Today, more people than ever are finding the vision of a world of safety and abundance beyond cops and cages irresistible. Indeed, since 2014, millions of people across the United States and beyond have taken to the streets to demand such a world, with many joining organized efforts to actualize it long after the protests have concluded. Why, then, even after the greatest crisis of legitimacy they have ever faced, do cops and cages—and the violence they perpetrate—still persist and grow?
Part of the answer lies in the fact that the state responds to crises of legitimacy by expanding its violence as a means of eliciting consent and preventing the kind of upheaval that would destabilize its power. Part of the answer also lies in the fact that the state, together with corporate-owned media, responds to crises of legitimacy by proliferating “copaganda” that convinces a majority of people that the world would go to hell if not for police and prisons.
By all accounts, a majority of people in the United States do in fact believe that the absence of police and prisons would result in the triumph of evil. Understanding that police and prisons are sites of profound meaning-making for so many people invites us to consider more seriously the existential, mythological, and deeply religious function that police and prisons fulfill for those who benefit or seem to benefit from their violence, a function apart from which they would not continue to exist.
The radical, largely materialist accounts of police and prisons are indispensable for better understanding why we have police and prisons. And yet, when such accounts consider the religious—and they seldom do—they tend to interpret it as a happenstance factor, at best a long-abandoned feature of police and prisons in their earliest form that bears little to no impact on their present-day function.
I take a different approach, arguing that mass criminalization is best understood, in itself, as a religious phenomenon. Mass criminalization is religious not only in the sense that European Christian theological ideas and practices played a crucial role in the formation of modern carceral systems in western Europe and the United States, which they did. At a more fundamental level, mass criminalization is religious because it is a manifestation of the godlike power to create, redeem, and sustain a racial capitalist and settler colonial social order that is, for its managers and beneficiaries, sacred. Saving sacred order from the mortal threat embodied by those who refuse proper subjection to the gods of whiteness and property, criminalization makes heaven for a few by exiling many to carceral hell.
On Christmas morning 2015, a fifty-nine-year-old Black man named Vernon sat in a cold Nashville jail cell, awaiting his court hearing for aggravated criminal trespass. Vernon couldn’t read very well, took care of his diabetes as best he could, worked whatever odd jobs he could find, and stayed with his partner, Miss Dorothy, in a boarding house in the North Nashville zip code with the highest incarceration rate in the nation. The area was a historically Black community and thriving Black commercial and cultural hub before the government drove an interstate highway through it in the late 1960s, demolishing a hundred square blocks—including 650 homes, 27 apartment buildings, and dozens of Black-owned businesses. North Nashville has long endured decimating economic divestment of public goods and equally decimating hyper-investment in policing and jails: carceral control posed as the solution to the instabilities that massive economic disruption and divestment helped create.
By 2015 North Nashville was becoming one of the last frontiers in the city for real estate speculators and developers to reap profit off foreclosed and still-affordable land and housing. Displaced by gentrification from another part of the city, my wife and I became Vernon’s neighbors in late 2014. The highway that tore the neighborhood in two half a century earlier hummed day and night at the end of the block. Vernon was the first neighbor to introduce himself to us. He prided himself on his lawn-care services and made sure we knew he was looking out for us, always telling us he would keep an eye on our house when we were out of town. Vernon took pride in being, of his own initiative, a good neighbor.
On December 12, 2015, I was taking out the trash when I saw police surrounding Vernon in front of his house across the street. I hurried over, and Miss Dorothy’s adult niece told me that a white man flipping a house two doors down—a house that would soon list for nearly three times as much as other houses of the same size on the street—called the police on Vernon for allegedly breaking into a vacant, boarded-up apartment across the street. The white house flipper was working on the roof when he saw someone he was certain was Vernon breaking into the vacant property before walking back across the street to the boardinghouse. As it turns out, the gentrifier saw not Vernon but another man whom Vernon and Miss Dorothy knew. After allegedly breaking the plywood covering the front doorway, the man walked to Vernon’s house and left out the back door when the police came. Vernon, who had been visiting with Miss Dorothy’s family when it all happened, fit the description: a thin Black man, about five foot six. When the police showed up at his door, they asked him questions to which they already presumed answers, confirmed with the house flipper that Vernon was the suspect, and placed him under arrest.
