ABSTRACT
For criminologists, it is helpful to historicize police violence in the United States within a larger context of colonial violence. Many notable scholars have demonstrated the historical connections between the contemporary carceral state and Jim Crow, and slavery. In this essay, that argument is extended through an historical, “genealogical,” analysis, demonstrating the connections and continuities between the present-day justifications for police violence against black people in the United States and the colonial European construction of African people as inhuman beings of innate moral defectiveness.
