference. Nor am I seeking to reduce the actual range of racial and ethnic
identities, identifications and experiences into an uncomplicated binary. Rather, I seek to enunciate two
of the paradigmatic locations on the socio-historical hierarchy that structure the modern world (Fanon
1967; Reyes 2009; Smith 2012; Wilderson III 2010).3 Drawing on scholarship in Critical Whiteness

3
This article is concerned with how policing shapes relations between whiteness and blackness, but as Smith (2012), Wilderson (2010),
and many others have argued, the category of native also constitutes a paradigmatic racial category.

40 North American Dialogue

Studies (Frankenberg 1997; Harris 1993; Lipsitz 2006; Roediger 1994), I conceptualize whiteness as a
structural position atop the racial order and blackness as that which must always be policed. Whiteness
extols capital accumulation over all other objectives and it afflicts its proprietors with a twin condition
of blindness and aphasia, inhibiting their capacity to recognize the discriminatory public policies, or
name the forms of genocidal violence that make whiteness possible. And because it requires public
recognition and acceptance of its norms and values, whiteness places a premium on social homogeni-
zation. Whiteness is simultaneously produced by and productive of the hegemonic structure of white
supremacy — a racially ordered regime of dominance.
As a mode of social life, whiteness is not exclusively tied to white bodies. To the contrary, whiteness
is all-too-often desired, pursued, and even inhabited (albeit tenuously) by phenotypically non-white
people. In other words, white supremacy is a multicultural project (Rodríguez 2011; Smith 2012). But
whiteness always stands on tenuous ground. It requires constant maintenance amidst the unbroken
tradition of black resistance and recursive political–economic crises. These disruptions produce
moments like the current one, moments in which whiteness threatens to become visible as a problem.
Blackness too is constituted by particular affective, ethical and political ways of inhabiting the world
(Lipsitz 2011; Vargas 2006; Vargas 2010). However, the present analysis is specifically concerned with
the ways in people who inhabit black bodies become floating signifiers for threat that require policing.
Judith Butler, responding to an earlier moment in which policing came under scrutiny, draws upon
Fanon (1967) to theorize the fear induced by the gendered black body:
The black body is circumscribed as dangerous, prior to any gesture, any raising of the hand, and the infantilized white
reader is positioned in the scene as one who is helpless in relation to that black body, as one definitely in need of
protection by his/her mother or, perhaps, the police. The fear is that some physical distance will be crossed, and the
virgin sanctity of whiteness will be endangered by that proximity. The police are thus structurally placed to protect
whiteness against violence, where violence is the imminent action of that black male body. (Butler 1993:18)

Thinking through TK’s encounter using Butler’s conceptualization, we see that TK did not need to
intentionally threaten anyone. His very being was a threat. His black body became a “phobogenic
object” (Fanon 1967:151) that disrupted white public space.
Although Butler provides us with an indispensible conceptualization of the black male body as
immanently threatening, black women and gender non-conforming people are also interpellated as
objects of policing. Under New York’s Stop and Frisk program, black women and black men are
stopped by police at comparable rates (Crenshaw et al. 2015). Not only are black women routinely
subjected to physical brutality and killed during police encounters, they also experience forms of
physiological and psychological punishment that are distinct from those typically enacted against
black men. These forms of patriarchal police violence include sexual threats and intimidation,
groping and/or bodily penetration under the guise of “performing a thorough search,” rapes and
sexual assaults, failure to protect black women who are being assaulted, failure to attend to injuries
or illnesses leading to further injury or death, and arresting or otherwise punishing black women
who seek the protection of the police from an abusive intimate partner (Crenshaw et al. 2015; Law
2014; Richie 2012).
Research into the brain’s limbic system has yielded a preponderance of empirical evidence showing
that black bodies are seen to represent physical danger and are thus experienced as threats (Chekroud
et al. 2014; Phelps et al. 2000). Additionally, the legal archive provides extensive testimonial material to
this effect. Take, for example, the Grand Jury testimony of Darren Wilson, the officer with the Ferguson
Police Department (FPD) who shot unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, to death, sparking an
initial wave of unrest that suddenly rendered the violence of policing and the problem of whiteness
visible. Wilson’s justification for killing Brown evinces what Waytz et al. (2014) call

To Protect and Serve Whiteness 41

“superhumanization bias” — the attribution of supernatural, extrasensory, and/or magical capacities
to phenotypically black people. Wilson narrated his fear for his life in language that imbued Brown
with the capacity to expand his body mass and run through bullets:
I shoot another round of shots ... At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like
it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face that he had was looking [sic] straight through me, like
I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way (N.A. 2014:228).

