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

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.