Abstract
Over the last few years, the intersections between mental health and punitive violence have gained more attention within scholarship and activism around race and policing. Disability justice and intersectional approaches have argued that the discourses around and categorisations of various forms of disability are deeply rooted in projects of colonialism and enslavement, and their legacies. These discourses are strongly enacted in contemporary logics and practices of policing, as racialised people who identify or are categorised as mad, neurodiverse, mentally ill, psychiatric survivors and disabled are particularly vulnerable to police harassment and violence. This article discusses how policing is deeply intertwined with discourses around saneism – institutional and systemic oppression of people who identify, have been diagnosed as, or are perceived to be, mentally ill, which has implications for abolitionist intersectional thought and practice. Foregrounding a black feminist abolitionist analysis, in dialogue with intersectional disability justice and mad studies, the author argues that an accountable engagement with the mad analytics of policing of black lives has important implications for intersectional and abolitionist thought and activism as forms of care/ing for black lives.
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References
1.
C. Sharpe, In the Wake: on Blackness and being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 124.
2.
This would include the articulations of racism in medical discourses, practices and institutions ranging from the medical services industry, to the production of medical knowledge and the pharma industrial complex.
3.
This would include psychiatric and psychological discourses and constructions of ‘normal’ versus ‘ill’/‘disordered’ mental health conditions that inflict violence on people who have been deemed mad.
4.
L. Costa, ‘Mad Studies: what it is and why you should care’, https://madstudies2014.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/mad-studies-what-it-is-and-why-you-should-care-2/.
5.
The health industrial complex describes a network and industry of discourses, practices and institutions as well as co-operatives which supply health care services, products and research for profit.
6.
B. A. LeFrançois, R. Menzies and G. Reaume, ‘Introducing Mad studies’, in R. Menzies and B. A. LeFrançois, eds, Mad Matters: a critical reader in Mad studies (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2013), pp. 1−23; R. Gorman, ‘Mad nation? Thinking through race, class, and Mad identity politics’, in R. Menzies and B. A. LeFrançois, eds, Mad Matters , pp. 269−81; T. A. Pickens, ed., ‘Blackness and disability’, African American Review 50, no. 2 (2017).
7.
T. A. Pickens, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
8.
I have discussed parts of this argument in V. E. Thompson‚ ‘“Hey, Sie da!” Postkolonial-feministische Kritik der Polizei am Beispiel von Racial Profiling’, in D. Loick, ed., Kritik der Polizei (Frankfurt: Campus, 2018), pp. 197–219 and Thompson (forthcoming).
9.
As postcolonial approaches argue, not only countries that have directly colonised populations through colonial violence and dispossession can be understood as ‘postcolonial’. Rather, various, especially European countries were involved in the long-term projects of colonialism in various ways. With regard to Switzerland, the notion of ‘colonialism without colonies’ has been brought forward by various postcolonial and critical scholars there. Their important work uncovers the narrative of a ‘neutral’ Switzerland and reveals that Switzerland has been engaged in the global trade of enslaved Africans (many Swiss financiers invested in or owned plantations, for instance in the Caribbean and Central America), sent mercenaries to fight in colonial wars, and participated in settler colonial migration in the second half of the nineteenth century. For important research on the colonial involvement of Switzerland see, for instance, P. Purtschert et al., eds, Postkoloniale Schweiz. Formen und Folgen eines Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien (Bielefeld, Transcript, 2012); B. C. Schär, Tropenliebe. Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900 (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2015).
10.
See F. El-Tayeb, European Others: queering ethnicity in postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and D. T. Goldberg, ‘Racial Europeanization’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 29, no. 2 (2006), pp. 331–64. See also A. Lentin, ‘Europe and the silence about race’, European Journal of Social Theory 11, no. 4 (2008), pp. 487–503.
11.
