Punitive Inertia: Anti-Blackness and the Policing of Motion

Theories of the U.S. carceral state often treat anti-Blackness as the disproportionate suffering of Black individuals across a range of measures instead of a distinct form of racial oppression that needs investigation. This article examines how anti-Blackness shapes the formal and informal ways that Black individuals are policed in their everyday lives. Drawing on 23 interviews with adults who identify as Black across the United States, I find that their spatial trajectories are altered by mundane forms of policing that extend beyond the criminal legal system. I offer the term punitive inertia to capture how Black spatial trajectories are policed and resisted. In physics, inertia describes how an object resists a force attempting to change its spatial trajectory. Similarly, punitive inertia describes how policing—underpinned by a history of racial slavery and colonialism—is the force Black individuals resist in attempts to control their own spatial trajectories. I argue that Black bodies are moving through an anti-Black modernity generating incessant moments of punitive inertia that call into question our very notions of Human and the Social as coherent categories. I conclude with a call for scholars to contend with anti-Blackness in further examinations of policing.