The Sound of the Beast
The Law of the Nation (Part 1 of 3)
This is the first in a three-part series adapted from my longform essay, The Sound of the Beast, originally published by UCLA Law Review Discourse in Fall 2024. The series examines how Black life is policed in America—not just through law enforcement tactics, but through legal doctrine, cultural narratives, and personal experience.
From Rodney King’s brutal beating in 1991 to O.J. Simpson’s nationally televised pursuit in 1994 to Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson in 2014, policing in America has long been shaped by racial ideologies that dictate who is deemed dangerous, who is afforded protection, and who is subjected to state violence. In each of these cases, one question looms large: Were the policing tactics employed against these Black men reasonable?
In Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, constitutional law scholar Devon W. Carbado argues that Black Americans are under constant legal scrutiny, from the moment they leave their homes to the moment they return. Drawing from Carbado’s analysis, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and my own experiences growing up in the South Bronx during the 1980s and 1990s, this series explores how racialized policing operates across three scales: the Nation, the Home, and the Body.
Each installment examines how law, culture, and personal experience intersect to shape the realities of racialized policing—and what that means for the ongoing struggle for justice in America.
Join me as we unpack these layers of law, race, and power.
“Woop-woop that’s the sound of da police Woop-woop, that’s the sound of da beast.”
-KRS-One
“Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment.”
- Toni Morrison
The Law of the Nation
Even before the police officer uttered his final words, I felt it inside my body. But that’s the hardest part to explain. So, let me first tell you about being outdoors.
Long before Sega Genesis and a three-button control pad would transform our stuffy living room into a sixteen-bit realm of infinite possibilities, and long before cellular phones would transfigure our anxious hands into sanctuaries—a choir of emojis quenching our incessant longing for joy—we braved the broken concrete and loose gravel of the alley behind our rowhouse, searching for adventure.
For years, my older sister and I would ride bicycles in endless circles within the rear driveway, eagerly awaiting the day we’d be granted permission to exit the chain linked fence and explore the alleyway’s mysteries. Later, it would become my younger brother and me, along with a rotating cast of neighborhood friends, running those same driveway loops beneath the basketball rim my father had painstakingly mounted to the second-floor porch railing. On other days, it was me, my brother, and those same friends racing bicycles from one end of the alley to the other, occasionally angling our handlebars toward a weathered wooden plank resting atop a solitary cinder block—a makeshift ramp that promised to unlock new heights, our lips brushing the musty air as we achieved flight.
We paid no mind to the unruly shrubs that swarmed forgotten driveways, clutching long-lost baseballs like jealous pigeons guarding their nests. Nor did we heed the grey dirt that clung to our sneakers and caked beneath our fingernails like desperate hatchlings pining for their mother’s warmth. The steady thrum of anxious four-door sedans racing beneath the elevated train tracks provided a symphonic backdrop to our youthful exploits, their collective rattle echoing the frenetic cadence of our neighborhood’s tempo.
We were out of the house. And, for young Black kids growing up in the South Bronx during the 1990s, being put out of the house was a blessing—a gift in disguise—a chance to escape crowded hallways in hot apartment buildings and avoid the chaos of messy kitchen tables doubling as improvised homework stations. It was a reprieve from the cacophony of blaring televisions, crackling radios, and squabbling siblings, an opportunity to enjoy the rush of cool air that awaits the edges of bare knees. It was a time to be free.
In the sweltering summers, we would pump our pedals along the sunbaked pavement until sweat beaded upon the hem of our t-shirts. And when winter’s frigid embrace enveloped the neighborhood, we would choreograph complex routines with rubber footballs, the snow clinging to our shoulders and knees. We were constantly on the run. Even with no place to go, even with no goal in mind, we discovered joy in the simple pleasures of the mundane, our skin soaking the sights, sounds, and scents of our metropolis until the flickering streetlamps announced the call of dinnertime.
One Christmas, around the age of ten or eleven, I tested the boundaries of our block with a coveted gift—a plastic remote-controlled car. After hastily discarding the torn gift-wrapping paper that had adorned the large box, I immediately threw on my heavy winter coat and raced out into the snow-covered alley to play with my new toy. The bright red machine whirred to life, but the battery sputtered out after a mere ten minutes, and I quickly learned that I would need to charge it before each session.
