Blackness and Existential Crimes in the Modern Racial State

This Essay presents the concept of “existential crime.” It argues that our notion of crime has conflated acts that challenge the racial premise on which a state is founded with acts that breach what Karim Murji (2009) calls “norms of propriety.”1 It argues that the conflation of these different types of social acts into our conceptualization of crime is a problem because this unnecessary and deliberate synthesis (1) privileges Western liberal philosophies that presume justice for everyone is achievable in states that were originally built on criteria for racial inclusion/exclusion, e.g., racial domination of one group over others; and (2) makes it difficult for social and legal scholars to posit states not founded on these Western liberal conceptualizations, but instead on “justice for everyone,” that is, a multi-racial democratic state. This Essay uses examples from contemporary events such as the January 6, 2021, attempted coup in the United States and Black Lives Matter protests, along with data on N.Y.P.D. Stop and Frisk practices from 2002 to 2013, to assess the need to distinguish between “existential crimes” and violations of “norms of propriety.” The assessment is contextualized in an analysis of U.S. discourses about crime, criminality, and criminalization, critiquing these socalled race-neutral discourses that normalized whiteness in the racialization processes that shaped the United States and other modern nation-states. The assessment reveals that the literature surrounding our definitions of crime, criminality, and criminalization does not challenge the centralization of racial formation in the definitions, classifications, and categorizations of what constitutes a crime. This Essay argues that teasing out and abolishing from our criminal codes and procedures those acts that constitute existential crimes are important steps in challenging white supremacy in the social and legal systems and increasing the likelihood of moving toward a truly democratic state

The construction of the Central Park Jogger Story: Racial consciousness in America at the turn of the 21st century

This study finds that the subject-area desk in media organizations that directs the coverage of the larger world, functions in a privileged space to facilitate communication with other privileged zones in the larger society. The information from these external privileged zones is permeated with messages about power and stratification around issues of class, race, and gender in the larger society. Media select the language with which to distill these messages that we use to construct our world. The study also finds that in the language used by the media to express the police interpretation of events on the night the Central Park jogger was attacked, race was paramount. In the case of the attack on the jogger, the police—through their public relations system—interpreted the events as follows: it was a gang-rape of a white, female investment banker by a group of six African-American and Latino teenagers. Wilding —the racial term describing a new form of urban terror—originated and was disseminated by newspaper writers about the jogger incident. Six African-American and Latino teens were incarcerated with some serving as many as 10 years in jail. The initial suspects were later exonerated and the charges withdrawn when the real perpetrator of the crime was discovered and confessed. This is a study of the newspaper coverage of the Central Park Jogger Story (CPJS) that emanated from the so-called wilding incident. It is a content analysis of a sample of 251 newspaper articles from two New York City newspapers. The study spans a 14-year period starting with the initial incident and ending when the convictions were vacated. It assesses the media\u27s reliance on sources using frequencies and examines the language of the coverage for racial content using an associational model. Language that is associated with social constructs in our society, like race, class, gender, age, victimhood, and violence are measured for their frequency of use. Additionally, the relationship between the language that represents race and other social constructs is examined