As a decade-long contributing editor at JOTWELL criminal law, my modus operandi is to read legal scholarship with an eye to considering a piece for my annual JOTWELL review. Usually, I have several articles on my shortlist—but that was not the case this year. When I came across The Exigencies of Black Existence: The Blue Gaze, the State of Exception, & Racialized Policing in Carceral Internal Colonies by Ciji Dodds, I was hit with something different, a new prism through which to imagine the bonds between prison life and life in the ’hood; I was forced to read shocking statements that jolted me in poetic ways. It was reminiscent of when I first read Anthony Paul Farley or Angela Harris.
I was initially struck by the introduction, which pointed to the irony of Martin Luther King boulevards, which line practically every major city in the country. The ironic part is that although Dr. King was a fierce advocate of non-violence, his namesake streets are associated with violence and other vices of the ’hood, as she rhymes “[e]veryone knows to stay away from MLK.” (P. 235.) While such streets may also be associated with urban redevelopment projects in the wake of destroyed traditional Black business communities, this grim reality begins a journey into the dynamics of prison culture and its influence in preparing people for a life in prison. Statistically, it is in fact the neighborhoods where such streets are named that supply many of the people who will eventually find themselves in prison.
This startling introduction offers an overview of a type of priming that happens to people outside of prison that comes from within prison walls. For prison-culture enthusiasts, one might consider this situation as a reversal of the importation model of culture. Rather than social norms being imported into prison society, prison culture exports some norms. This point is clearly illustrated in the techniques and technologies that inform life in the ’hood: bullet-proof glass casings in convenience stores, metal bars, barbed wire fencing, surveillance cameras, and of course, police. Lots of police. The police, however, are not regular police, and instead represent a special brand who operate within “racialized states of exception” that create carceral spaces or “internal colonies, where the suspension of the rule of law has been deemed necessary to respond to America’s enduring state of emergency and national security threat, which is Black existence.” (P. 238.)
The author’s primary approach is to outline the defining characteristic of an internal colony and then to map these onto Black community spaces. Adopting Charles Pinderhughes’ notion of “internal colonialism,” the author marshals evidence to show how these characteristics pervade Black neighborhoods. Guided by the works of Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault, the author theorizes Black spaces in America as an iteration of this type of spatial colony. The author’s argument is a straight syllogism. The article ends with a case study of Baltimore, Maryland, as an exemplar of such a carceral topography.
The author’s conceptualization of internal colonies as “a nation within a nation” is possible in large part because police effectively operate under a different set of rules. People in such communities must contend with the “blue gaze,” a concept informed by the work of Fanon, who saw the Black body as the permanent object of suspicion and guilt—as “the depository of maleficent powers.” (P. 244.) The notion of the “blue gaze” represents the way police patrol and surveil Black communities, but it also signals white supremacist power over Black bodies. The idea is also indebted conceptually to Foucault’s understanding of the panopticon, the constant surveillance that disciplines bodies outside of the prison’s walls. The enactment of the “blue gaze” occurs in states of exception, in places that feel like occupied zones, a state of perpetual emergency. Internal colonies are produced by the blue gaze and this racialized state of emergency.
Dodds’ work embodies an originality, creativity, and intellectual inquiry that advances our understanding of important legal questions involving legal theory, policing, and race studies. She convincingly shows that prisons provide the technologies and procedures for police outside of prisons. The blue gaze structures Black communities in ways that ensure that life outside of prison prepares their members for life inside. Prisons are the model for themselves. They are the blueprint for structuring the ’hood.
But the work also moonlights as a piece of literature. It injects a dose of beauty into a notoriously dull and dry genre of scholarship. It is an interdisciplinary work that showcases Professor Dodds’ deep understanding of racial policing in America, and of the corollary institutions that support such internal colonies. The author contends that for some, “to live inside of a carceral space means to live as a *citizen, with an asterisk to live knowing that you are being deprived of the Constitution while power attempts to gaslight you into believing that the Constitution contemplates and encompasses your existence.” (P. 257.)
