Stops: How Race,Space,and Policing Shape Who is Human and Who is Not

Abstract

Recent scholarship prompts scholars to think of policing in novel ways. Yet, less attention is given to policing as a physical and ontological act. In this article, I examine three examples of how Black individuals and groups are policed—within and beyond the criminal legal system—to show that policing is a physical and ontological act that serves to cohere one of the most important onto-epistemological claims of modernity: the human. Through these global examples spanning from the Middle Passage to the present, I argue that policing is a mechanism of racialization that works to differentiate humanity into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, with Blackness resting at the nadir of this fractured category. I posit stops as an analytic to examine how when Blackness-in-motion is stopped and policed, the category of human is reified and contested. I conclude the study with a discussion on the usefulness of stops for future research on policing that extends beyond the criminal legal system. Stops provides scholars with an analytic that allows one to observe how racialized policing is central to the construction of modernity. Therefore, we must take abolitionists’ calls to end prisons and policing seriously, because to end policing is to formulate new forms of human relationality.

Plain language summary

How race, space, and policing shape who is human and who is not

This study examines three examples of how Black individuals are policed to show how policing shapes who is considered human and who is not. Often, human is understood as a universal category that everyone has claim to. Yet through these global examples spanning from the Middle Passage to the present, I argue that policing racializes humanity into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, with Blackness resting at the bottom of this hierarchy. I offer stops as a concept to help us understand how the category of human is contested when Black mobility is policed. I conclude with how scholars can use stops in future research and urge us to embrace abolition as a pathway to develop new forms of social relationships devoid of policing.

Introduction

Recent literature has prompted scholars to think about policing in novel ways. For example, Go (2024) examines the archives to reveal how imperial military tactics and personnel used to control colonized and enslaved subjects were inextricable from the founding of modern police departments. In another light, Vitale (2021) examines many forms of policing and highlights the limits to police reform, prompting calls of police abolition. Even with these germinal texts, popular discussions of policing—due to the commercialization of Black death (Tanksley, 2022) and the political economy of racist criminalization (Noble, 2014)—often focus on physical and spectacular forms of policing, such as police violence and murder. Yet, less is known about how policing is a mundane physical and ontological act that extends beyond the criminal legal system (in the U.S. and elsewhere) and enforces modern ontological and epistemological claims that give way to contemporary systems of stratification. ¹ To be clear, I conceptualize policing as “racial-spatial techniques of social control in which the state, and those empowered by the state, perceive and respond to criminality” (Blinded). ² Therefore, in line with thinking of policing in novel ways, I ask, what happens when we broaden our definition of policing, and consider policing as a physical and ontological act? In addition, what can we learn if we give close attention to policing as a technique used to underpin the onto-epistemological claims of modernity?

To answer these questions, I situate policing within one of the most central projects in Western thought: the definition of Man (Wynter, 2003), or in other words, our onto-epistemological quest to define who is, and who is not, human. Wynter (2003) uses “Man” to denote how the white patriarchal masculine figure is an ideal type that is “overrepresented”—through political domination and violence—in the understanding of human, to the point where Man gets conflated with the category human itself. Through the advent of colonialism and racial enslavement, the definition of Man took the form of anti-Black racialization, where “racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” with Blackness resting at the nadir of these relations of power (Weheliye, 2014, p. 3, emphasis added). ³ Racialization is also a spatial (Mills, 1997) and geographical process (McKittrick, 2006) that occurs in physical or material ways that implicate the ontological. Therefore, I situate policing within the central project of defining Man, by arguing that policing is a mechanism of racialization to discipline humanity into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. In other words, these categories—the onto-epistemological claims of humanity—are created and recreated through everyday acts of (physical) policing and fortify an anti-Black sociopolitical reality. ⁴

