(Director’s Note: Todd May teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religion. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
“the prison, apparently ‘failing’, does not miss its target; on the contrary, it reaches it, in so far as it gives rise to one particular form of illegality in the midst of others, which it is able to isolate, to place in full light and to organize as a relatively enclosed, but penetrable milieu.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 276.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault notes that the history of critiques of the prison is co-extensive with the history of the prisons themselves. They are always failing and thus always in need of reform. But perhaps, he wonders, we’re asking the wrong question. Instead of asking why the prisons are constantly failing, perhaps we should ask a different question: what are they succeeding at?
That, I believe, is the question—the first of two questions—we should be asking about the police. Year in and year out, decade in and decade out, police behavior cries out for reform. The calls are as predictable as they are painful. So, instead of asking ourselves why the police constantly fail, perhaps we should ask another question: what are they succeeding at?
Once we ask this question, and do so without the blinders of a superficial and easily disproven ideology (“they’re here to prevent crime”; “they’re here to protect the citizens”), we are free to recognize their social role. And to recognize it, we need only look. Look at the murders of countless African Americans. Look at the increasing militarization of the police. Look at the city budgets that neglect social services in order to fund police activities. Look at the wider and wider set of activities that the police, while regularly failing, are constantly required to perform.
The police have a role to play in this deeply inegalitarian society. That role is to preserve the social order and the hierarchies it involves. It is to ensure that the privileged are protected and that those without privilege don’t get any fancy ideas, individually or collectively.
The police may seem to perform a necessary role in any society. After all, somebody needs to ensure that people aren’t robbed or raped or murdered. And this is the peculiar genius of the setup. There are roles that police play that in any society would need to be played. But those roles are folded into the larger one of keeping the social hierarchy intact. If there is to be a social order that preserves the privilege of the few, it must also ensure that there aren’t robbers and rapists and murderers running around. And it can do that while at the same time ensuring that, for instance, enough fear is instilled in poor and African American communities that things won’t get out of hand, that African American mothers and fathers won’t forget to have those “talks” with their sons and daughters. These roles are inseparable from one another in the current structure of policing.
That is why asking whether particular police officers are racist misses the larger issue. The police is (singular verb) racist. It is an inescapable aspect of the role of the police is to be racist. That is because it is an inescapable aspect of their role to preserve a social order that privileges the wealthy and (for the most part) the white.
At the outset, I said there were two questions that needed to be asked. We have answered the first one. The second one is this: what is a better way to approach the question of robbery and rape and beatings? And here I ratify something that has been said before but recently with increasing urgency. The question is not how to reform the police. The question lies further back. How do we build safe and healthy communities for people?
We know the outlines to the answer to that question: education, jobs with living wages, universal health care, community fellow feeling. The question of violence should be addressed within that context. Whether, at the end of that questioning, anything that we might want to call “the police” emerges, it should be a result of the answers to those previous questions, not an answer presupposed at the outset.