Furthermore, Wilson’s discursive juxtaposition of Brown’s inviolable black body with his own
defenseless, almost phantasmal whiteness typifies the dialectics of the racial myth: white virtue
requires black threat. As Fine and Ruglis (2009:21) note, “the strategic production of whiteness as
security, innocence, and merit teeters dangerously and precariously upon the exclusion and contain-
ment of black and Brown bodies.” In Wilson’s account, Brown was not unarmed. His body was a lethal
object. It was driving the action, shaping the terms of the encounter, and compelling the inevitability of
its own annihilation. Wilson was merely reacting to the situation:
He had started to lean forward ... like he was going to just tackle me, just go right through me ... I saw the last [bullet]
go into him. And then when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was
gone, I mean, I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped” (N.A. 2014:229).

A Genealogy of “Order–Maintenance” Policing in North America

During the past 30 years, “order–maintenance policing,” alternatively known as “broken windows
policing,” has imparted the veneer of scientific legitimacy to the antiblack policing function by couch-
ing the social liquidation of undesirable populations in the vernacular of public safety. First concep-
tualized in 1982 by conservative intellectuals James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, the order–
maintenance approach asserts that public disorder and violent crime are “inextricably linked, in a kind
of developmental sequence” (Wilson and Kelling 1982:3). Wilson and Kelling argue that policing
undesirable acts such as public urination, public drunkenness, and vagrancy, as well as the undesirable
people who perpetrate these acts, will deter “serious crime.”4 Although both of these foundational
premises have been thoroughly disputed (Harcourt 2001; Rosenfeld 2002; Taylor 2001), order–
maintenance policing has ascended to the level of law enforcement common sense (Wacquant 2009a).
Order–maintenance policing is nothing new. Indeed in their elaboration of the concept, Wilson and
Kelling pine for a return to the style of policing prevalent “during the earliest days of the nation” in
which night watchmen “[maintained] order against the chief threats to order — fire, wild animals, and
disreputable behavior” (Wilson and Kelling 1982:2). But here the duo neglects to unambiguously
reference another chief threat to order: the nation’s enslaved black population. Following Bass (2001),
Hadden (2001), Reichel (1988), and Williams (2007), I argue that in order to understand policing and the
order–maintenance imperative as foundationally antiblack, we must account for the evolution of
modern policing through southern slave patrols. As we will see, policing and the order–maintenance
imperative developed in the slave holding states out of the need to curtail black mobility, punish minor
affronts to white supremacy, and guard against the ever-present threat of black insurrection.
In the early 1700s, planters in South Carolina found themselves outnumbered by a ballooning slave
population and vulnerable to organized slave revolt. Inspired by the Barbados Slave Act of 1661, which

4
I have placed this term in scare quotes because normative criminological discourse employs a very narrow state-sanctioned definition of
what constitutes a crime. For a thorough critique see Christie (2004).

42 North American Dialogue

established the legal basis for classifying slaves as chattel property, Carolina planters passed a 1704 law
creating the first slave patrol (Hadden 2001). These patrols were organized groups of armed white men
who roamed the territory, policing and surveilling the black population — enslaved and free alike.
According to the law, patrolling was intended “to prevent such insurrections and mischief as from the
great number of slaves we have reason to suspect may happen when the greater part of the inhabitants
are drawn together” (Henry 1914:31). As they searched homes, checked “papers,” dispersed gather-
ings, apprehended fugitives, and meted out corporal punishment for non-compliance, patrollers
sought to occlude the possibility of black private space and black resistance. Black spaces and black
bodies were to remain visible, yet isolated and exploitable by a white policing public:
The duties of this patrol were to visit each plantation in its beat at least once per month, chastising any slave found
absenting himself from home without a pass, administering twenty lashes as a maximum; to search the negro
dwellings, confiscating any firearms that might be in the home or any goods that they might have good reason to
believe have been stolen; to enter any tippling house or any other house whatever, where any one of them might have
seen a slave enter. Any fowls or provisions found in the hands of any negro who is away from home without a ticket
might be appropriated to the patrolman’s own use (Henry 1914:33).