While Miss Dorothy wept on the sidewalk, the white gentrifier stood on the porch, arms crossed, chest out, watching it all unfold. When he spotted me—another white man—on the sidewalk talking with my neighbors and questioning the police, he called me up to where he stood so he could speak privately, presumably beyond earshot of my Black neighbors. “Do you live around here?” he stood close and asked quietly. When I pointed to our house a few doors down across the street, he responded, “A word of advice: watch your back around here.” His white construction coworker, a wiry man with stubble on his face, warned me about the “riffraff” in the neighborhood who were out to get people like me. Both men named their anticipation for the changes—clearly both racial and classed—that would soon come as more houses were flipped in the neighborhood.
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I was shocked but not surprised. I told them that they had been misled—that they did not, in fact, understand this neighborhood—and that Vernon would not and could not have broken into the abandoned home, because he prides himself on keeping watch over the neighborhood. The house flipper expressed a patronizing regret: “I know it must be hard,” he said. “I know you thought you knew your neighbor, but I know what I saw.”
“They’re tryin’ to take me downtown—for no reason!” Vernon called out while the officer wrapped steel around his wrists. “Why?” he kept asking the white officer arresting him. “I’m not the one!” He already knew what his arrest meant for him and Miss Dorothy, hardly able to afford rent as it was, especially during the winter months when he didn’t have any lawns to cut. “I gotta get on and make my money, man,” he said to the officer. “I ain’t the one!” he repeated, incredulous, while the officer turned him around, moved him against the car, asked him to spread his feet apart, took Vernon’s wallet out of his back pocket, and tossed it on the trunk of the cruiser. A moment later, as the officer guided him into the back seat of the squad car, Vernon glanced up toward the porch where the house flipper stood, then drew his eyes back down. “They lyin’,” he said matter-of-factly.
From the rolled-down window of the cruiser, Vernon tried to explain once again that it was not him. “He was in the house talking to our daughter!” Miss Dorothy implored. The officer, in a patronizing I’m-only-doing-my-job tone, responded, addressing Miss Dorothy, now shaking with tears. “The people who called us ID’d him to a T,” he said. “Now, that being said, that doesn’t make him guilty.” Mispronouncing his presumption of guilt as a presumption of innocence, the officer turned to me: “I’m sorry, I never did catch your name, sir.” “Andrew,” I responded. He turned to Vernon and Miss Dorothy: “So, like Mr. Andrew and everyone else, we’re gonna try and figure out what’s going on, OK?” Much like the house flipper who called me to his porch, the cop subtly but clearly adopted me, a white male property owner, into a position of authority in a way that the situation clearly did not warrant, especially given that I was inside my house when it all happened. Meanwhile, the word of every Black person present was treated as inherently unauthoritative, and was thus ignored. What the godlike gaze of whiteness sees becomes real through its seeing, regardless of whether it is actually reflective of reality or not.
My wife and I went to the night court judge to speak to Vernon’s character and to implore him not to move forward with any charge. We ran into the house flipper outside the night court chambers, where he told us and the arresting officer that he would be carrying his gun onto the property for the remainder of the renovation. Vernon spent weeks behind bars without ever being formally convicted of any crime, keeping him from being able to earn any money to support himself and his partner during the holidays. In the year that followed, both Vernon’s and Miss Dorothy’s health deteriorated, and Vernon eventually had no choice but to move in with his daughter. He died less than five years later at the age of sixty-three.
Shortly after the armed white house flipper finished his work on the house, it was converted into a short-term rental property for tourists. Nearly ten years later, it is occupied with guests, at most, five days out of every month. If the owner decided to sell, they could easily get more than half a million dollars for it. The abandoned property across the street remains unfilled, plywood covering the windows and doors, grass grown up high around the porch in spring. Meanwhile, thousands of people struggle to survive in shelters and camps, under overpasses, and on the streets of Nashville every night.
