Beyond Boomerang
- PDF / 435,368 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 31 Downloads / 183 Views
Beyond Boomerang Jeanne Morefield1,2 Published online: 4 August 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract This review article examines the historical relationship between American imperial power and its impact on racist domestic policing through an exploration of Stuart Schrader’s Badges Without Borders. I argue that conventional approaches to the “boomerang” effect of imperial violence on the metropole fail to adequately capture the complex, fugal relationship between racist state power within the United States and its expressions abroad. Schrader’s in depth, historical and archival interrogation of these relationships sheds new light on U.S. imperialism and its capacity to deflect attention away from its own violence. In holding the “foreign” and “domestic” together “in a single analytic frame,” Schrader gives us a new language for combatting racist police violence precisely when we need it most. Keywords Stuart Schrader · Counterinsurgency · American exceptionalism · Imperialism · Boomerang · Policing · Anti-colonial One of the most consistently striking characteristics of American culture is the tone of shocked surprise that always seems to accompany confrontations with politics that are not congruent with our image of ourselves. These expressions of unease— which straddle the “right liberal” and “liberal liberal” extremes of our impoverished public culture—frequently take the shape of dismayed confusion. After the bombings of September 11, 2001, for instance, the predominant question on every American’s lips (according to mouthpieces from Newsweek to George W. Bush) was not, “why did this happen?” but forlorn expressions of, “why do they hate us?”1 1 President George W. Bush, Addresses the Nation, Sept. 20, 2001 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html); Fareed Zakaria, “The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?” Newsweek, October 14, 2001 (https://www.newsweek.com/politics-ragewhy-do-they-hate-us-154345).
* Jeanne Morefield [email protected] 1
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
2
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Washington, D.C., USA
Vol.:(0123456789)
4
International Politics Reviews (2020) 8:3–10
More recently, Donald Trump has elicited comparable expressions of shocked unease. For example, in a conversation with Rachel Maddow about Trump’s willingness to detain children at the U.S./Mexico border, a teary-eyed Hillary Clinton shot out; “I mean, you just … who thinks like that? Who does these things? How can they actually live with themselves? If you heard about it in some third-world banana republic, you’d say: ‘That’s horrible! Stop it! Who would do that?’ Now it’s happening in our country, and it’s just so distressing.”2 Even an inherently global event like a viral pandemic can bring forth these same stunned utterances which are often, as with Clinton’s comparison, framed in contrast to a generalized “Third World.” The doctor in New York, unable to believe what was unfolding before his ey
Data Loading...
