Border Citizenry and the Arbitrary Civil Protection of Black Males

Abstract

The words “police brutality” when paired together ought to sound like an oxymoron. Yet we have learned that marginalized group members have somehow not earned the same protection under the law as others. Although the law is the site at which ordinary citizens depend on jurisprudence, fairness, and integrity in the United States, the failure of the state apparatus to ensure such protection has facilitated the production of border communities. By “border communities,” I do not mean those neighborhoods that are adjacent or contiguous. I mean there are very real cultural, social, political, and discursive separations that enable a sort of new artificial boundaries to be drawn that in effect disable the continuity, commonality, and sense of community that binds us together as human beings. Like all other borders, there are patrols, territories, migrations, police, and politics whose structural parameters constitute barriers to progress. This article examines whether there is any possibility of dismantling these boundaries and allowing the borders to effectively disappear or whether we will always be left with border communities that imprint our citizens with the stain of hegemony, entitlement, and patriarchy. Both Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin are treated as cases that are emblematic of a larger social terror and enigmatic set of privileges that remain unchecked.