Posted Date: May 17, 2021

Episode Description: How does antiblackness, slavery, and police power structure society? What has the COVID-19 pandemic revealed about policing? In this episode LAC member Irenae Aigbedion has a provocative conversation with Dr. Tryon Woods on police violence, police power, and the interrelated systems and inequities that structure society. The two discuss the ways that state and police power has transformed from slavery to the present. Ultimately, they touch on the struggle to consume and process the vast amounts of information presented to us daily via multiple competing channels.

Guest Biography

Dr. Tryon Woods  teaches Crime & Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and Black Studies at Providence College.  He is the author of Blackhood Against the Police Power: Punishment and Disavowal in the ‘Post-Racial’ Era (MSU 2019), and the co-editor of Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation (Lexington 2016) and On Marronage: Ethical Confrontations with Antiblackness (Africa World Press 2015).  He is also co-author of the forthcoming book on contemporary African migration, Ex Aqua in the Mediterranean: Excavating Black Power in the Migrant Question (Manchester UP forthcoming).  Dr. Woods has taught at a number of universities in New England and California, at prisons in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area; and he has worked with community organizations in NYC, Seattle, and Oakland on HIV/AIDS prevention, supportive housing for drug users, and police accountability.

Project Description

Dr. Woods writes, “My work investigates how slavery structures the contemporary culture of politics.  In my recent book Blackhood Against the Police Power, I argue that the spectacles of state violence are symptomatic of a more fundamental police power shaping society.  This police power works most effectively through means other than criminal justice practice.  While I examine aspects of criminal law and the criminal justice system, then, I do so in order to draw attention to how the police power is at work in various other sectors of society, including the leading critical discourse on race and sex.  My second Blackhood book (in progress) situates the ubiquitous digital video recordings of antiblack violence amidst cinematic treatments of black subjects in Hollywood and independent cinema, as well as in documentary film.  The argument here is that exposing the violence does not galvanize resistance to it as much as it fuels slaveholding culture’s parasitic relation to blackness.  I am also in the process of completing a book on African migrations across the Mediterranean that interrogates how humanitarian and racial capitalism discourses encounter black people on the move.  Again, the argument here is that global society and its humanitarian missions are bound up with the continued consumption of blackness.  Abolitionism reveals itself as slavery’s a priori, not its resolution, both in the pre-twentieth century period, and into the twenty-first.

In each of these projects, the goal is to uncover the inner workings of humanism in order to better name how slaveholding culture functions today when nobody is legally held in bondage.  Slavery without slaves.  This work thus enters the discussion on the Anthropocene, or what some are calling the racial capitalocene, through the histories of racial violence that constitute the contemporary moment.  In particular, it tracks the archives, social movements, and onto-political interventions associated with black studies.  I use the notion of the police power because it seems pedagogically useful and accurate as a way of taking people from where they are towards a more expansive and rigorous conception of policing.  Most people are now at least somewhat aware that there is a problem with the police.  But the criminal justice system, in all of its massive reach and brutal impact, in fact obscures as much as it reveals about the police power.

In a brief article for Abolition Journal, “Confronting Pandemic Police Powers,” I began to sketch how this approach confronts the hosts of questions that pandemic raises.  The current pandemic situation underscores the argument that the police power is most effective where it does not appear as policing, and thus raises the need to closely evaluate where we are able to deconstruct state power and when this critique seems to fall away and state power is retrenched.  In other words, how does the pandemic lay bare all of the many ways that we are the police power itself?

I am currently working through this problem in a law review article called “Where It Is Least Visible: Public Health Policing.”  While 2020 was notable for many because of its twin public health crises, the COVID-19 pandemic and the police killings of black people, these two things are only discussed together in terms of racial inequity’s mirror institutions:  black people continue to face discrimination before both law and medicine.  While this is clearly the case, what else is at work here?  How does this discourse—the narrative of institutional racism—also obscure a more fundamental police power?”

You can learn more about his work on his website:  www.tryonpwoods.com

Recommended Thinkers and Resources: 

• W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880
• Toni Cade Bambara, Those Bones Are Not My Child
• Joy James’ analyses on political prisoners and abolition
• Gerald Horne’s historical analyses of the black movement
• Harriet Washington’s analyses of medical racism
• Dorothy Roberts’ analyses of constitutional law