In all three contexts, the legal discursive framework that defines conditions of police controls can be, despite important historical and socio-political differences, relationally discussed. There are police laws, federal and state ones that not only allow, but rather foster and reproduce racial profiling and racist policing through codes of criminal procedure that claim to combat a) illegalised migration, b) terrorism and c) crime and risks to public order, which often unravel the criminalisation of poverty. These codes of criminal procedure such as verdachts-und ereignisunabhängige Personenkontrollen in Germany (carried out under § 22 Abs. 1a BPolG and § 23 Abs. 1 Nr. 3 BPolG of the Federal Police Act), les contrôles au faciès in France (carried out mainly under Article 78-2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure), and Personenkontrollen in Switzerland (carried out under Article 215 StPO and cantonal laws), enable law enforcers to conduct stop and search and identity checks without ‘evidence’ at border areas, in and around train and railway stations, and on international sites such as freeways and airports. The relation between space and policing, in which race is concealed but nevertheless operates through the racialisation of the analytics of migration and mobility, as well as crime, is already striking here. It is even more explicit within police laws that enable state (and cantonal) police to designate certain locations as ‘districts of danger’, thereby transforming them into spatial zones where police can stop and search ‘anyone’ without basing these checks on ‘suspicious’ behaviour. These are often districts where large proportions of racialised people work and/or live at the intersection of the criminalisation of migration/sex work/mental health issues, lack of housing, and/or informal economies. See B. Belina, ‘Der Alltag der Anderen: racial profiling in Deutschland?’, in B. Dollinger et al., eds, Sicherer Alltag? Politiken und Mechanismen der Sicherheitskonstruktion im Alltag (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2016), pp. 125–46, and E. Bruce-Jones, ‘German policing at the intersection: race, gender migrant status and mental health’, Race & Class 56, no. 3 (2015), pp. 36–49. See also Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt, eds, Alltäglicher Ausnahmezustand: institutioneller Rassismus in deutschen Strafverfolgungsbehörden (Münster: Edition Assemblage, 2016) and Thompson‚ ‘“Hey, Sie da!”’; M. Wa Baile et al., eds, Racial Profiling. Struktureller Rassismus und antirassistischer Widerstand (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2019). For an analysis of so-called ‘districts of danger’ in Germany, see Belina, ‘Der Alltag der Anderen’ and S. Keitzel, ‘Varianzen der Verselbstständigung der Polizei per Gesetz. Gefährliche Orte im bundesweiten Vergleich ’, Kriminologisches Journal (forthcoming).
12.
See S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: orientations, objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). See also Goldberg, ‘Racial Europeanization’; Lentin, ‘Europe and the silence about race’; El-Tayeb, European Others ; and T. Keaton et al., Black France/France Noire: the history and politics of blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
13.
See Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology ; Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt, Alltäglicher Ausnahmezustand ; Kollaborative Forschungsgruppe Racial Profiling, Racial Profiling. Erfahrung, Wirkung, Widerstand (Studie 2019, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung), https://www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/40493/racial-profiling/; Thompson‚ ‘“Hey, Sie da!”’; Wa Baile et al., Racial Profiling .
14.
There is also a long history of challenging the everyday racialised working of policing in the UK, as the crucial report on policing blackness in Britain by the Institute of Race Relations from 1987 demonstrates. http://www.irr.org.uk/publications/issues/policing-against-black-people/.
15.
See Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology , p. 140.
16.
See F. El-Tayeb and V. E. Thompson, ‘Racial profiling als Verbindung zwischen alltäglichem Rassismus, staatlicher Gewalt und kolonialrassistischen Traditionen. Ein Gespräch über Racial Profiling und intersektionale Befreiungsprojekte in Europa’, in Wa Baile et al., Racial Profiling , pp. 311–29.
17.
See R. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2011). Nixon introduced slow violence as a form of violence that takes place gradually, is often invisible and ordinary, and dispersed, rather than taking place on the basis of a spectacular incidents or events.
18.
See also Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt, Alltäglicher Ausnahmezustand and ADBs für NRW/ Antidiskriminierungsbüro Köln, ‘Menschen wie DU neigen zu Straftaten. (Rassistische) Diskriminierung bei der Polizei: Ursachen, Folgen und Möglichkeiten der Intervention ’, 2017, http://www.gleichbehandlungsbuero.de/docs/Rassistische%20Disktiminierung%20bei%20der%20Polizei*Brochure%20vom%20ADB*Köln.pdf.
19.
See B. Basu, ‘Die Lüge von der Neutralität. Überlegungen zu Rassismus in Polizei, Justiz und Politik’ , in Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt, Alltäglicher Ausnahmezustand , pp. 85–101. See also E. Louw et al.‚ ‘Wenn alles anders bleibt. Psychosoziale Folgen rassistischer Polizeigewalt’, in Kampagne für Opfer rassistischer Polizeigewalt, ed., Alltäglicher Ausnahmezustand , pp. 29–46.
20.
See E. Bruce-Jones, ‘German policing at the intersection’, and C. A. Nelson, ‘Frontlines: policing at the nexus of race and mental health’, Fordham Urban Law Journal 43, no. 3 (2016), pp. 615–84.
21.
See Basu, ‘Die Lüge von der Neutralität’, and Thompson, ‘“Hey, Sie da!”’.
22.
T. Naguib, ‘Mit Recht gegen Rassismus im Recht. Rechtsverfahren als Mittel des Widerstands’, in Wa Baile et al., Racial Profiling , pp. 257–73.
23.
Breathing refers to physical as well as social breathing here. I approach these experiences through a Fanonian framework and follow, amongst others, the crucial and material motif of un-breathing, a motif which sticks to the policing of race, especially of blackness, through time and space.
24.
See Parallelbericht von AnwältInnen der Nebenklage des ‚NSU’-Prozesses: https://www.institut-fuer-menschenrechte.de/fileadmin/user_upload/PDF-Dateien/Pakte_Konventionen/ICERD/icerd_state_report_germany_19-22_2013_parallel_Joint_report__2015_de.pdf and Juliane Karakayali et al., eds, Den NSU-Komplex analysieren. Aktuelle Perspektiven aus der Wissenschaft (Bielefeld, Transcript, 2017).
