The Sound of the Beast
The Law at Home (Part 2 of 3)
This is the second installment 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 a discussion of law enforcement tactics, but through legal doctrine, cultural narratives, and personal experience.
In Part 1: The Law of the Nation, I explored how the legal architecture of the Fourth Amendment reinforces a racialized framework of suspicion and surveillance, casting Blackness as a national threat. Now, in Part 2: The Law at Home, I turn inward—to the intimate spaces where policing doesn’t just knock on the door but shapes the very conditions of Black domestic life.
From “consent” searches at the doorstep to the legal fiction of voluntary encounters, the home—long mythologized as a site of refuge—is shown to be a porous and contested terrain for Black families. Drawing from Devon Carbado’s Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and my own memories of growing up in the South Bronx, this installment interrogates how the law fails to protect Black privacy, intimacy, and safety where it matters most.
Each part of this series examines how law, culture, and personal history converge to reveal the many layers of racialized policing—and what that means for the ongoing struggle for justice in America.
The final part of the series will focus on the body—the most intimate site of regulation, risk, and resistance.
The Law at Home
The journey on the coach bus from Cambridge, Massachusetts, back to New York City always took longer than anticipated. Whether delayed by rush hour traffic, halted by a roadway accident, or rerouted due to inclement weather, there was always something or someone prolonging the trip.
Yet, I always managed to find my way back home. Beyond deciphering differential equations or mastering the laws of thermodynamics, one of the greatest challenges I encountered at MIT was grappling with the persistent feeling that I did not belong. Aside from my lingering New York accent, it was my Yankees fitted ballcap, baggy Rockawear jeans, and biting Bronxian wit that set me apart in my engineering classes.
Even more, as one of a handful of Black students on campus, I was frequently alone, seemingly left with “no place to go.” I was outdoors. To navigate MIT’s renowned intellectual firehose, I found solace in embracing my Black culture, immersing myself in a historically Black fraternity, and choosing to live in a predominantly Black housing group. Surrounding myself with mentors and friends who shared similar struggles helped me cultivate the confidence needed to thrive.
Yet, nothing compared to the joy of returning home. The thick sound of eager drivers hurling pendejo out of tinted windows as they maneuvered through traffic. The sweet smell of oil-soaked pizza slices wafting from paper plates as lively youths spilled out of local bodegas, their movements synchronized to the pulsating rhythm of reggaeton blasting from SUVs. The sharp taste of a $1 mango Italian ice from the elderly Puerto Rican vendor parked beside the concrete basketball courts, where laughter mingled with grunts and the familiar calls of I’m open. Point game! Who got next?
The firm touch of my barber’s calloused hands as he meticulously shaped the edges of my barely visible goatee with a razor blade, the scent of Brut cologne lingering on his arm. The soft gazes of neighbors I had left behind, their thin smiles and gentle nods, their greetings of Good to see you, son, enveloping me like a birthday hug. Being home meant more than just being seen and heard; it meant being known.
And in my neighborhood, to be known was to belong.
Belonging, however, often comes at a cost. There is usually sacrifice, and frequently, there is loss. For my grandparents and parents, finding a sense of belonging in America meant sacrificing intimacy as they left family behind on the island of Dominica, a former British colony in the West Indies. Planting roots in the concrete jungle meant losing familiarity with the Caribbean soil as they became immigrants in New York City. Chasing opportunity in the so-called land of the free meant relinquishing the comforts of small island living for the unpredictability of bustling urban landscapes.
It meant sacrificing the simplicity of humble beginnings in exchange for the complexities of the American dream. It meant proving that one belonged and earning enough respect to be welcomed. It meant tirelessly searching for a place to call home.
As protesters around the country vehemently decried the U.S. Jim Crow legal regime during the civil rights era, home for my maternal grandparents—whom I affectionately called Granny and Papa—meant a neighborhood where White Americans were moving out (or were already absent) and Black folks were moving in. For Granny and Papa, home meant searching for living-wage jobs with limited education—my grandfather securing employment at a record factory, and my grandmother performing domestic labor before becoming a staff member in a hospital cafeteria. For Granny and Papa, home meant witnessing the transformation of New York City during the 1960s and 1970s, as urban renewal concentrated Black and Hispanic families into marginalized neighborhoods that lacked essential governmental services and extracurricular opportunities for their children.
For Granny and Papa, home meant confining their only child—my mother—to indoor play areas with cousins and close friends, and sending her to a local Catholic school (scraping together the tuition fee, month to month) because the local public schools were hit-or-miss. For Granny and Papa, home meant celebrating the marriage of two hopeful young Black Americans—their daughter and my father, a Caribbean-born Black man who immigrated to New York City as an ambitious young adult—while lamenting the onset of New York’s war on drugs and the escalation of supervisory policing. By the time I arrived in the 1980s, Granny and Papa’s home had become my own, the place where I would discover what it means to be a Black boy in America.