The policing powers of slave patrols developed gradually, through an accretion of laws that
responded to shifting social, political and economic conditions and an unbroken tradition of black
resistance (Genovese 1992). Following the lead of South Carolina, patrols formed in North Carolina,
Georgia, Virginia, and throughout the southern colonies. A law passed in Virginia in 1705 granted
citizens of the commonwealth the right to “kill or destroy” runaway slaves without fear of legal
reprisal (Reichel 1988:57). The Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 empowered slave owners to “seize and
arrest” fugitive slaves from across states lines, expanding the geography of policing powers in North
America.
Initially, free white men, mostly of meager social standing, were conscripted from militias and
legally compelled to participate in the patrol system, but by 1734 slave patrols were populated by a
broad range of southern white society. They also began receiving remuneration for patrolling, an
important step in the long durée of police professionalization (Hadden 2001). The policing of slaves
was a powerful symbolic force in the constitution of racial meanings. It signaled to whites that,
whether or not they profited directly from slavery, the defense of white supremacy and the regula-
tion of black mobility was their civic obligation. Whiteness, and white masculinity in particular,
became tied to the capacity to control and enact violence upon black bodies. The Fugitive Slave Act
of 1850 helped to formalize this relation by penalizing whites that failed to capture and return
escaped slaves.
Following the conclusion of the Civil War, the passage of the 13th amendment abolished de jure
chattel slavery but legally preserved the master/slave relationship under a new logic of racial criminal-
ization (James 2005). But even partial abolition, along with the passage of the 14th amendment, placed
the “intelligibility and collectivity of whiteness” in crisis (Omi and Winant 2014:76). The beleaguered
structure of white supremacy required new forms of antiblack violence in order to sustain itself. As
Hadden (2001) notes, the duty of meting out this violence shifted from slave patrollers to Klansmen and
policemen.
With the passage of the Black Codes during the post-reconstruction period, “crime” became a cipher
for blackness. In what was perhaps a precursor to modern order–maintenance policing, officers were
tasked with enforcing newly emerging laws against mundane acts of vagrancy, unemployment, loi-
tering, and public drunkenness. These laws were enforced almost exclusively against blacks (Davis
1998). Once ensnared in the criminal justice system, black prison–slaves were leased to individuals and
corporations. They were also exploited directly by state governments and once again forced to labor on

To Protect and Serve Whiteness 43

plantations, in mines, and on chain gangs (Blackmon 2009). As Du Bois (1999:698) notes, “in no part of
the modern world has there been so open and conscious a traffic in crime for deliberate social
degradation and private profit as in the South since slavery.” This legally codified system of racial
criminalization, which ensnared roughly 800 000 black men and women between 1865 and 1942
(Blackmon 2009), could not have functioned without hypervigilant, antiblack policing.
Antiblack policing was not solely a southern phenomenon. In the US north during the 19th century,
bars and clubs that were reputed to encourage race mixture became frequent sites of white riots and
mass (black) arrests (Roediger 1991:103). During the opening decades of the 20th century, police
violence often took the form of selective enforcement. Communities of European immigrants, many of
questionable whiteness, enacted organized violence against black migrants seeking to settle in northern
urban centers. Riots, bombings, murders, and intimidation were pervasive, in part because in many
cases, the police openly supported these acts and neglected to arrest the assailants (Massey 1993;
Sugrue 2014).
In his book The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Gibran Muhammad (2010:227) argues that early
20th century “vice districts” — spaces where drugs, alcohol, and prostitution were permit-
ted — formed in northern black ghettos with the “active support of politicians and police officers.”
Selective police enforcement helped to forge the enduring link between spaces of criminality and
immorality and black spaces. Muhammad also demonstrates that in the 1930s, the emergence of crime
statistics and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports lent scientific credence to the already pervasive notion
that blacks were an innately criminal population. The circulation of this narrative as science was
enabled by crime “experts,” who presented this overrepresentation of blacks in the crime reporting
tables as empirical evidence of disproportionate criminality, foreclosing the possibility that the figures
reflected racially discriminatory policing.
As Dylan Rodríguez (2012:105) notes, “the diverse and complex practices of police violence are not
only inseparable from the institutional evolution of policing in the last half century, they are essential
to the very institutional integrity and identity of the U.S. police regime writ large.”5 History shows us
that policing in North America is always already racialized policing. Its historical development has
been inflected by white supremacy, here conceptualized not as a discreet historical moment, but as an
ongoing regime that requires constant reformulation and maintenance. Policing performs this mainte-
nance by monitoring and shoring up the fault lines between the deserving, innocent and presumed
white “us” and the ungovernable, guilty and irredeemably black “them.” In the following section, I
assert that contemporary policing continues to serve this function through both “excessive” acts of
violence and banal forms of daily regulation.

