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The Racial Profile: Governing Race through Knowledge Production (Research Note)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Carmela Murdocca
Carmela Murdocca
Affiliation:
Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, OISE/ University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6Canada, [email protected]
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Abstract

Using two reports about the practice of racial profiling in Toronto, I argue that racial profiling must be understood as a category of governance. My argument for understanding racial profiling as a category of governance is to insist upon a move away from questions or investigations that ask whether racial profiling occurs as a police practice. Instead, by understanding racial profiling as a category of governance, I argue that scholars and practitioners can begin to expose how different racialized practices regulate the boundaries of citizenship and ultimately work to establish how citizen rights are organized, policed and implemented. I conclude by suggesting why it is useful to speak of a “category of governance” as a concept that has wider potential use in the study of racial profiling, particularly as it pertains to the variety of ways in which certain populations are made (or are not made) into subjects/citizens of modern nation states.

Résumé

Utilisant deux rapports sur la pratique du profilage racial à Toronto, l'auteur soutient qu'elle doit être comprise comme une catégorie de gouvernance, et ceci puisqu'il faut s'éloigner de la seule question, si le profilage racial fait partie des pratiques policières. En concevant le profilage racial comme catégorie de gouvernance, chercheurs et praticiens peuvent plutôt analyser comment des pratiques racialisantes déterminent les limites de la citoyenneté et ultimement contribuent à établir, contrôler et mettre en oeuvre l'organisation des droits des citoyens. Elle conclue en soulignant l'utilité et le potentiel plus large du concept de ‘catégorie de gouvernance’ pour étudier le profilage racial, notamment dans le sens d'une analyse des multiples manières de faire (ou de ne pas faire) de certaines populations des sujets/citoyens des États-nations modernes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , August 2004 , pp. 153 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 2004

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References

1 Rose, N., “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies” in Barry, Andrew, Osborne, Thomas and Rose, Nikolas, eds. Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 37 at 45.Google Scholar

2 Rose, N., “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies” in Barry, Andrew, Osborne, Thomas and Rose, Nikolas, eds. Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 37 at 45.Google Scholar

3 O'Malley, P., Weir, L. and Shearing, C., “Governmentality, Criticism, Politics” (1997) 26:4Economy and Society 502.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Ontario Human Rights Commission, Paying the Price: the Human Cost of Racial Profiling (21 October 2003)Google Scholar online: Ontario Human Rights Commission http://www.ohrc.on.ca/english/consultations/racial-progiling-report.pdf (accessed 23 September 2004) at 1.

5 Goldberg, D.T.. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993) at 80.Google Scholar

6 My use of Foucault's notion of governmentality is meant to refer to the processes through which men of colour, as a population, have been the targets/focus of racial profiling. In this context, racial profiling refers to a sanctioned process which seeks to both produce a particular profiled population and simultaneously regulate, or govern the conduct of this population. As Gail Lewis points out, “governmentality refers to the encompassing of (certain) populations within the net of the nation” and as a result, “racialized populations are introduced and subjected to differential racializations” based upon ideological demarcations meant to control and manage them (at 41). For example, Lewis argues that through various practices, such as racial profiling, “the police demarcate boundaries between those with greater or lesser propensities to criminality (and) greater or lesser degrees of pathology” (ibid.). See Lewis, G., “Configuring the Terrain: Governmentality, Racialized Population and Social Work” in ‘Race,’ Gender, Social Welfare: Encounters in a Postcolonial Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).Google Scholar

7 Goldberg, supra note 5 at 151.

8 Lewis, supra note 6.

9 As Colin Gordon explains, Foucault “proposed the term ‘government’ in general as meaning ‘“the conduct of conduct’: that is to say, a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons.” Gordon, C., “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction” in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P., eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1991) 1 at 2.Google Scholar

10 Rose, Nikolas and Miller, Peter, “Political Power Beyond the State” (1992) 2 British Journal of Sociology 43 at 174.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., at 175.

