Critics of policing often utter the phrase ‘to protect and serve,’ in order to point out the gap between discourses of ethical policing and practices of punitive policing in black communities. However, the present analysis asserts that a more appropriate representation of the policing function is ‘to protect and serve whiteness.’ Drawing ethnographic observations, the Ferguson Report and Officer Darren Wilson’s Grand Jury Testimony, I shift the locus of critique away from the putative problems of ‘police brutality,’ ‘excessive force,’ and ‘police militarization.’ I argue that these critiques naturalize the forms of psychic violence, dehumanization and dispossession inflicted in routine and professional encounters between police and black people. Instead, I argue that anti‐blackness is imbricated in policing itself. Then, by examining the ways in which modern policing and ‘order maintenance’ approaches developed from southern slave patrols, I assert that policing in the United States is always already racialized policing. It plays a foundational role assigning of racial meanings, helping to produce whiteness as a subject of protection and blackness an object of regulation.

This article examines the forms of intergenerational kinship and care work that Black men perform within and beyond US prisons. First, I offer a historical conceptualization of domestic warfare as a multilayered process that targets Black radical activism, social/familial life, and the interiority of Black subjectivity. I argue that the rupturing of intimacy and familial relationships precipitated by the prison should be understood not as an incidental byproduct of a poorly designed carceral regime but as a tactic of war and a condition of genocide. Next, I theorize letter writing as an ethnographic and political modality that is part of a broader repertoire of strategies that Black men deploy to survive within and rebel against domestic war. I then draw on correspondence between myself and Absolute, an imprisoned Black man, as well as oral histories I collected with elders of New York's radical prison movement, to show how Black men care for each other, forge kinship networks, and transmit knowledge. I close by showing how Absolute carries on traditions of knowledge production and care to younger generations of captive Black men and by connecting this intergenerational practice to forms of collective rebellion. [prisons, kinship, Black masculinity, letters, warfare] RESUMEN Este artículo examina las formas de parentesco intergeneracional y el trabajo de cuidar que hombres negros desempeñan dentro y más allá de las prisiones de Estados Unidos. Primero, ofrezco una conceptualización histórica de la guerra doméstica como un proceso de múltiples niveles que va dirigido al activismo radical negro, vida

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This essay traces the emergence of the carceral warfare project, a clandestine campaign to infuse US prisons with the logics and techniques of counterinsurgency. First exposed by Black Liberation Army member Dhoruba bin-Wahad, the project came into being between 1970 and 1978. The article begins by discussing the theory undergirding the carceral warfare project, a reactionary idea known as “the issue exploitation thesis.” Starting in 1970, seasoned cold warriors renovated their long-standing arguments against communism for application against imprisoned Black revolutionaries. Next, the FBI’s little-known Prison Activists Surveillance Program (PRISACTS) is discussed. Focusing on the words and deeds of George Jackson and Donald Bordenkircher—two central figures positioned on opposite sides of the struggle—the essay shows how the bureau used PRISACTS to treat carceral spaces as zones of counterrevolutionary warfare. Although the FBI officially discontinued PRISACTS in 1976, the final section argues that the FBI’s counterrevolutionary methodology had already been integrated into state prison systems by this date. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates that through prisons, internal security operatives engage in a plausibly deniable form of counterinsurgency warfare that seeks to isolate political prisoners from each other, from the general prison population, from their outside networks of support, and even alienates them from themselves.

The authors use meta-ethnography to learn how dissertation researchers have used Black racial identity theory (BRIT) to qualitatively study race and Black racial identity. BRIT has gained increasing currency since the early formulations of the 1970s—nigrescence theory in particular—but mainly in branches of psychology, education, and organizational change. As BRIT has developed, however, researchers have emphasized quantitative analysis of Black racial identity. The authors examine 13 dissertations to meta-ethnographically explore how researchers conduct qualitative studies of Black racial identity that engage BRIT and to determine what researchers learned as a result. An important value of the qualitative approach is how it allows experience-near and context-specific analysis of Black racial identity to address how racial identity intersects with other identifications.