Yet, in those fleeting minutes, I experienced a sense of freedom that would take years for me to fully comprehend. Perhaps I had been inspired by Michael Knight-David Hasselhoff’s iconic character on the television series Knight Rider, who bravely fought crime with an artificially intelligent and heavily modified black Pontiac Firebird. After watching reruns of the popular 1980s show, I became obsessed with the idea of racing my own electric car around the block and down our back alley. It felt then like the essence of being American. To conquer the chaotic twists and turns of the urban terrain. To wield the raw, unbridled power of metal and technology at my whim. To experience the intoxicating thrill of propulsion, of moving faster than my youthful legs could take an ambitious Black boy in New York City before some well-meaning elder would caution me to slow down, or else.
Perhaps I had been mentored by O.J. “The Juice” Simpson, the Hall of Fame NFL running back widely regarded as one of the greatest football players of all time. In the summer of 1994, while watching the New York Knicks battle the Houston Rockets in the NBA finals, the television abruptly cut to an aerial view of a white Ford Bronco, with the Juice seated inside, speeding down a Southern California freeway. For two hours, that Bronco took me to a part of the United States I had never been, galloping defiantly down the Santa Ana Freeway, the Artesia Freeway, and the San Diego Freeway, weaving through dense traffic, all while being trailed by the police. In those surreal moments, the boundaries of my insular world in the Bronx evaporated, and Simpson’s brazen defiance signaled the possibility of escape.
Months later, the world would become enraptured by the trial of O.J. Simpson for the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Although I did not grasp the details of the case at the time, I sensed its importance because so many adults, including my parents, kept discussing it. As Ta-Nehisi Coates recounts in his observations of Washington, D.C. during those fateful months, “[B]lack people broadcast[ed] their support as though he were one of them. Vendors hawked RUN O.J. and FREE O.J. SIMPSON T-shirts. Community activists ... offered fervent defenses of him.” Simpson was everywhere, his face plastered across newspapers and magazines in corner store bodegas.
The racial undertones were impossible to ignore—Simpson was a Black man and his ex-wife, Nicole, was White. News articles and documentaries dissecting the saga dubbed it “an American tragedy,” their narratives often condemning the systemic racism embedded in the criminal justice system. Even Simpson’s defense attorneys claimed that he had been targeted because of his race, a ploy to humble a wealthy Black man who had ascended to national fame. Yet, when the verdict rendered Simpson a free man, waves of celebration erupted from Black communities across New York City and the nation at large. In that polarizing moment, what seemed to matter most was that his most intimate encounter with the law had culminated not in subjugation but liberation, transforming Simpson’s personal victory, his enduring celebrity status, and perhaps even his existence as a Black man who had defied the odds into a story of heroism.
I was a naive ten-year-old boy. I did not know that O.J. Simpson was a bona fide sports icon-winner of the coveted Heisman trophy at the University of Southern California, where he set the NCAA single-season rushing record in 1968. Or that he became the first NFL running back to rush for 2000 yards in a single season in 1973 with the Buffalo Bills. I did not know that by the 1990s, O.J. had amassed an estimated net worth of $10 million through lucrative endorsement deals with major corporations like Hertz, as well as ownership stakes in hotels and upscale restaurants. I did not know that he had become widely regarded as a womanizer, with a particular preference for “Bond girls, Playboy playmates, models, actresses, most of them white.”
I also did not know that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) had a notorious reputation for brutality: “It didn’t just brutalize black communities; it terrorized them.” I did not know that Daryl Francis Gates, the LAPD’s chief from 1978 to 1992, had commented in 1982 after numerous reports surfaced of Black people dying from the department’s use of chokeholds,
“[I]n some blacks when it ... is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.”
I did not know that in 1991, Rodney King had been mercilessly beaten by four LAPD officers after failing to pull over during a high-speed pursuit while intoxicated. The vicious assault, caught on film by an uninvolved witness from a nearby balcony, would spark outrage and civil unrest when the officers were acquitted at trial.
All I knew was what I saw. And what I saw in 1995 as a Black boy in the South Bronx was communal joy over O.J.’s saga. A deep reservoir of anxiety filled by the image of a Black man evading the law in a fast car, surrounded by helicopters, and the sound of his escape from prison—proclaimed “not guilty” in the courtroom—surrounded by lawyers. These sights and sounds of Black joy shaped my understanding of liberty and freedom. Perhaps they also fueled my youthful longing for power and prestige too.
After the trial, I yearned for my own car, but that would have to wait. Instead, four years later, as a high school freshman, I discovered that the O.J. Simpson trial offered deeper insights into the racial dimensions of policing in the United States, far beyond the spectacle of high-speed chases. The trial exposed systemic disparities in law enforcement’s policing of Black Americans, from disproportionate stops and arrests to harsher sentencing and treatment within the judicial system. Even more, it laid bare the deep-seated societal tensions concerning race, privilege, and criminal justice, igniting a national dialogue about racial bias and the urgency of reform within law enforcement agencies.
