In this paper, I look at the Racial-Sexual contract to make an argument about the questionable neutrality of law and law enforcement institutions in the American state, particularly the police, with respect to interaction with the social body identified as black woman. The paper is focused on explaining the form of violence black women today are facing in their encounters with the police in the United States. I suggest that one can understand the Racial-Sexual contract as proposed by Charles Mills as a heuristic to understand the structural position of black women in the contemporary state and use historical evidence to support the case for the validity of the Racial-Sexual contract. Further, I argue that this theoretical conceptualization can be evaluated on the basis of contemporary empirical evidence of black women becoming systematic targets of police violence, in addition to the other forms of structural violence they face. The historical institution of slavery, the construction of black femininity and sexuality it has institutionalised and the development of the modern category of ‘criminal’, with the presumed neutrality of law, work in conjunction to de-race the violence on black female bodies while at the same time driving the process of racialized criminalization. The racialization of crime, affects black women as it affects blacks as a group, but it affects black women in a different way, which the Racial-Sexual contract helps us to explain. What is this difference and what are the intersectional ways in which history has constituted race, gender and class as structurally debilitating factors for black women and why it has made them easier targets of physical and sexual violence at the hands of police, is what this paper will provide an answer to.
In the first section of the paper, I outline and evaluate the argument of Mills’ on the Racial Contract and more specifically black women’s position in the Racial-Sexual Contract, with the support of black feminist writers. In the second section, I connect the history of slavery in the United States to contemporary racialized criminalization and the construction of a perception of black femininity and sexuality. In the third section, I interpret and evaluate Foucault’s thesis on State racism today as a commentary on the category of ‘criminal’ to show how it is racialized despite being colour-blind and further show how black women are impacted by the process of racialized criminalization. In the final section, I analyse two cases of recent violence against black women – the death of Sandra Bland in prison and the sexual abuse of Charnesia Corley on being identified as a suspect of drug possession. I use the Racial-Sexual contract framework to understand the form of violence in the two cases, arguing that it is a generalized pattern affecting black women as a group with the support of some secondary data, finally to use the cases as an illustration of Racial-Sexual contract being at work and driving racialized criminalization.
Alternate section : Gender and Politics Research in the 21st Century: New Directions