To examine these everyday moments of policing, I offer a concept called, stops. ⁵ Stops are moments of policing where we can observe the sociopolitical process of racialization mark bodies as human, not-quite-human, and nonhuman (Weheliye, 2014; see Spillers, 1987; Wynter, 2003). ⁶ In this article, I focus on how Blackness is stopped for two reasons. First, since the Middle Passage, Blackness has become the footing in which Western (and arguably global) ontological claims rest, causing Blackness to be a source of fungibility (Hartman, 1997), domination (Wilderson, 2010, 2020), and liberatory possibility (King, 2019, see chapter three). Hence, examining Blackness illumines the shifting of sociopolitical relations (Weheliye, 2014) and how the fractured ⁷ category of human is reified and contested (Lugones, 2010 ). Second, in the face of non-humanhood, fugitivity (King, 2019; Shange, 2019) and constant motion are used by the Black Atlantic ⁸ as a means of “self-realization” and liberation (Gilroy, 1993, p. 111). Also, non-humanhood is challenged through “erotic” gestures, where “the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings” (Lorde, 1984, p. 54). In other words, non-humanhood is resisted through acts that generate feelings of interdependence (see, King, 2019; Tinsley, 2008). Therefore, I contend that when Blackness is stopped, there is a struggle between ontological exclusion and self-actualization, which brings the definition of Man into crisis and raises questions of what it means to live or be human otherwise (Erasmus, 2017; Weheliye, 2014).

The following essay is divided into three parts. First, I outline the definition of Man as the central project in Western thought and discuss how racialization is a spatial process and why it is necessary to consider a broader definition of policing that views policing as a geography making act. Second, I posit stops as an analytic to understand how policing is a mechanism of racialization that aims to discipline humanity into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. In addition, I show how resistance to policing throws the definition Man into crisis and provides a glimpse of living otherwise. Last, I conclude with the opportunities that stops affords scholars who aim to think through policing within and beyond the criminal legal system.

Human as Elusive and Ever-Changing

Wynter (2003) argues that western civilization is guided by one key undertaking—the definition of Man. Stretching from the period of classical Greece to our contemporary moment, descriptive statements have been used to define human in each epoch (Wynter, 2003). These descriptive statements shift in dialectical fashion and carry the ontological and epistemological assumptions of what is, and how we come to know, human. Further, descriptive statements frame how one can perceive the physical world. For example, the descriptive statement of medieval Europe posited humans as Christians: split between clergy (“Redeemed Spirit”) and laypeople (“Fallen Flesh”) “enslaved to the negative legacy of Adamic Original Sin” (Wynter, 2003, p. 274). As a result of this theocentric descriptive statement, the physical world was bifurcated between Europe and Northern Africa as known and inhabitable land, in respect to, all unreached and presumed uninhabitable lands not graced by God. Racial slavery and colonialism ushered in a period shaped by a ratiocentric descriptive statement, where humanity was divided between the rational European political subject versus the politically subjected subrational non-European. Now, our contemporary Darwinian moment is defined by a biocentric definition of Man, using biocultural frames to differentiate humanity “between Breadwinner (jobholding middle and working classes) and the jobless and criminalized Poor,” situated in the Global North and Global South respectively (Wynter, 2003, p. 316).

Racialization, a key process in differentiating humanity, is inextricably a spatial process. When we read Mills’ (1997) The Racial Contract with insights provided by Wynter, we learn that while descriptive statements bound geographical frameworks, racialization ascribes race to people and spaces within these geographical understandings. The fourth thesis in Mills’ (1997) germinal work states: “The Racial Contract norms (and races) space, demarcating civil and wild spaces” (p. 41). Mills abuts the spatial component of Wynter’s descriptive statements when he remarks:

The norming of space is partially done in terms of the racing of space, the depiction of space as dominated by individuals (whether persons or subpersons) of a certain race. At the same time, the norming of the individual is partially achieved by spacing it, that is, representing it as imprinted with the characteristics of a certain kind of space. So this is a mutually supporting characterization that, for subpersons, becomes a circular indictment: "You are what you are in part because you originate from a certain kind of space, and that space has those properties in part because it is inhabited by creatures like yourself." (Mills, 1997, pp. 41–42, emphasis original).

Thus, Mills suggests that the nation, neighborhood, and even the body, becomes demarcated as white/civilized space in contrast to nonwhite/wild spaces, where the “nonwhite body is a moving bubble of wilderness in white political space, a node of discontinuity which is necessarily in permanent tension with it” (Mills, 1997, p. 53, emphasis added).