Perhaps most important for me, the episode confirmed the dangers of being “put outdoors,” as award-winning novelist Toni Morrison discussed in her book, The Bluest Eye.
I wasn’t familiar with Morrison’s work when I received the slim novel in my ninth-grade English class, but I was intrigued by the paperback’s cover, which was decorated with a painting of a somber Black girl. I learned that her name was Pecola Breedlove. Set in the 1940s in Lorain, Ohio—a segregated Midwestern steel town—Morrison’s novel describes the lives of working-class Black folks as many were migrating North to escape racial terrorism and job scarcity in the South.
However, development in Northern urban enclaves during this era was uneven, relegating many Black families to predominantly non-White and low-income neighborhoods that reproduced familiar racial stigmas and biases from the South. As Black people in Pecola’s hometown learn to survive such environments, they must grapple with the alienation wrought by a White dominated society and the underlying fear of being consumed by racism, even as they relish intimate moments of joy and love within their Black enclaves.
Morrison tells us that they are isolated with “no place to go,” haunted by a relentless quest to forge an enduring Black culture capable of upholding human dignity amidst the pervasive undertow of White supremacist ideals, their “mysterious all-knowing master.” There is rage at widespread social exclusion, frustration at limited opportunities for social and economic mobility, and existential angst at their inability to live up to White standards of beauty and belonging. Unable to confront the architects of racial oppression, some community members turn inward, projecting their rage and frustration onto fellow Black Americans and even themselves. For Pecola, the storm that roars in her midst is her father, Cholly Breedlove.
As Madhu Dubey explains, Cholly is the archetypal Black father of the stereotypical low-income Black family: “Cholly is an unemployed alcoholic, while his wife Pauline works as a domestic servant to provide for her family.” Cholly shirks familial responsibility, projecting unresolved guilt and shame from his traumatic childhood, societal oppression, and internalized racism. Instead, he turns to alcohol as a means of escape, exacerbating his problems and leading to further destructive behavior.
Cholly, however, is also a sympathetic character. We learn that he was abandoned by his parents as a baby in a junk heap and forcibly emasculated by White men at an early age in front of his then-lover, “[t]he one whom he had not been able to protect, to spare, to cover from the round moon glow of the flashlight. The hee-hee-hee’s.” A prisoner of his past, Cholly cannot direct his rage at his oppressors. His subconscious understands what his conscious mind does not: “hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke.”
To avoid being destroyed by his hatred of White supremacy, Cholly redirects his rage and despair toward his daughter Pecola, sexually abusing her. In many ways, Cholly embodies an extreme version of the Black adults in the novel who frequently channel their unresolved trauma and existential pain into abuse—physical, verbal, and emotional—against their children. Pauline, Cholly’s wife, reflects on this cycle: “I loved them and all, I guess, but Sometimes I’d catch myself hollering at them and beating them, and I’d feel sorry for them, but I couldn’t seem to stop.”
This form of “purgative abuse,” as scholar E. Frances Bower argues, reveals the lingering guilt and shame tied to “the injustice of being put outdoors.” Claudia MacTeer, Pecola’s childhood friend, draws a distinction between being put out and being put outdoors:
“If you are put out, you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go.”
Morrison uses this metaphor to parallel the emotional and psychological toll of racial trauma. When one has been deprived of their rights and rejected by society—left with “no place to go”—they are outdoors, where they confront “the real terror of life . . . . [T]he end of something.” Cholly, ostracized by the Black community for his abuse and alcoholism, becomes a symbol of this exclusion.
Yet, Cholly’s continued presence in the narrative underscores the community’s internal struggles, including the mistreatment of Black children and the difficulty of sustaining Black love while resisting White supremacy’s ideals of acceptance and belonging. Cholly’s ostracism mirrors the systemic exclusion experienced by the Black community at the hands of White society, highlighting how societal oppression can become internalized. This internalization manifests in Black children’s behavior as well—often through bullying. In the novel, the light-skinned Maureen Peal cruelly taunts the dark-skinned Pecola, declaring: “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos.”
Morrison’s novel illuminates the concept of being outdoors for Black Americans as an enduring struggle for self-preservation in spaces where they are made to feel unwelcome, always under surveillance, and perpetually vigilant. According to legal scholar Devon W. Carbado, Black Americans are “strictly scrutinized” from the very moment they leave their homes—whether in elevators, on the streets, at department stores, parks, restaurants, work, or the movies—until the moment they return. In Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, Carbado argues that this inescapable scrutiny reflects how U.S. law shapes the experience of dignity for those racialized as Black.
