White Control of Black Geographies and Resistance to Urban Policing: Dismantling Hegemonic Knowledge Production on Race, Crime, and Youth in Portugal

This essay investigates hegemonic knowledge production that has re‐enacted anti‐Black policy/policing interventions and interrogates its complicity in continuous efforts to control and suppress Black politics in contemporary Portugal. The author engages with Black geographies studies and recent literature on anti‐racism, legal struggles, and Black resistance to policing in order to expand our analysis of anti‐Black violence and the predicaments of Black youth resistance in European urban contexts. Drawing on an analysis of complaints against police brutality in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, this piece examines knowledge production about “the integration of minorities”, “prevention of youth delinquency”, and “social problems and crime” in the justice system and academia, and demonstrates the connections between different sites of white control. The author seeks to foreground Black youth struggles for racial justice and the assertion of their spatial experiences in an environment that forces them to navigate and respond to dominant policy frames.