The racialized Black body, a node of discontinuity in an anti-Black modernity (Sharpe, 2016; Wilderson, 2020), is where we observe the ontological and physical meet and come into crisis. The onto-epistemological claims of our contemporary Darwinian descriptive statement provide the justification to use racialization to differentiate humanity into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans (Weheliye, 2014; Wynter, 2003). Through racialization Blackness is ascribed to bodies and attaches a nonhuman status. Further, as the Black body moves through space and time, it experiences “violent political domination” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 2) and ceases to even be a body at all: it becomes flesh (Spillers, 1987). Building on Spillers, Alexander Weheliye (2014) distinguishes between a body and flesh. A body refers to one viewed as a person under the law imbued with certain rights, whereas flesh is one who is very much alive but is not viewed as a person under the law and thus lacks (human) rights. Weheliye provides the example of CLR James, a Black Caribbean scholar, who was detained on Ellis Island in 1952 under the Immigration and Nationality Act (1952) and was ordered to be deported. Through the act, James—who was in the U.S. with a tourist visa since 1938—was reclassified as a subversive “illegal alien” and stripped of his right to due process and habeas corpus. Paradoxically, James was “subject to U.S. law” even though “he could not testify on his own behalf, because as an alien subversive he was not a person before U.S. law and therefore had no recourse to habeas corpus” (Weheliye, 2014, pp. 113–115). Here, if we try to understand James as a body then we run into issues because under the juridical conceptualizations of Man, he is not a body and is denied the right to be brought before a judge or habeas corpus (which translates to “you shall have the body”). Therefore, to examine how Black “bodies” move through our anti-Black modernity, Weheliye’s concept of habeas viscus (“you shall have the flesh”) is useful. Habeas viscus captures the crisis arising from a Black node of discontinuity moving through an anti-Black modernity because habeas viscus indicates “how violent political domination” creates nonhuman flesh while at the same time, flesh becomes a site of possibility; of living otherwise beyond the definition of Man (Weheliye, 2014, p. 2). Policing rests at the nexus of this crisis.

In common parlance, the term policing often refers to the actions of law enforcement. Which is understandable considering how as a mechanism of social control, law enforcement pervades many social institutions in the U.S. (Vitale, 2021) and beyond. Yet a broader definition of policing will allow us to examine how policing is a physical and ontological act that extends beyond the criminal legal system. Put another way, when Black moving “bubbles of wilderness” or nodes of discontinuity transgress the geo-political boundaries of an anti-Black modernity, they are stopped and policed in ways that reveal the (re)construction of human and other categories of inequality. ⁹ Therefore, I define policing as “racial-spatial techniques of social control in which the state, and those empowered by the state, perceive and respond to criminality” (Tillman, 2025). This definition allows us to capture the mundane moments of policing such as the shout, the scowl, the touch, and the delay, while noting the everydayness of the spectacular moments like police murder, detentions, and passing of draconian legislation. When we use this expanded definition of policing, we can analyze how moments such as traffic stops and the subsequent “police talk” (Gonzalez, 2019, 2022), racialized and gendered punishment in schools (Ray, 2021), and the racial-sexual experience of airport security (Browne, 2015), are all moments when one is stopped, and the onto-epistemological categories of human are reified and contested. Hence, I ask, what happens when we broaden our definition of policing, and consider policing as a physical and ontological act? In addition, what can we learn if we give close attention to policing as a technique used to underpin the onto-epistemological claims of modernity? Examining stops can shed light on these questions.

Stops

A stop is a moment of pause, disruption, interruption, prevention. At first, a stop appears to be a commonplace colloquialism. But a stop is a useful tool to analyze how the fractured category of human becomes done and undone—a process always undergirded by the descriptive statement of the era. Akin to an x-ray, which provides a still image for us to inspect what is happening within our bodies, stops allows us to use stillness to inspect a cross-section of time, and explore what has ossified in a social interaction where the definition of Man is ever present beneath the surface of meanings. Simply put, a stop is to put a moment of policing under a microscope and give due attention to how the fractured category of human is reified and challenged during this moment.

Before we continue, I want to address why policing is at the center of a theorization of stops that aims to explain, but more so bear witness to, the dynamics of how the fractured category of human is reified. There is a difference between a logical necessity and a contingent necessity (see, Go, 2021 for an example of this distinction as it relates to the theory of racial capitalism). For policing to be a logical necessity in the theorization of stops, there would need to be a set of propositions on how human is reified where policing (as a process of racialization) ¹⁰ is the logical conclusion. Yet, this is not the case. Policing sits at the nexus of this theorization because it is a contingent necessity, or in other words, because there is a set of historical conditions that explain why policing is a mechanism in the reification of the definition of Man. Elsewhere, I have shown how historical techniques of social control within racial slavery and colonialism shape our contemporary techniques of policing (Tillman, 2022). Here, my argument is two fold. First, I argue that policing is a process of racialization—which extends beyond the criminal legal system—“to discipline humanity into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 3). Second, since movement is central to Black self-actualization (Gilroy, 1993), I argue that when Blackness is stopped in moments of policing, we witness a crisis in the definition of Man: we witness habeas viscus. On one hand, we observe how violence and political domination ascribe a fleshy nonhuman status to Blackness. On the other hand, Blackness continues to live and presents the possibility of living otherwise, beyond the definition of Man.