12 Ibid.

13 While this paper focuses on two sets of documents, the debate about racial profiling in Toronto has resulted in the publication and production of additional documents including the Ontario Human Rights Commission report Paying the Price: the Human Cost of Racial Profiling, supra note 4.

14 As a result of the Privacy Commissioner's intervention, in January 2001 the police released one of the lists and estimated that the second list would cost $7, 440.06. In February 2001, the Privacy Commissioner intervened a second time and ordered the TPS to produce the second list free of charge. A provincial mediator was also appointed to the file in order to assess and address privacy considerations of the TPS. In January and February, “Star reporters work(ed) to satisfy the last of the privacy concerns – that exact offence information theoretically might enable one to locate court files and identify those charged.” “The story behind the series” The Toronto Star (10 December 2002) A1.

15 Ibid.

16 Rankin et al., “Singled Out” The Toronto Star ( 19 October 2002) A1.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 It is relevant here to note that an underlying principle that operates through the TPS support of the CIPS database is the notion that collecting data on race and arrests is not congruent to the practice of racism in police practice. Analytically, it is impossible to separate the ideologies of objectivity and neutrality in police practice, for example, from the ideologies of race and racialization that structure the very (legal) meanings to which they apply. Goldberg has characterized this analytic impossibility as the quintessential “liberal paradox” and the “irony of modernity.” Goldberg explains: “As modernity commits itself progressively to idealized principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as it increasingly insists upon the moral irrelevance of race, there is a multiplication of racial identities and the sets of exclusions they prompt and rationalize, enable and sustain. Race is irrelevant, but all is race.” Indeed, this “liberal paradox” functions through police practice and the law in the context of its disciplinary, procedural and interpretive legal manifestations that are fundamentally structured through race, the primary (albeit invisible) referent of liberal law. The “liberal paradox” effectively “normalizes” or “naturalizes” racial identity, namely through the legal derogation of racialized populations. [footnotes omitted]. Goldberg, supra note 5 at 6.

20 Rankin et al. supra note 16 at A1.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 “Police Target Black Drivers” The Toronto Star (20 October 2002) A1. The Toronto Star's findings were mainly published in two articles: “Race and Crime” The Toronto Star (19 October 2002) A1 and “Police Target Black Drivers” The Toronto Star (20 October 2002) A1.

24 Throughout this paper, I suggest that the Toronto Star employs the database as an interpretive device, however The Toronto Star maintained that the numbers speak for themselves. The authority or indeed, the effectiveness of such a claim derives from – and can be challenged by – their recognition or non-recognition as “scientific” and empirically-sound. It was precisely because the Toronto Star numbers were deemed unscientific that they were challenged. Moreover, the police themselves were ascribing racial identity to the suspects through the use of the database.

25 Rankin et al., supra note 16 at A1.

26 Ibid.

27 Lewis, supra note 6 at 25.

28 Honderich, J., “Star's statistics analysis holds up to fair scrutiny” The Toronto Star (1 March 2003) A1.Google Scholar

29 E.B. Harvey, “An Independent Review of The Toronto Star Analysis of the Criminal Information Processing System (CIPS) Data Provided by the Toronto Police Service” (March 2003), online: Toronto Police Service http://www.torontopolice.on.ca at 5

30 Ibid., at 1.

31 See Foucault, Michel, “Truth and Power” in Rabinów, Paul, ed., The Foucault Reader (Pantheon Books: New York, 1984) 51.Google Scholar

31 Harvey, supra note 29 at 10.

33 Ibid., at 10–11.

34 Ibid., at 2.

35 Ibid., at 13.

36 Ibid.

37 Curtis, B., The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) at 26.Google Scholar

38 Harvey, supra note 29 at 13.

39 Ibid., at 39.

40 Ibid., at 39.

41 Lewis, supra note 6 at 25.

42 It is important to point out that The Toronto Star solicited its own experts to assert that its procedures for uncovering the event and practice of racial profiling among the Toronto Police Service were valid.