By defending even vacant property from Black presence and by making clear his intention to contribute to the whitening of predominantly Black space through territorial reclamation and displacement, the house flipper invoked a white settler colonial and carceral imaginary. Much as in the histories of European, Christian colonialism, imperialism, and manifest destiny that destroyed Indigenous and Black communities, for the white house flipper, taming and purifying a nonwhite landscape requires vigorously held claims to absolutely exclusive private possession that generate white wealth and contribute to the displacement of nonwhite, working-class, and underclass residents. Though it was not even his own property that was threatened, the house flipper defended it because a threat to any private property is potentially a threat to all private property and thus to the white settler vision that guided him.
Patriarchal and possessive whiteness is a manifestation of the human aspiration to godlike transcendence and power. What the story of Vernon’s arrest shows, among other things, is that merely asserting “ownership of the earth for ever and ever, Amen!,” as W. E. B. Du Bois writes in “The Souls of White Folk,” is not always enough to make patriarchal and possessive whiteness materially omnipotent. The order that revolves around whiteness and property depends for its existence—and its sacredness—on the vigilant management and elimination of all that threatens to desecrate it. Managing or eliminating threats to sacred order requires ordained violence. And in the present-day United States, the “violence work” of identifying, managing, and eliminating threats to whiteness and property, and of thereby actualizing their inhabitants’ godlike power to possess and control the world, belongs to police.
The police power of the state not only protects civil society but brings it into being. Without the discretionary state power to eliminate threats, the modern liberal story goes, civil society, given over to the disorder and chaos of the state of nature, would cease to exist. There is no sacred whiteness or property without police, and apart from whiteness and property, there would be no such thing as police as we know them today. As such, we should understand whiteness, property, and police as conceptually and materially contiguous: the sacred fences, gates, and walls that hedge in whiteness and private property and hedge out their trespassers extend into and serve the same function as the fences, gates, and walls of the carceral institutions that partition and order our world.
Most commentaries on modern policing fail to apprehend the foundational role that police power plays in the creation of modern society itself: police power helps bring racial capitalist and colonial order into being, defends and protects it from all that threatens to undermine it, and thereby ensures the order’s continued existence. In these ways, the very structure and function of police power resembles a kind of divine power in relation to society: police power creates, saves from threat, and sustains a social order that grants near-transcendent power to a few by criminalizing and dispossessing many.
One of the greatest seeming contradictions of the modern capitalist and colonial state is that while it cannot exist without purging itself of its internal and external enemies, it also cannot exist without them. The state’s dependence on its internal and external enemies often takes the form of economic reliance on their exploited, wealth-generating labor. But it also takes the shape of a more fundamental dynamic wherein the state must posit and construct an enemy in order to prove itself powerful and superior at all. Just as whiteness and property define themselves hierarchically in relation to what they are not, so the racial capitalist and settler colonial state is only able to articulate and actualize itself through hostility to those whom it dispossesses. Indeed, there is no such thing as the modern state apart from its enemy.
There can be no white racial capitalist state without its Black, dispossessed, criminalized enemy. Or, as James Baldwin put it in his 1983 essay “This Far and No Further,” “the State creates the Criminal . . . because the State cannot operate without the criminal,” which is to say, the police power to construct, capture, and eliminate those who threaten sacred social order—criminalization—is the foundation on which the racial capitalist settler colonial state depends for its very existence. Criminalization is not an anomaly within but a manifestation of the social order from which it arises: capturing and containing threats to sacred order makes the order possible and, with every police intervention, ensures its continued existence.
The police power to criminalize and thereby eliminate the enemies of order does not merely defend whiteness and property; it deifies them and thereby sacralizes the order that revolves around them. In this way, eliminating threats to sacred social order is not merely an act of negation but, for those who manage and benefit from that order, a fundamentally creative, life-giving, and thus godlike act. As sociologist Émile Durkheim argued, the punishment of those who are defined as “criminal” gives society a foundational sense of cohesion, bringing people together in a shared response to the “blasphemy and sacrilege” that the criminal desecration of sacred order enacts. By capturing and containing predominantly Black and Indigenous people, other people of color, and propertyless peoples of all races, police power and carceral captivity make white propertied life possible—and pseudo-divinely powerful. The elimination of some makes life for others. Deification for a few means destruction for many.
Excerpted from White Property, Black Trespass: Racial Capitalism and the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization by Andrew Krinks, reprinted with permission from NYU Press.
Image: John Vachon/Library of Congress.
