INTRODUCTION

This book developed out of a general inquiry born from two of my social identities. As a sociologist, I want to understand the social world—perhaps even contribute to making it better. As a Black woman who is married to a Black man and the mother of two Black children, I want to protect them from that world. Reasoned rational inquiry is the tool of the social scientist. In many ways, I use that tool as a Black woman as well to safely navigate diverse spaces and places, but in that capacity it is not the only tool in my kit. I am equipped with what W. E. B. Du Bois terms “second-sight.”¹ This second-sight affords me a keen awareness of the social world, which is born of my twoness: I am Black and American, Black and female. My historical past and contemporary present suggest that I am at once hypervisible yet invisible, valuable as property yet presumed to be propertyless, to be used yet not useful. I am a proud Black woman in a world that values neither women nor Black people, and while, to quote Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house [of racial oppression],” 450 years of Black survival have taught me how to use a few tools of my own.²

Some of my tools are visceral. In encounter after encounter, I hypothesize about people’s responses and interactions with me and toward me. I know the felt experience of race and racial oppression, and my sense of self-preservation compels me to trust these instincts if I want to remain safe. But safety is not my only aim. So too is freedom.³ Navigating the two states—safety and freedom—can result in a freedom amid constraint.

We live in what Simone Browne, author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, terms a “racialized disciplinary society,” where Black bodies are subject to constant surveillance and other schema whose aim is social control over the group. Browne argues that surveillance is structured by processes of racialization.⁴ Reviewing Dark Matters, Megan Wood writes, “Racializing surveillance is Browne’s term for the ways in which technologies, policies, and practices of surveillance are ordered by and reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along discriminatory and deleterious racial lines.”⁵ Though invisible, the racial lines created through these processes are real, and they influence human interactions and outcomes.

I am, at heart, a symbolic interactionist—someone who believes that we are social products and that patterned, organized interactions often emerge amid human actors based on their responses to symbolic identity markers. Black skin is one of those markers, and the reality is that the embodied experience of those who wear it is different than that of Whites. With this knowledge, I do not take mobility for granted. Safely navigating social spaces and physically moving from one location to another is something few Blacks in America have the luxury of taking for granted. Over the last few years, my husband and I have been compelled to have that conversation with our son and daughter on several occasions—too many occasions and too many victims as young as or younger than our own children. The assaults (some resulting in death) on Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Tamir Rice, Oumou Kanoute, Martese Johnson, Dajeeria Becton, and countless others necessitated it.

Black Identity in a White World

My husband and I wanted our children to understand the centrality of race to their lives and the reality of racism. It may surprise non-Blacks to realize that race (or “the race card” as those deflecting their own personal responsibility and culpability in human exchanges often call it) is not the first factor many Blacks consider in dealing with the slights we face daily. Instead, unlike our paler brothers and sisters, we go through the extra effort of carefully weighing and considering other explanatory concepts, including what, if anything, we might have done to prompt an offense. It is an exercise emerging out of the deeply ingrained politics of respectability instilled in us. It is only after this process that we often settle on the historical reality—I know what this is; it is because I am Black.

In Suspicion Nation, author and attorney Lisa Bloom outlines how George Zimmerman coded Trayvon Martin’s intersecting identities—male, Black, and young adult—to read him as suspicious and up to no good. Zimmerman then used this nebulous characterization to justify following Martin. “Suspicious” became code for Black.⁶ Zimmerman’s problematization of the teenage Martin had deadly consequences for the latter. My children wanted to know why Zimmerman thought Martin looked suspicious. In the case of Michael Dunn’s second trial for shooting and killing 17-year-old Jordan Davis, my son, who was then around Davis’s age, wondered why it was so hard to get a conviction and how someone could shoot repeatedly into a crowded vehicle and then just drive off.

There were countless other questions. As a family, we watched an episode of the sitcom black-ish together, which wrestled with the same queries. Soon the questions stopped, but our children never asked the most important question: “Could this happen to me?” I think our son knew the answer. So did we. Our daughter flirted with the fiction that this is something that happens to Black boys and men, but she was soon robbed of that confidence. Still, she was seven years younger than her brother, so we focused on him. We gave him tools to navigate exchanges with the police, and we warned him to make good choices about the people with whom he associated. When a high school administrator caught and punished two White friends for smoking weed, I had another version of the talk with our son. We talked about the dangers of drugs in general, but the real point I needed him to get was this: If he was ever the only Black kid riding in a car with the White kids, and they got pulled over by the police, officers might presume the marijuana belonged to him. As self-interested beings, many of his “friends” might corroborate the same. The “truth” would not matter. Only perception matters, and, as any good symbolic interactionist will tell you, perception is reality.

Abstract racial oppression was not difficult for my children to grasp, but the realization that it could happen to them was. I understood their reticence. After all, they live in a society that makes vehement ideological claims to color-blindness. But what people say and what they do are not always consistent. It was a sobering time, but it was also an illuminating one. I was teaching at the University of Mississippi—an institution steeped in its own entrenched history of racial oppression—and I was desperately trying to make sense of the racism I saw all around me. I relied on the tools I had honed as a social scientist, and I began to take “field notes” about my observations. I would reflect on them later. Soon I was building a theory. One by one, the tenets of the theory I advance in this book unfolded.

