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Eating pizza in prison
Author(s) -
DENYER WILLIS GRAHAM
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1111/amet.13071
Subject(s) - punishment (psychology) , civility , prison , white (mutation) , criminology , sociology , fallacy , psychology , social psychology , law , political science , politics , biochemistry , chemistry , philosophy , epistemology , gene
Police work is obviously a question of pursuing subjects. In postslave societies, one figure dominates; police are always after the young Black man. Meanwhile, another distinctive subject of policing exists. In São Paulo, Brazil, police detectives are also worried about the failing White father. He represents a crucial kind of problem: he weakens whiteness by subjecting White children to the indignities that Black children face. His punishment is not incarceration, however. Instead, his punishment is a question of civility and reparation, of being “pedagogical.” Attention to police officers’ decision‐making about these two subjects of everyday policing shows how the long‐standing fallacy of the idealized White family is produced by extracting from the Black family. It reveals the logic of differentiated punishment— civil and reparative punishment for White men, life in prison or death for Black men and boys—as a mechanism in the constant remediation of whiteness as property and accumulation. [ whiteness , policing , punishment , men , family , child support , race , São Paulo, Brazil ]