Throughout U.S. history, the power and discretion granted to police under the Fourth Amendment has often rendered Black bodies—and, tragically, dead Black bodies, like that of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, lynched by White men in Mississippi in 1955, or more recently, that of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, shot and killed by the police in Missouri in 2014—public spectacles. Carbado describes these incidents as instances of “conspicuous racial consumption,” where White passersby derive a sense of “racial comfort and safety” by gazing upon Black suffering. This dynamic reveals a grim duality: the “sense of precarity” that defines Black life affords White Americans a corresponding “sense of security,” exposing the inequalities at the heart of our constitutional ideals of liberty and equality. As Carbado puts it, “our vulnerability, their safety; our rightlessness and marginalization, their entitlement and power.”
Consider, for example, the practice of a “pedestrian check,” in which police stop and question people on the street without clear evidence of wrongdoing. They are on the hunt for criminals, guided by their instincts and suspicions, like hound dogs. Growing up in the South Bronx, I witnessed this practice of police power regularly. Further, I not only observed it, but as Carbado puts it, I lived it “vicariously through the experiences of ... mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins, and friends and neighbors.”
As the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation into the Ferguson Police Department reveals, “pedestrian checks” were a routine part of the pattern and practice of policing in the community where Michael Brown was killed. These policing practices including the discriminatory enforcement of minor offenses, excessive force, and arbitrary arrests-have been widely condemned as both unreasonable and unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.
In theory, police officers are prohibited from conducting searches or seizures without a clear, articulable, and reasonable suspicion guiding their investigation. In practice, however, as Carbado warns, a hidden threat persists: many invasive policing practices escape constitutional scrutiny entirely, leaving privacy and personal security in jeopardy. Before we delve deeper into this latent danger, it’s worth reflecting on the hypocrisy of “reasonable policing” in Black communities.
Under the guise of identifying suspicious behavior, these practices perpetuate a cycle of surveillance and exclusion, reinforcing the very inequalities the Fourth Amendment claims to guard against. The amendment declares:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
As Carbado explains, however, a variety of converging factors—namely, “the pervasive nature of de facto racial segregation [that] concentrates Black people in economically depressed neighborhoods”—have produced racialized assumptions about the kinds of people that are likely to engage in criminal behavior. Consequently, this leads to the need for constant police surveillance, searches, and even seizures.
In the landmark case of Mapp v. Ohio, the Supreme Court established a pivotal safeguard against policing overreach: evidence obtained through unreasonable search and seizure must be excluded from trial. However, this exclusionary rule is not absolute; it is subject to various “good faith” exceptions intended to strike a balance between curbing unconstitutional police practices and the perceived need to prevent guilty defendants from evading justice. Despite the Court’s assertion that these exceptions are necessary due to “substantial social costs,” legal scholar Thomas Crocker argues that this perspective predominantly privileges law enforcement interests, often overlooking the social toll borne by innocent individuals and communities disproportionately affected by over policing.
Furthermore, beyond the limitations of the exclusionary rule itself, civil remedies for constitutional violations are further hampered by the doctrine of qualified immunity, which similarly weighs social costs but tends to prioritize the interests of law enforcement. Crocker contends that the Court’s narrow focus on the potential drawbacks of civil liability for policing practices falls woefully short of addressing the broader societal ramifications of qualified immunity. This focus not only perpetuates Fourth Amendment violations but also erodes fundamental constitutional principles and undermines core democratic values. These unexamined social costs—such as the erosion of public trust and law enforcement legitimacy, the suppression of civic engagement and political discourse, and the decline in public safety—are disproportionately shouldered by Black and other racially and ethnically minoritized communities.
The origins of these racialized biases and stereotypes date back to at least the antebellum era of U.S. history, when White Americans could be deputized by law as slave patrols to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, thereby reinforcing the U.S. Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause by capturing runaway enslaved people. How could one discern a deviant runaway from an anxious freeman—both stuck outdoors—in non-slaveholding states in mid-nineteenth century America? For both parties, twitching fingers and furtive glances sought to mask the impending wave of terror whenever certain White Americans approached.
In 1842, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that the property rights of enslavers in their human chattel were more important than the “personal liberty’’ of Black fugitives and the individual autonomy of White abolitionists. Fifteen years later, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney would conclude in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Black people “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order ... unfit to associate with the white race ... [and] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” As Carbado puts it, “Dred Scott was a way of saying that Black people were not, and could not be, part of ‘the people’ who had the right under the Fourth Amendment” not to have their bodies unjustly “searched and seized, captured, and violated.”
