Review symposium: Policing in american society linking racial classification, racial inequality, and racial formation: The contributions of pulled over

Abstract

Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, by Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Mood, and Donald Haider-Markel, is an important piece of law and society scholarship that isolates investigatory police stops as an institutional practice with profound consequences for racial inequality. Pulled Over also speaks to scholarship on race and ethnicity by addressing an ongoing tension between a focus on the socially constructed nature of racial categories and their stratifying significance. Pulled Over offers an important model for future studies by incorporating social constructionist insights into how race is measured, empirically documenting institutionally produced racial inequalities, and linking these inequalities to the evolving meaning of race itself.