“My Deputies Arrest Anyone Who Breaks the Law”: Understanding How Color-blind Discourse and Reasonable Suspicion Facilitate Racist Policing

Abstract

In 2010, Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070. Although the Department of Justice has since deflated some of the racist tones contained within the bill, it set into motion several similar bills in other states. The author argues that this bill represents state-level color-blind racial ideology and facilitates white supremacy at the macro (state) and meso (police institutions) levels. Analyzing the state’s guidelines for determining “reasonable suspicion” implemented by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) in 2010 and 95 press releases from the desk of MCSO’s head sheriff, Joe Arpaio, from 2011, the author shows that these discourse have enabled racial profiling, racial discrimination, and racial attacks on the Latino/a community in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The use of this color-blind discourse masks state-sanctioned white supremacy perpetrated by the MCSO. The guidelines for reasonable suspicion shape the MCSO’s justificatory narratives (press releases) after racial profiling has occurred. In light of the Department of Justice’s findings that the sheriff’s office did indeed practice racial profiling of Latinos/as, this project peels back the discursive layers on how these racist practices are justified and how color-blind racism does more than create racialized discursive environments but fundamentally shapes, constructs, and enables the state’s police departments practices of white supremacy.

Collateral Subjects: The Normalization of Surveillance for Mexican Americans on the Border

“…Popular discourse surrounding police brutality against people of color underscores the presumed agency of individuals as they interact with officers. Race-blind rhetoric posits that civilians escalate encounters with law enforcement by failing to follow direct orders or lacking a respectful demeanor when engaging with authority (Delgado 2018). This logic imposes responsibility on civilians for ensuring that interactions with officers go smoothly by engaging in politics of respectability, consequently placing blame on civilians for their victimization.…”

“…Studying policies and practices around surveillance is particularly crucial given that surveillance concurrently perpetuates and reveals existing systems of inequality (Glover 2008). Border security, although highly specific to the U.S.-Mexico border region, should not be overlooked considering that the surveillance practices and discretion exercised by CBP at the border in Arizona are being used as a template in other states (Delgado 2018). Local contexts underscore social patterns at the national level while also accounting for the mutability and particularity that emerge from specific settings.…”

“…1 The experiences of U.S.-born Mexican Americans with surveillance on the border have been obscured, as the national conversation on the militarization of the border are centered on the deaths, deportations, and detention of immigrants near the border (Slack and Whiteford 2011). The merit of centering immigrants' experiences is readily apparent, given the physical and legal vulnerabilities of unauthorized immigrants and the fact that surveillance systems at the border are built to pursue them (Delgado 2018). However, it is also imperative to consider how surveillance systems affect Mexican Americans born in the United States because they exemplify what the future holds for recently arrived immigrants.…”

How Microaggressions Reinforce and Perpetuate Systemic Racism in the United States

“…Both color blindness and anti-immigrant sentiment were found to be strong predictors of voting for Donald Trump, who campaigned on a platform of hostility toward illegal immigrants in the 2016 U.S. presidential election (Hooghe & Dassonneville, 2018). Racial color blindness has also been postulated to aid policing policies (e.g., Arizona SB 1070) that appear race-neutral on the surface but largely affect people of Latina/Latino descent (Delgado, 2018).…”

Doubling Down on Racial Capitalism during COVID-19: Qualitative Interviews with Bank Employees

“…Research documents the ways that organizations embed racism through their repeated, everyday practices and procedures (Fields and Fields 2014;Ray 2019;Ray, herd, and Moynihan 2020), identifying this embeddedness within contexts such as policing (Delgado 2018;Epp, Maynard-Moody, and haider-Markel 2014), public welfare (Schram et al 2009;Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011), and education (Ewing 2018;Moore and Bell 2017;Squire, Williams, and Tuitt 2018). For example, Epp, Maynard-Moody, and haider-Markel (2014) explore racism within the context of policing, where investigatory stops of drivers have become an accepted and institutionalized practice.…”