The Reconstruction Amendments attempted to melt these fetters of White supremacy by affirming the equal citizenship of Black Americans and overturning the Dred Scott decision. However, Black subjection was once again recast by the backlash of Southern redeemers, culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which legalized the racially discriminatory “separate but equal” doctrine and solidified the oppressive Jim Crow regime. It would take a “Second Reconstruction” nearly a century later, during the pivotal civil rights era, for Black Americans to finally be recognized as integral members of “the people” protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Nevertheless, as Carbado illuminates through a detailed study of the interactions between Black civilians and law enforcement, “over the past five decades, the Supreme Court has effectively legalized racially targeted policing by interpreting the Fourth Amendment to protect police officers at the expense of Black Americans.” The insidious legacy of America’s dark past continues to cast a long shadow, haunting perceptions of security and privacy in its dark ghettos.
This narrative echoes in the transformation of the South Bronx during the rise of hip-hop culture, a period that coincided with my own upbringing and adolescence in that very borough. During my youth, I witnessed a systemic bias within the law that frequently presumes guilt among Black people by broadening the parameters of reasonable police conduct that does not constitute a search or seizure, thus sidestepping constitutional protections.
According to Carbado, the police can surveil and follow a Black person based on a racially motivated suspicion (i.e., racially profiling them) because, under the law, they have not yet been seized. The police can approach that same racially profiled Black person, observe their behavior for signs of nervousness or attempted flight, and draw conclusions about potential criminality based upon these actions because, under the law, they have not yet been seized. The police can interrogate that same Black person about their identity and whereabouts, even if the person is terrified of refusing to comply and asserting their right to leave because, under the law, they have not yet been seized.
The police can follow that same Black person onto a bus and continue their interrogation, even if that person now feels restricted or unable to leave the confined space, because, under the law, they have not yet been seized. The police can request to search the bag of that same Black person, even if that person is unaware of their rights and has not been informed by the police of their right to refuse consent, because, under the law, they have not yet been seized. Like a nightmare that will not end, the terror of over-policing goes on and on.
To maintain “law and order,” police officers are free to exploit a Black person’s lack of awareness of their legal rights under the Constitution. Alternatively, police officers can leverage a Black person’s intimate familiarity with and fear of the routinized policing of Black bodies to compel a search, a practice sanctioned by the courts under the Constitution. Either tactic can trigger attempts by Black people to avoid or terminate police encounters “by giving up their rights, consenting to searches, and otherwise being overly cooperative.”
The chilling effect on constitutional rights to free speech, bodily autonomy, and personal security—fueled by an intense fear of the police—not only distorts the ideal of liberty in a liberal democracy but also reinscribes the culture of racialized terror levied by the antebellum slave patrol to suppress rebellious and defiant fugitives. By failing to consider whether Black people reasonably feel seized during their everyday interactions with the police, similar to how fugitive Black people likely felt seized following the Court’s pro-slavery ruling in Prigg, the Court has failed to establish a race-neutral interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. Instead, as Carbado clarifies, the Court has infused “a racial preference in the seizure doctrine for people who are not racially vulnerable to interactions with the police, and who do not experience a sense of racial constraint in those interactions.”
For those Black folks who occupy a “peripheral existence” just one step away from being seized—moving about “on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate [their] weaknesses and hang on”—they are hunted by a criminal punishment system that exploits their precarity.
Perhaps as a result, when the U.S. Department of Justice completed its investigation of the Ferguson Police Department in 2015—the same department that employed Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown six months prior—they described a pattern of policing practices that leverages “warrants, arrests, and citations not only to exploit the economic and social vulnerabilities of a group, but also to generate revenue for cities and police departments, and to secure pay increases and promotions for police officers as well.”81
Labeled as “predatory policing” by Carbado, this law enforcement strategy portrays Black individuals as targets for police intervention, criminalizing mundane and non-threatening behavior, such as sleeping in public spaces or removing trash from bins. Moreover, this widespread “mass criminalization” perpetuates the contentious criminalization of poverty.
For me, the oppressive atmosphere of the hunt in the South Bronx eventually seized my voice.
In solidarity,
Note: This is the first in a three-part series. Stay tuned for Part 2, The Law at Home, where I explore how policing shapes the intimate spaces of Black life.
P.S. As always, thank you for reading this edition of Freedom Papers. If you found this piece meaningful, share it with a friend. If it moved you, consider supporting with a paid subscription or buying me a coffee. This creative exploration happens because readers like you believe words and stories matter.
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Incredibly powerful and beautifully written. Predictably, as a white woman, I hadn’t considered the events of my younger years through this lens. Thank you for this and for yet another way to read my all-time favorite author. ❤️🙏