25.
See Critical Resistance, Do Black Lives Matter? , https://vimeo.com/116111740.
26.
See A. Traoré and G. de Lagasnerie, Le Combat Adama: les essais (Paris: Stock, 2019).
27.
See Bruce-Jones, ‘German policing at the intersection’; S. Dankwa et al., ‘Profiling und Rassismus im Kontext von Sexarbeit’, in Wa Baile et al., eds, Racial Profiling , pp. 155–71; Kollaborative Forschungsgruppe Racial Profiling, Racial Profiling ; A. J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: police violence against black women and women of color (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2017), and Thompson‚ ‘“Hey, Sie da!”’. In the UK context, campaigns and collectives such as the United Families and Friends Campaign and Sisters Uncut have done crucial work around this. The movie Injustice on black deaths in custody from 1993–1999 by the Migrant Media radical documentary group also documents this: see K. Fero, ‘Migrant media and the road to injustice’, Race & Class 57, no. 1 (2015), pp. 39−50.
28.
See INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance, ‘The Critical Resistance: INCITE! statement on gender violence and the prison industrial complex’, in The CR10 Publications Collective Abolition Now!, eds, Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2008), pp. 15–29; M. Brazzell, ed., Was macht uns wirklich sicher? Ein Toolkit zu intersektionaler transformativer Gerechtigkeit jenseits von Gefängnis und Polizei (Münster: Edition Assemblage, 2018).
29.
See the collective Doña Carmen: https://www.donacarmen.de/ and Hydra: https://hydra-berlin.de/startseite/.
30.
See Bruce-Jones, ‘German policing at the intersection’.
31.
P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought: knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990).
32.
See Bruce-Jones, ‘German policing at the intersection’.
33.
R. Erfani-Ghettani, ‘The defamation of Joy Gardner: press, police and black deaths in custody’, Race & Class 56, no. 3 (2014), pp. 102−12.
34.
C. M. Bell, ‘Doing representational detective work’, in C. Bell, ed., Blackness and Disability: critical examinations and cultural interventions (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2011); S. Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in Black women’s speculative fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
35.
See R. Gorman, ‘Mad nation? Thinking through race, class, and Mad identity politics’, in LeFrançois, Menzies and Reaume, eds, Mad matters ; and J. K. Puar, The Right to Maim: debility, capacity, disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
36.
See Pickens, ‘Blackness and disability’.
37.
Pickens, Black Madness , p. 6.
38.
See J. Haritaworn, ‘“Beyond Hate”: Queer metonymies of crime, pathology and anti/violence’, Global Jindal Law Review, Special Issue on Law, Culture and Politics in Neoliberal Times 4, no. 2 (2014), pp. 44−78.
39.
See Pickens, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness , p. 8.
40.
See Pickens, ‘Blackness and disability’. See La Marr Jurelle Bruce, ‘“The people inside my head, too”: madness, Black womanhood, and the radical performance of Lauryn Hill’, African American Review 35, no. 3 (2012), pp. 371−89; N. R. Fleetwood, ‘The case of Rihanna: erotic violence and Black female desire’, African American Review 35, no. 3 (2012), pp. 419−35.
41.
Just think of Foucault’s work, Madness and Civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason (London: Routledge, 1967).
42.
See Left of Black with Pickens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GcNC5v2jJw.
43.
Black Health Workers and Patients Group, ‘Psychiatry and the corporate state’, Race & Class 25, no. 2 (1983), pp. 49−64.
44.
See D. Loick, ‘We look out for each other: Für eine Welt ohne Polizei ’, Prager Frühling: Magazin für Freiheit und Sozialismus 24 (2016); and Thompson‚ ‘“Hey, Sie da!”’.
45.
M. Brazzell, ed., Was macht uns „wirklich” sicher? Toolkit für Aktivist_innen (Berlin: Edition Assemblage, 2017); and LesMigras – Antigewalt- und Antidiskriminierungsbereich der Lesbenberatung Berlin e.V., ‘Handlungsmöglichkeiten im Umgang mit Gewalt und Diskriminierung. Unterstützung geben ’ (2011), http://lesmigras.de/tl*files/lesmigras/Tapesh/LM*Broschuere*Tapesh*UnterstuetzungGeben.pdf.
46.
Z. Shahar, ‘Black liberation requires making room for uncomfortable manifestations of mental illness’, Black Youth Project, http://blackyouthproject.com/black-liberation-requires-making-room-for-uncomfortable-manifestations-of-mental-illness/.
47.
Shahar, ‘Black liberation’.
48.
Mad People of Color, ‘A Manifesto’, https://asylummagazine.org/2013/12/mad-people-of-color-a-manifesto-by-rachel-gorman-annu-saini-louise-tam-onyinyechukwu-udegbe-onar-usar/.