In what follows, I provide three examples of stops and then conclude with the implications of this conceptual tool for the study of policing and beyond.

Treading Between Water and Humanity

As the Middle Passage charted a route to an anti-Black modernity, we witness stops. From Sharpe’s (2016), In the Wake, we learn that in 1781 there was a British slave ship called Zong (see, NourbeSe, 2008) headed to Jamaica from the shores of West Africa. There were over 440 enslaved Africans aboard, chained to the hold of the ship, where they were stored after being forced from the Continent. Chained in the hold against their will; a moment in which they unbecome human, they become Black (Wilderson, 2010). Before reaching the shores of Jamaica, the ship ran low on drinking water, prompting the crew to discard over 130 enslaved Africans overboard. An effort done without worry—as one tosses litter out of a moving car—because the crew’s loss of property was covered by insurance. The next time the enslaved Africans are set in motion, set adrift, it is to fend for themselves in the currents of the Atlantic Ocean—to live in a context that is unlivable.

Here, the movement of the enslaved Africans were policed. The act of placing Africans into the hold of a slave ship, followed by them being tossed overboard, is a racial-spatial technique of social control on criminalized bodies that has physical and ontological ramifications. In the physical sense, their movements were restricted and controlled as they were forced into the hold and later thrown into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. In the ontological sense, this act served as a process of racialization that policed the boundaries of the category of human, reifying that those enslaved Africans were nonhuman, legal no-bodies, deemed fleshy property only as valuable as what they were insured for.

The act of throwing enslaved Africans overboard the Zong was a moment of habeas viscus. On the one hand, there is violence and domination that turned these African “nodes of discontinuity” into nonhuman property worthy of discarding. Yet, on the other hand, the definition of Man, or what it means to be human, is challenged. As the enslaved Africans hit the water and fought to stay afloat, to swim, to live, the possibility to live otherwise was revealed. In the fleeting moments before those Africans breathed in the waters of the Atlantic and became one with its currents, they lived outside the definition of Man. No longer enslaved or bound to the socio-juridical definition of Man, they lived. Although the fatigue of attempting to survive—for any who did attempt to survive—the deep waters of an anti-Black modernity quickly set in, they lived in an unlivable context, where improbability gave way to possibility.

This example was a stop, where policing served as a mechanism of racialization that distinguished who was human and who was not. In a dialectal fashion, the white crew members, who forced what they viewed as cargo into the Atlantic Ocean, became human through the violence used to ascribe a Black nonhuman fleshy status to the enslaved Africans thrown overboard. Yet, those tossed into the Atlantic Ocean lived—although briefly—showing that the experience of living flesh (always facing the threat of death within in the anti-Black waters of modernity) provides the opportunity to examine how to live otherwise, or in other words, outside of the category of human riddled by the overrepresentation of Man.

The Sound of Freedom

Internal political divisions within the African National Congress (the ANC is Mandela’s party and one of the parties currently running South Africa) led a group to break off and form the Pan-African Congress (PAC), where Robert Sobukwe was elected the first president in 1959. Known as a powerful orator and staunch Africanist, ¹¹ Sobukwe led an anti-pass ¹² law campaign that asked Black South Africans to leave their passes at home and turn themselves in at their local police station. During the peaceful protest on March 21st, 1960, the police opened fire on a crowd in Sharpeville, killing 69 people in what is now known as the Sharpeville Massacre (South African History Online, 2023). Following his arrest and conviction of sedition, Sobukwe was imprisoned on Robben Island, the notorious prison that held many of South Africa’s political prisoners during apartheid (Pogrund, 2015).