Linking the Excessive to the Mundane in Order–Maintenance Regimes

Beginning in 2014, widespread political unrest emerged around the issue of antiblack police violence
in the United States. These mobilizations — protests, riots, teach-ins, walk-outs, civil disobedience,
writing, art, and the formation of new organizations — were most immediately sparked by two widely

5
Rodriguez also suggests that a robust genealogy of racialized policing in North America should account for colonial military outfits, Texas
Rangers, and white citizens militias, which targeted colonial subjects and native populations as objects of control. I would also add that
in addition to slave patrolling, the institution of policing was formalized through the regulation European immigrants, particularly the Irish,
in the urban US north. However, as these groups were gradually incorporated into whiteness their oppressive relationship to policing
changed.

44 North American Dialogue

publicized killings of unarmed black men by police. On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner, a 43-year-old,
unarmed black man was choked to death by the New York Police Department (NYPD) officer Daniel
Pantaleo. A bystander-recorded video of the homicide was uploaded to YouTube, showing four NYPD
officers pinning the non-resistant Garner to the ground as Pantaleo held him in a chokehold for 15 s.
Before his death, Garner yells, “I can’t breath” 11 times. Less than 1 month later, on August 9, 2014, in
Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot at least six times by Officer
Darren Wilson. Then, in a cruel act of public punishment, the FPD allowed Brown’s lifeless body to lay
in the street for 4.5 h, while residents of Ferguson watched in horror. Two separate Grand Juries would
later rule that neither killing warranted criminal charges.
These two acts of policing, although brutal, were tragically mundane. In his article “Why We
Won’t Wait,” historian Robin Kelley memorializes eight of the black women, men, and children who
were killed by police “while we waited” for the Grand Jury’s decision in the Wilson case. He articu-
lates the inevitability of antiblack police killings by describing the deceased as “just a stack of dead
bodies that rises every time we blink” (Kelley 2014:1). Striking a similar cord, Poet Claudia Rankine
(2015) argues that the flow of daily life in America is modulated by the recurrent production of black
death:
We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of
normal life here. Dying in ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned
down by the police or warehoused in prisons: Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained or dead
black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against.

The ritual of state-sanctioned antiblack violence remains largely unnamed by the general
public. The unbroken tradition of black resistance against the violence of policing has thus far proven
unable to remedy the problem of whiteness and the twin afflictions of blindness and aphasia it
induces. It is instructive that in this age of “big data,” in which virtually all facets of social life
are collected, measured, and traded as currency, the number of killings by police is not even an
official category of knowledge.6 I ask, what could be more mundane than that for which we cannot
name?
What did generate widespread public indignation was the disproportionate response to the protest-
ers and rioters by law enforcement. On August 16, 2014, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a State
of Emergency in Ferguson. That night the FPD and the National Guard patrolled the streets of Ferguson
with an array of armored vehicles and military arsenals. This indignation, rendered legible through
hours of media debate, orbited around the notion of police excess. Police had “too many weapons,” they
were using “too much force,” and it was costing taxpayers “too much money.” But this critique of
excessive police force naturalizes the antiblack policing function and obfuscates the ways in which the
violence of policing is enacted as standard operating procedure, even when a given encounter does not
immediately produce a brutalized or lifeless black body.
The killings of both Eric Garner and Michael Brown stemmed from order–maintenance approaches.
Garner lived and died in Tompkinsville, a working class neighborhood inhabited primarily by people
of color and recent immigrants. He was allegedly selling unlicensed cigarettes, a misdemeanor offense
under New York State Law. Under the logic of order–maintenance, Garner’s activity on that block was
an invitation for violent crime and thus his removal from the landscape was imperative. Ironically, the

