Settler policing at the foundations of racial capitalism: communication studies of colonial police work

Abstract Communication studies ignore colonial policing in racial capitalism. The oversight continues seven years after #CommunicationSoWhite studies called for needed inquiry into colonization and racialization, five years after the January 6, 2021 coup attempt by MAGA militia and mobs, and as federal police build new historic infrastructures of racial subordination. I address these gaps and communication studies’ marginalization of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, which inspires a methodological sensibility illuminating policing as a discursive and material force necessary to create racial capitalism. However, the central contributions of the article are case studies of settler colonial revolt, the Baconites and the Black Boys, which offer a framework for understanding the development of racial capitalism through police practice. Settler-policing, I find, was a form of work and performance that divided White settlerness from Indigeneity and Blackness as it produced racialized systems of land control, economy, and the state.