Black Lives and Policing: The Larger Context of Ghettoization

President Lyndon Johnson's appointment of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder (Kerner Commission) followed a series of inner-city riots in the 1960s. The Commission's 1968 report, issued months before Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, famously concluded that the United States was moving toward separate societies, one Black and one White. In recent years, another version of racialized violence has garnered public attention: systemic police brutality and repeated killings of unarmed Black and Brown men by police, spawning a new civil rights movement proclaiming Black Lives Matter. Condemnation of this violence and acknowledgment of its racial content by leading public officials is now standard fare, but criminal convictions and departmental discipline are scarce. This review essay brings attention back to the institutionalized racism called out by the Kerner Commission, arguing that occasional and even chronic police violence is an outcome rather than the core problem. A more fundamental issue is a routine function of policing-protecting mainstream United States from the perceived risk from its "ghetto" underbelly through spatial containment.