6
The US Department of Justice does not keep complete records of officer-involved shootings.

To Protect and Serve Whiteness 45

police were the ones who brought violence to the situation, a predictable effect of the order–
maintenance approach (Herbert 2001; Howell 2009; Parenti 1999; Smith 2001). Before Pantaleo choked
him to death, the camera phone video captures Garner saying, “every time you see me, you’re
harassing me.”7,8 Garner was accustomed to being policed, as are millions of black, Latino, and South
Asian people in New York City.
In 2011, under the order–maintenance regime of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
and Police Chief Raymond Kelley, 685 724 people were stopped, questioned, and frisked by the NYPD.
Eighty-four percent of them were black and Latino and 90 percent of them were totally innocent (CCR
2012). The experience of being targeted by police, often more than once, has profound psychological
effects. In his Op-Ed for the New York Times, Nicholas Peart, a Harlem resident who is young, black, and
male describes what it’s like to live under an order–maintenance regime. After being stopped, frisked,
and threatened three times between 2006 and 2010, Peart writes:
After the third incident I worried when police cars drove by; I was afraid I would be stopped and searched or that
something worse would happen. I dress better if I go downtown. I don’t hang out with friends outside my neighbor-
hood in Harlem as much as I used to. Essentially, I incorporated into my daily life the sense that I might find myself
up against a wall or on the ground with an officer’s gun at my head.9

During one encounter with the NYPD, Peart was accosted while leaving his apartment building.
Officers confiscated his keys, wallet, and cellphone. They then used his key and attempted to enter his
apartment, an (illegal) act that “terrified” his 18-year-old sister, who was in the apartment at the time.
The way in which Peart narrates his lack of autonomy over his body and domicile, his fear of being “out
of place,” and his acute awareness of his own vulnerability to premature death conveys the extent to
which order–maintenance policing re-enacts the practices and imperatives of slave patrolling.
Although couched in colorblind language, order–maintenance criminalizes black association, occludes
black private space, and confines black bodies within a milieu of pervasive state violence. “For a black
man in his 20s like me,” Peart continues, “it’s just a fact of life in New York.”
Although Michael Brown’s killing was the spark that incited the first wave of political unrest in
Ferguson, Missouri, the US Department of Justice “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department”10
found that residents of that city have been living under a racially exploitative policing regime for years.
In 2013, Ferguson’s municipal court issued over 9000 arrest warrants stemming from cases involving
minor infractions such as parking, traffic, and housing code violations (USDOJ 2015:3). These violations
were not equally distributed throughout Ferguson’s population. The city is 67 percent black, yet black
people account for 90 percent of citations, 85 percent of vehicle stops and 93 percent of arrests (USDOJ
2015:62). The prosaic transgression that inaugurated Brown’s deadly encounter with Darren Wilson
was a “Manner of Walking in Roadway” violation, an act for which 95 percent citations are issued to
black people (USDOJ 2015:4).
Although FDP records do not explicitly identify race as a pretext for code enforcement, the system’s
race–neutral façade is undermined by the explicitly antiblack emails that circulated among FDP
commanders and municipal court staff between 2008 and 2011 (USDOJ 2015). As the Ferguson Report
notes, the FPD sees its black residents “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders

7
New York Daily News. 2015. “Original Eric Garner Fatal Arrest Video.” YouTube.com
8
Although the NYPD Patrol Guide has prohibited chokeholds since 1994, they too are routine. A 2014 report revealed that 1128 chokehold
complaints have been reported since 2009 (CCRB 2014).
9
Peart, Nicholas K. 2011. “Why Is the N.Y.P.D. After Me?” The New York Times, 12/17/2011.
10
Hereafter cited as the Ferguson Report

