Journal article
Who Killed Oscar Grant: A Legal-Eulogy of the Cultural Logic of Black Hyper-Policing in the Post-Civil Rights Era
The Journal of Race, Gender, and Poverty, Vol.1, p1
2010
Abstract
But, questions abound; some specific, others general. Why were the police acting so violently towards these young men when they had no police corroborated information that they had committed a crime? Acting with no description, why were four young men of color singled out on a train, occupied by passengers of different racial and economic backgrounds, although a raucous involving twelve people was reported? Why was Grant forced to lie prone when he had already raised his hands and submitted to police authority? And most importantly, why was Oscar Grant killed?
While it appears that these questions provoke varied answers, this article suggests they do not. Rather, the answer lies somewhere between disbelief, shock, and dismay juxtaposed against a historical reality that has dogged African-American men for centuries: the cultural logic of Black hyper-policing in African American communities. More specifically, the answers force us to reconcile how mere anecdotal evidence of Black encounters with the American police transforms into empirical historiography on race and police brutality. However, in order to fully understand how historical moments of race and police brutality occur, as in Grant's case as well as countless others,' 9 we must divorce our collective memory from the 'crime and punishment' paradigm that dominates American culture in order to reckon the extra-punitive function of American policing as an instrument for the management of dispossessed and dishonored groups. In exchange, we must confront, head-on, that the law as it is written differs significantly from the law as it is practiced. In this new paradigm, the law is not a discreet system of rules and regulations, but rather a site of conflict and tension, a legal dialectic that pits constitutional sufficiency and proposition against functional realities and lived experiences. In this sense, law becomes a terrain of political struggle, a site for legal contestation, not over its formation and meaning, but over its cultural production and practice - or the social and legal production of hegemony. Thereby, this article, which is written as a legal-eulogy to Oscar Grant, suggests that legal practitioners, pundits, and scholars, as well as the advocates of "tough on crime" approaches to American criminal justice, devote, perhaps, less time evaluating law as a system of rules and opinions that construct and fix our collectively legal identities, and instead, reckon law as a site for being as much the problem of race and policing as it is the solution to legally disjointed parties. Only after re-framing policing, whereby we first expunge the irrationality of evaluating crime containment and eradication through a policing and punishment paradigm, can we arrive at a site where we understand policing's cultural logic in the post-Civil Rights era.
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Details
- Title
- Who Killed Oscar Grant: A Legal-Eulogy of the Cultural Logic of Black Hyper-Policing in the Post-Civil Rights Era
- Creators
- Donald F Tibbs - Drexel University, Thomas R. Kline School of Law
- Publication Details
- The Journal of Race, Gender, and Poverty, Vol.1, p1
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Thomas R. Kline School of Law
- Identifiers
- 991021902912504721