At the Limits of Community: Anti-Black Security Practices in a Montreal Public Housing Complex

Abstract

This thesis argues that contemporary security practices, mainly community policing and defensible space, are conceived epistemologically and operationalized empirically through anti-blackness. To make this point, I provide an in-depth analysis of a major community policing project in operation in Plan Robert, a North-Montreal public housing complex, since 1996. I pay particular attention to the important role of discourses of community in licensing two decades of community and defensible space interventions in the complex. I show how, while seemingly benign, these discourses allowed for the state’s interference in the Black community of Plan Robert to control and disrupt residents’ relationship to the public space. Combined, the high-level theory and the site-specific empirical evidence, which this thesis introduces, aim to contextualize this contemporary historic instance in North America’s longer history of anti-blackness, and the state’s ongoing obsessions with Black communities since the formal abolition of slavery, up until today. It also demonstrates that, forged through anti-blackness, the category of community, as a category of the modern Human, is site of re-elaboration of subjugation of blackness rather than a figure that rescues the Black person