Gendered Racism is a Key to Explaining and Addressing Police-Involved Shootings of Unarmed Black Men in America

Abstract

There are racial differences in policing and treatment when people are stopped for the same crimes, and scholars have long documented and expressed concern regarding the police’s reactions to Black men. In this paper, we argue that racism is the root cause of police-involved killings of unarmed Black men. Utilizing several contemporary examples, we articulate the ways racism operates through cultural forces and institutional mechanisms to illustrate how this phenomenon lies at the intersection of public safety and public health. Thus, we begin by defining racism and describing how it is gendered to move the notion that the victims of police involved shootings overwhelmingly tend to be Black men from the margins of the explanation of the patterns to the center. Next, we discuss how the police have been used to promote public safety and public health throughout US history. We conclude by describing common explanations for contemporary police-involved shootings of unarmed Black males and why those arguments are flawed. Reframing the phenomena as gendered racism is critical for identifying points of intervention. Because neither intent nor purpose is a prerequisite of the ways that racism affects public safety and public health, the differential impact of policies and programs along racial lines is sufficient for racism to be a useful way to frame this pattern of outcomes. Incorporating gender into this framing of racism introduces that ways that Black men have been viewed, stereotyped, and treated implicitly in institutional practices and explicitly in institutional policies.