Uncovers the inherently religious structure of the criminalization
of Black, Indigenous, and dispossessed peoples
Most
popular critical accounts of mass criminalization interpret police
and prisons as purely social or political phenomena. While such
accounts have been indispensable in moving millions into collective
action and resistance, the carceral state remains as pervasive as
ever.
White
Property, Black Trespass
argues that understanding why we have police and prisons, and
building a world of safety and abundance beyond them, requires that
we acknowledge the inherently religious function that criminalization
fulfills for a colonial and racial capitalist order that puts its
faith in cops and cages to save it from the existential threat of
disorder that its own structural violence creates.
The
story of criminalization, Krinks shows, begins with the eurochristian
aspiration to become God at the expense of all others—an aspiration
that gives rise to the pseudo-sacred powers of whiteness and
property, and, by extension, the police power that exists to serve
and protect them. Tracing the historical continuity and religiosity
of the color line, the property line, and the thin blue line, Krinks
reveals police power as the pseudo-divine power to exile nonwhite and
dispossessed trespassers to carceral hell.
At
once incisive and expansive, this groundbreaking work deepens
understanding of racial capitalism and mass criminalization by
illuminating the religious mythologies that animate them. It
concludes with thoughts on what might be entailed in a religion
rooted in rejection of the religious idolatry of mass
criminalization—a religion of abolition.
