ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses specifically on Proposition 2 that the pervasive and disproportionate police and vigilante killings of African Americans can best be understood as a violence-centered racial control mechanism. Racial conspiracy is sufficient to demonstrate how such killings function in sustaining ostensibly colorblind systemic racism and the various privileges it affords members of the racially dominant group. Allen Liska has identified two sociological theories that explain race relations from a social or, more specifically, a racial control perspective, which are especially useful for this study: Herbert Blumer's group position theory and Hubert Blalock's group threat theory. The chapter examines the pervasive, disproportionate, and persistent police killings of African Americans as a racial control enforcement mechanism both within their larger social and policing context and, more specifically, as but one point along a continuum of police violence. As has been seen, popular support for police violence does not happen in a political and racial vacuum.
