‘Babylon Remove the Chain, Now They’re Using the Brain’: Race and the Perpetual Suspect

Abstract

This chapter considers how Black and Black-mixed race people experience policing contemporarily, through the narratives of the policed. It develops a counter story to the dominant police narrative which denies racism through recourse to the equality and diversity agenda which erases race but produces ‘raceless racism’. Drawing upon the work of race scholars it argues that a dominant global system of ‘white supremacy’ (Mills 1997) determine Black bodies as a ‘site of danger’ (Yancy 2008). This is evident in their experiences of over-policing through surveillance, stop and search, trivial arrests and excessive use of force. Whilst, for most participants, there is an absence of overt racist behaviour, ‘racisms invisible touch’ (Tate 2016) is felt through these practices. It concludes that race is significant in the police encounter and that this renders Black bodies perpetually suspect.