After completing his 3-year prison term, Sobukwe was not released. The Minister of Justice enacted what is known as the “Sobukwe Clause,” which allowed the Minister of Justice to detain political prisoners indefinitely (South African History Online, 2023). Sobukwe was held on Robben Island for an additional 6 years after the completion of his sentence. Not considered part of the general prison population, a “+1” was used to denote Sobukwe’s presence on the island. For example, if there were 1,000 prisoners, the count of the total prion’s population would be represented as “1000 + 1.” The entire span of Sobukwe’s imprisonment was spent in solitary confinement out of fear that his oratorical skills and Africanist views would incite rebellion throughout the prison, or the entire country if he was released. Sobukwe’s voice was so feared, that he was not allowed to speak to anyone, and no one was allowed to speak to him, even those guarding him (Pogrund, 2015). The prolonged silence damaged his vocal cords, but Sobukwe continued to communicate through letters and symbolic gestures:

As [Robben Island prisoners] went past they always looked at him, removed their round cloth caps and raised their right hands in the PAC salute; ANC members often gave their thumb-up salute. . .Sobukwe returned the salutes and if he was outdoors would bend down, pick up a handful of earth, hold it up and let it trickle through his fingers. They knew he was addressing them as ‘Sons of the soil of Africa’ He also sometimes gave them a clasped hands greeting, which they took to mean his urging of unity among them. No words were exchanged (Pogrund, 2015, p. 196).

If we examine the plight of Robert Sobukwe using stops as an analytical tool, we can observe how his detainment and the subsequent policing of his voice was a physical and ontological act of habeas viscus. South Africa is shaped by a history of racial capitalist ¹³ dispossession and exploitation of Black South African land and labor (Clarno, 2017). In light of this history, Black South Africans are the racial and capitalistic footing in which the white apartheid (and even the current) state rests. Thus, Sobukwe, a Black South African agitator with Africanist views during apartheid, was seen by the state as “bubble of wilderness” moving through a white polity that needed to be stopped because his views were harmful to the state project.

Sobukwe’s imprisonment is a clear form of physical policing yet let us spend a moment thinking through how his imprisonment was also an ontological form of policing through racialization. First, Robben Island was already a site of imprisonment and dehumanization for apartheid’s racialized others, detaining mainly Black, Colored, and Indian men as categorized by the state (Gillespie, 2021). Second, within this space of racialized punishment, Sobukwe was further othered through the torturous conditions of prolonged solitary confinement and being tallied as the “+1” to the prison population. Lastly, through an act of dehumanization sponsored by the apartheid state, Sobukwe’s voice was silenced. Symbolically his voice was silenced from the larger anti-apartheid movement, and simultaneously he endured the physical violence of vocal cord damage through a form of sonic policing, where silencing is a “technique of control” (Gilsing, 2020, p. 130; see Lally, 2023 for a comprehensive discussion of policing and sound). As seen during U.S. racial slavery and Jim Crow, race, disability, and gender were used to ascribe a nonhuman and “useless” (Barclay, 2014) status to Black bodies while positioning the white able-bodied male as normal (Barclay, 2018)—or as Man in the Wynterian sense. I contend that policing Sobukwe’s voice until he was differently abled was a process rooted in racial slavery to mark him as nonhuman and relatively “useless” to the anti-apartheid movement.

As Sobukwe was policed through the mundane silence of his imprisonment, he continued to resist and live, revealing the possibility of living otherwise. Denied many visitors and sonic forms of communication, Sobukwe pursued education through mail correspondence, wrote to his loved ones, and communicated silently with other prisoners. When Sobukwe allowed the earth to “trickle through his fingers” to acknowledge the other prisoners as “Sons of the soil of Africa,” and returned “a clasped hand greeting,” he hinted at the interdependence needed to overcome their racialized dehumanizing experience. Scholars have recently returned to Lorde’s (1984) theorization of the erotic—the place between our sense of self and our deepest desires—as a way to move beyond the definition of Man and connect with others in interdependent and mutually supportive ways (Erasmus, 2017; King, 2019). Therefore, as Sobukwe used the earth to communicate, he signaled a connection between beings and their environment that is necessary to transcend the racialization that marks them as nonhuman. Even though his voice was stopped, his symbolic gestures continue to ring with future possibilities.