I term my framework Bodies out of Place (BOP). I first used it in an article, “Black (and Brown) Bodies out of Place: Towards a Theoretical Examination of Systematic Voter Suppression in the United States,” which appeared in the journal Critical Sociology.⁷ The article scrutinized the rise of voter identification laws and attacks against the Voting Rights Act as examples of political violence meant to frustrate Black progress and push Black (and brown) bodies back into a position of subservience to Whites.⁸ Political violence has always been a useful tool in oppression, but it is certainly not the only tool. Soon I began to see the utility of my theory for understanding other forms of violence against Black bodies and how the aim of each form of violence was the social control, sanction, and subjugation of the group.⁹

I am a product of two Black parents raised under Jim Crow, the name given to the set of laws that enforced legal segregation. This gripping system simultaneously forced them to be strong and robbed them of strength. Their lives and sacrifice compel me to tell this story. In many ways, I feel called to do so. A smile breaks out over my face as I recall that my deceased father’s childhood name for me was Bop-de-Bop. There it was, BOP. Five decades before I began to write about it, my father called me by the name of the theory I advance. This is his story too.

Toward the tail end of the Great Migration, my parents moved from Alabama to Ohio. They sought better opportunities. They believed life—for them and their children—would be better in the next place. But, like in the old places they fled, in the new places to which they migrated their Black bodies remained subject to continued surveillance and threat of violent attack. Jim Crow– like attitudes did not know or respect state boundaries. This realization is, perhaps, not surprising, especially to those who recognize, as Du Bois did, that blackness is devalued across the globe.¹⁰

Some 50 years apart, my parents and I came to the same discovery. Despite Black gains, the new social structure looks and operates a lot like the old one. Blacks today can attain heights not permitted under the old system with this one exception: Blacks belong in subservient positions to Whites in America.¹¹ White supremacy is about maintaining a social order with Whites on top, and the regulation or control of bodies is key to that. In this stratification system, Black bodies are on the bottom.¹² This hierarchy is totalitarian in nature; it undergirds and preserves White supremacy, and it is so deeply ingrained in society that even subordinated groups can be complicit in maintaining and defending this order.

Jim Crow 2.0

Today’s Jim Crow– like attitudes are embodied in fixed ideas about where Blacks belong, when, with whom, and in what position. These ideas communicate “a hierarchical racial order that legitimates anti-Black racism. Any Black person outside his or her societally designated “place” is presumed to be a malevolent actor and must be pushed back into position. I call this the pushback, and violence—in the various forms it takes—is used to accomplish it. It is an attempt to police, preserve, and maintain distinct White physical and social space. The idea of distinct Black and White space evokes Jim Crow. Although most prominent in the South, Jim Crow existed in the North and West too.¹³ Jim Crow mandated separation in every part of life, including housing, education, theaters, restaurants, public parks, and more. The separate facilities, which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, were always inferior and helped institutionalize the total subservience of Black life.¹⁴

Today’s policing of Black bodies extends to a scrutiny of the most mundane daily activities. The continuing nature of the attacks has the aim and sometimes the effect of constraining Black mobility and attainment on both an agentic and structural level. What looks like choice must be scrutinized. For example, homophily (i.e., a preference for sameness, often expressed by the notion that birds of a feather flock together) does play a role in the choices people make. However, given the impact various organizational policies and practices, including mortgage redlining, blockbusting, steering, exclusionary zoning, and predatory policing, have had on Black lives, it stretches the imagination to view all the housing and employment choices Black people make today as purely voluntary. Additionally, gains in school integration achieved post– civil rights movement have stagnated.¹⁵ As a result, balkanization occurs consciously and subconsciously. It happens under actual and perceived threat of physical force, and under socioeconomic or other social and psychological pulls, to Black communities, schools, houses of worship, and other social groupings. This contributes to and reinforces ingrained Jim Crow– like attitudes that there are distinct White and Black spaces.¹⁶

I believe that to understand continuing violence against Black bodies, physical and social place have to be a central part of the analysis. My inquiry is both visceral and cerebral. Chiefly, I ask what role does the desire to maintain a place-based social structure (as a physical and social construct) play in the continuing violence perpetrated against Black bodies?¹⁷ In the soul-stirring ballad “What Are You Gonna Tell Her?,” performed by Mickey Guyton, the listener is reminded of the difficulty of explaining something that you yourself do not understand.¹⁸ Be-fore I could have a meaningful conversation with my children about the roots of continuing racism in society, I had to make sense of it for myself. Now I have the same conversation with the readers of this book.

Conclusion

I approach this book as if I am having a conversation with a friend, actually a conversation with all my friends. My friends come from a variety of backgrounds. That has always been the case. My close circle is less racially diverse than it was for the first three decades of my life, but in a host of other respects it still has quite a bit of variety. When I was in college, I remember inviting people in my friend group to a party. I had been involved in student government, the Black student association, programs for peace and justice, the newspaper, and the thespian society. I invited all my friends. It was just before the Christmas break, so we had ample reason to celebrate. The party was an unqualified disaster. Every group had a different interpretation of the word “party.” Some of my friends thought it meant music and dancing, so they began to move all of the furniture in the apartment to make room for dancing. Some brought Christmas ornaments to decorate the tree, and there was also popcorn for stringing. Some of my other friends thought “party” meant food, so they ate the popcorn and irritated the group that was trying to string it. Some of my friends thought “party” meant liquor, so they opened my cabinets to find some to put in the hot apple cider and cinnamon sticks heating on the stove. Some of my friends thought “party” meant poetry reading, and while they were sharing their latest creations or spouting off someone else’s, another group was in a corner laughing at them. I have never forgotten that experience. There have been many times when I tried to understand it. I guess I have always been a social scientist.

Despite that disastrous party experience, I write this book to all my friends. I even write to the ones I have never met. The stakes are too high and time too short for me to have polite conversations with each individually. Having said that, sometimes in this book I am speaking directly to a particular set of friends. Sometimes I am speaking about a particular set of friends. Such shifts will be readily discernible for the careful reader (friend), but I feel compelled to caution everyone else.