46 North American Dialogue

and sources of revenue” (USDOJ 2015:2).11 Thus, Ferguson’s order–maintenance regime finds its pro-
totype in the Black Codes, with the notable exception that direct wealth extraction has supplanted labor
exploitation as the dominant mode of statecraft.
We have seen that the cognitive and conceptual divide between police violence and the normal
functioning of policing is unworkable in relation to blackness. The rolling procession of black people
killed by observable acts of police aggression unfolds in concert with a repertoire of seductive antiblack
policing policies, strategies, and tactics. Although couched in color-blind language, order–maintenance
policing has imparted renewed legitimacy to the well-worn imperatives that animated 18th and 19th
century slave patrols: the incapacitation of blackness, the fragmentation of black association, and the
criminalization of black life.

Conclusion

After TK’s expulsion from the park, I walked back across the parking lot and entered the Community
Center. There, I found the staff member who initially approached us about TK. He was standing near
the entrance, gazing out of the window.
“Did you call the police on that kid?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied after hesitating a few moments. “We received a complaint.” I could tell that the
directness of my question startled him and in that moment I became acutely aware of my own
blackness, the fact that I was about 12 inches taller than this white man, and of the very real possibility
that I might become the next threat that required policing. Almost out of habit, I made a conscious effort
to prevent my voice and my body language from communicating the extent of the anger I felt in my gut.
“Did you even bother to talk to him first?” I continued, in a measured tone. “You ran into the parking
lot to speak to my wife and I but you never even spoke to TK. You never even asked him what he was
doing. Why is that?”
There was a brief pause and I could tell he was considering something carefully. In that moment, I
found myself wondering whether or not he knew about Freddie Grey, the young man who, days
earlier, had died in police custody after “making suspicious eye-contact,” then running from police.
“Yes, I see your point,” he said finally. “But it was out of my hands, it’s our policy to ...”
“But this is a Community Center,” I interrupted, losing my cool. “There was no reason to get the police
involved!” I wanted to explain so much to him: like how often black people, and black youth in
particular, are treated as threats; and about that time, when I was TK’s age, that me and a friend
were arrested by a mounted police for “sitting-while-black”; and about how minor police encounters
routinely escalate to brutal or deadly police encounters when they involve black people. But I was
resentful for needing to explain these things and I could feel my anger getting the best of me. I simply
turned and walked back to the car where my family was waiting.
As the three of us drove home I thought about the anger that was still with me. I was angry with the
would-be victim that was threatened by TK, but who didn’t even bother stick around and explain him
or herself. I was angry at community center policy for resorting to policing as the default way to
manage patron discomfort, thereby abnegating any meaningful notion of “community.” I was angry
for my son, because in a few years, when he ceases to be seen as innocent, he will need to become
hyperaware of how others perceive him. But most of all, I was angry with myself. I should have

11
ArchCity Defender, a St. Louis-based non-profit organization found that municipal fines and court fees were the second largest source
of revenue for the City of Ferguson. See: Harvey et al. (2014).

To Protect and Serve Whiteness 47

followed TK and the officers all the way home so as to ensure that he was treated as a dignified human
being and not an object. In that moment, I should have acted as if his well-being was solely my
responsibility, because it was.
Following that day, my son and I frequented Community Center Park in the hopes of spotting TK.
I wanted to make sure he was okay. Finally, about 2 weeks later, I saw him in roughly the same spot
as when I first laid eyes on him. This time he was not jumping, or yelling, or performing air kicks, or
proclaiming himself the greatest in the world, he was just sitting quietly by himself watching other kids
play.

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to Professor Charles Price for his constant support and guidance. I am also indebted
to Professor Alvaro Reyes, whose course “Racialization in the U.S. City” was a major inspiration for this
work. I would also like to thank Vincent Joos, Ben Rubin, Willie J. Wright, and Nikhil Umesh for
commenting on earlier drafts of this work. Finally, I would like to thank Professor Patricia J. Williams,
Professor Ann Stoler, and all of the participants in the “Racial Formations and Justice” Seminar at the
2015 Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. Those lectures, conversations, and debates helped shape my
thinking and approach.

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Orisanmi Burton
University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill
oburton@live.unc.edu

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