As One Door Opens

In Kansas City, Missouri on April 13, 2023, Ralph Yarl, a Black 16-year-old teenager, was looking for his younger brothers when he rang the doorbell of the wrong house. Andrew D. Lester, a white 84-year-old man, answered the interior door and within seconds shot through the exterior glass door, hitting Yarl in the head and the arm (Taylor et al., 2023). Fortunately for Yarl, he was able to run away and yell out for help. After recovering in the hospital, and a summer engineering internship (Associated Press, 2023), Yarl took the stand in an August 2023 preliminary hearing on the shooting. He told the courtroom that after he was shot, he heard Lester say, “Don’t ever come here again” (Smith, 2023).

Yarl was stopped. This is a clear example of what happens when a Black “bubble of wilderness” edges up against an anti-Black polity. Viewed as out-of-place, Yarl’s presence prompted policing, and Lester was the enforcer—a common (white) subject of the state imbued with the power to maintain white supremacy through mundane and “ritualistic violence” (Martinot & Sexton, 2003, p. 180). This policing of Yarl’s presence was a form of racialization that marked Yarl as nonhuman and reified the definition of Man. Without any discussion, and acting on preconceived notions of Black criminality, Lester shot Yarl as an act of self-defense (Smith, 2023). Which, of course, causes one to ask, what was Lester defending himself from? A lost Black boy looking for his younger siblings, or perhaps, a Black boy who was perceived as a violent criminal adult through his mere existence on a porch within a county that is 85% percent white (United State Census Bureau, 2022)? Without testimony, one can only speculate what went through Lester’s mind in that moment. Nonetheless, because of Yarl’s Blackness, he was the victim of near-fatal violence that served as a reminder that he was a node of discontinuity that did not belong in that racialized space. In an act further suggesting that Yarl is a legal no-body—and that the white male figure defines Man—Lester was initially released from custody without charges, until protests erupted demanding accountability (Taylor et al., 2023). Although considered nonhuman, Yarl continues to live.

If we stop and analyze how policing is a physical and ontological act that has implications for the category of human, then we understand how Yarl was policed at the site of habeas viscus. On one hand, through the everyday violence of white supremacy, Yarl is (re)made as Black nonhuman flesh. Yet, on the other hand, through his fugitivity or his ability to flee and survive, Yarl provides a glimpse of how to live otherwise. As one who is policed and racialized as nonhuman, he continues to live and look toward the future, especially as he hopes to study engineering in college (Associated Press, 2023). Not only does Yarl live and dream—invoking notions of Black futurity—his community’s response to the shooting demonstrates that his Black life has value and is in relationship to others, challenging human as the primary onto-epistemological category of relationality. There are two functions of the erotic that dovetail in this instance of communal resistance: power through “sharing deeply any pursuit with another,” and a “open and fearless. . .capacity for joy” (Lorde, 1984, p. 56). The first function is demonstrated as Yarl’s community comes to his aid to in a shared pursuit to demand justice for the violence he experienced. The second function occurs when Yarl looks beyond the stop and embraces what career path would fulfill him in the future. When we read these forms of resistance through Lorde’s uses of the erotic, we can observe hints at how to live otherwise. Yarl’s story is one of violence and domination, but also of survival, Black futurity, and life beyond the definition of Man. Thus, as I seek to answer questions about how policing underpins onto-epistemological claims of modernity, another one arises: how can Blackness in motion, or rather, nonhuman flesh move us beyond the definition of Man and provide insight on how to be human as “a lifelong process of life-in-the-making with others” (Erasmus, 2017, p. 4)?

Conclusion

Recent scholarship urges scholars to think of policing in new ways. Whether that is examining the military and imperial origins of contemporary policing (Go, 2024) or giving due attention to the pitfalls of police reform (Vitale, 2021). Yet less is known about how policing is a physical and ontological act. I argue that policing is a process of racialization that demarcates the boundary of who is and who is not human. I offer stops as an analytic to examine how mundane moments of policing reify and challenge the fractured category of human (Lugones, 2010). Giving particular attention to three moments when Blackness is stopped, I show how policed Blackness results in what, Weheliye (2014) calls, habeas viscus: a violent and dominant act of racialization that simultaneously marks some living beings as nonhuman while creating the possibility of living beyond the category of human, or the definition of Man (Wynter, 2003).

First, I leverage Sharpe’s (2016) retelling of the enslaved Africans thrown overbroad the British slave ship, Zong to highlight how, in resistance to policing, movement is central to Black “self-realization” (Gilroy, 1993, p. 111). As the enslaved Africans fought against the currents of an anti-Black modernity (if any did fight), they demonstrated what it means to live otherwise—beyond the definition of Man—in the face of impending death. Second, I move beyond the U.S. and discuss the imprisonment and silencing of South African anti-apartheid figure, Robert Sobukwe. Although confined to years of silent isolation on the notorious Robben Island, he managed to communicate with fellow prisoners to advocate for unity and inspire hope (Pogrund, 2015). Third, I spotlight the story of Ralph Yarl, a Black Kansas City teen who was shot twice by an elderly white man for ringing the wrong doorbell while looking for his siblings. This stop shows how policing moves beyond the criminal legal system and falls into the hands of civilians who take the reins in enacting the “ritualistic violence” (Martinot & Sexton, 2003) necessary to sustain a white supremacist carceral state. Yet Yarl ran to safety, received treatment, and is excited about his future—demonstrating how Blackness-in-motion resists policing and continues to live even when relegated to the fleshy status of nonhuman (Spillers, 1987; Weheliye, 2014).

The use of stops as an analytic has a few implications for the study of policing. First, to have a better understanding of how policing is conducted within and beyond the criminal legal system, it is important to broaden the definition of policing. I define policing as “racial-spatial techniques of social control in which the state, and those empowered by the state, perceive and respond to criminality” (Tillman, 2025). This definition allows us to observe how individuals and groups are dominated in spatial and temporal ways across race and other axes of oppression that stretch beyond the actions of law enforcement. For example, search engines are built on racist algorithms that police the category of human through dehumanizing anti-Black results (Noble, 2018). Next, scholars can sidestep analytic bifurcation or the process of treating social realities as distinct and not connected (Go, 2016; see Patil’s, 2018 concept of webbed connectivities as an exemplar). In the first two examples I discuss above, there is a clear connection between the histories of racial slavery, (settler) colonialism, and policing. Though stops analyze a cross section in time, each moment of policing is shaped by a past that continues to unfold into the present (Lowe, 2015; Tillman, 2022). Lastly, stops reveal how human is a fractured and unstable category that is shaped in part by policing. Therefore, when one claims that their human rights have been violated by an act of policing, we are able to be analytically still and ask, were they even considered human to begin with?

Stops are tied to motion and emphasize the continuum of Black fungibility and Black fugitivity (King, 2019). As Black bubbles of wilderness move through an anti-Black polity there are few places where Blackness can rest without the threat of agitation. In each example above, the policing and violence that makes Blackness fungible is inextricable from the necessity to flee as a form of survival and Black futurity, which is always at the threat of collapse. Whether one swims to flee drowning, communicates to flee silence, or runs away to evade an active shooter, ceasing the opportunity to move beyond one’s current circumstance is key to understanding Black resistance, possibility, and futurity. Fugitivity as a motif of Black possibility has appeared in Blues music (Davis, 1998), popular movies such as Jordan Peele’s, Get Out, and in Maya Angelou’s memoir detailing her time in Ghana, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. The Black fungibility/fugitivity continuum will be an important aspect of theorizing stops in future research.

I invite scholars to continue to develop stops as an analytic to observe policing as a physical and ontological act in the contestation over the definition of Man. Where else do we observe other stops? Schools, airports, or even music? Mills discussed how white folks perceived “early rock and roll” played by Black musicians as a communist subversion to slip Black rhythms into “white bodily space.” So, white music producers stopped the rhythm of Black music, by appropriating Black music and then playing it for white audiences (Mills, 1997, pp. 51–52). How are stops generative? Research participants are asked to stop and fill out surveys. How can rest or the internal and “quiet” (Quashie, 2012) moments of life challenge or reify the fractured category of human? How can stops be viewed as political and ethical commitments, such as the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic? What is the opposite of a stop, as in, what are the qualities and ways of knowing attributed to motion (see, Tillman, 2025)?

The police murders of Black people globally, such as Christopher Alder in the UK (1998), Adama Traoré in France (2016), and Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the U.S. (2020), led to a summer of Black uprising in 2020 (Carter, 2021) that increased international calls to abolish the police. The use of stops calls for scholars, activists, and organizers to take these abolitionist calls seriously because to end policing rattles contemporary onto-epistemological claims that undergird human relationality. Hence, I offer stops as an analytic of liberation with the hope that we may use stillness to address policing and set in motion a way that we can live, together.