Spending my formative years in the 1990s as New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani rose to power, home for me was a blend of cherished moments and underlying tensions. It meant savoring the simple pleasures of being put out to play ball with friends on the block, where children dreamed of soaring like basketball legend Michael Jordan, and attending block parties with cousins, where we freestyled over the latest Jay-Z hip-hop track.
However, home also meant navigating the pervasive anxiety of being put outdoors, where the urban landscape’s harsh realities bred criminal activity and drug use. Where gang affiliations and rising unemployment rates fueled a style of policing that was more discomforting than reassuring. Being home meant embracing both joy and hardship, even when those experiences meant contending with the very individuals sworn to “protect and serve.”
As Devon Carbado recounts, New York City was not only a place where police supervision and surveillance were commonplace but also where individuals could be subjected to stop-and-frisk encounters. Less than two months before my graduation from MIT, a Black man named David Floyd experienced such an encounter while walking home in the South Bronx. Upon being approached by two police officers, David complied with their request to see his ID. Then, without his consent, one of the officers proceeded “to pat him down from his groin to his ankles and pulled [David’s] cellphone out of his pocket.” After returning David’s out-of-state ID, the officers falsely claimed it was illegal for him not to possess a New York City license.
Less than a year later, David found himself once again facing the police outside his home. This time, as he assisted the tenant who resided in the basement of his godmother’s home (where David was living at the time) in gaining entry to their locked apartment, he was confronted by three plainclothes officers. As David attempted to unlock the apartment door using his godmother’s spare keys, likely fumbling through the key ring with anxiety as he fished for the correct one, the officers swiftly approached. They ordered David and the tenant to raise their hands and stand against the wall, proceeding to conduct a pat-down and search their bodies without obtaining consent. Later, the officers justified their actions by citing a heightened state of alertness due to a series of burglaries in the area. In the police incident report, however, they recorded “[fJurtive [m]ovements” as the rationale for their invasive bodily search.
David Floyd eventually emerged as the lead plaintiff in a groundbreaking class action lawsuit challenging the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) controversial “stop-and-frisk” policy. In a landmark decision in 2013, Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled in favor of David Floyd and the class, affirming that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policing practices violated constitutional rights. The court’s judgment was bolstered by empirical evidence from a comprehensive study, which unequivocally demonstrated that Black and Latinx people were disproportionately targeted for stops and frisks. Despite the over policing of non-White residents, whom police claimed aroused greater suspicion, the searches rarely yielded weapons, with less than 10 percent resulting in an arrest. Such outcomes underscored the unreasonable nature of their suspicions.
Nevertheless, the pervasive practice of stops and frisks persists in Black communities across the United States, reflecting a longstanding pattern of local governments utilizing police power to quell social unrest. Historical instances of so-called race riots in response to violent policing—spanning from Watts, California, to Detroit, Michigan, to Baltimore, Maryland—date back at least to the civil rights era. As Carbado explains, the strained relationship between Black Americans and law enforcement, which prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to establish the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in 1967, was partially fueled by the widespread use of stops and frisks and played a pivotal role in each uprising.
Recognizing the urgency to address this tension, the legal landscape shifted in l968 when the Supreme Court’s ruling in Terry v. Ohio established that police officers are permitted to stop and subsequently frisk individuals based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, even without probable cause, which had been the prevailing standard. This decision, ostensibly aimed at balancing law enforcement’s need to prevent crime with individual rights, paradoxically seemed to validate and perpetuate the very practices that had contributed to the volatile atmosphere between Black communities and the police.
Chief Justice Warren’s decision notably did not clarify whether probable cause is necessary to stop and question someone who poses no immediate threat to a police officer’s safety. As a result, courts eventually extended the reasonable suspicion standard to stops, granting officers the authority to detain and question individuals based solely on a reasonable suspicion of past or future criminal activity.
Unfortunately, reasonable suspicion, as a legal standard, is relatively weak and can be established merely through an individual’s presence in an area of high crime activity, combined with behavior deemed evasive by law enforcement. Although the Supreme Court did not explicitly endorse the “high crime and evasive behavior” rationale in Illinois v. Wardlow, the Court indicated that nervous or evasive behaviors are relevant factors in determining reasonable suspicion. However, as Carbado explains, there are inherent problems with this reasoning.
First, there exists no definitive definition for a “high crime neighborhood,” rendering it a subjective term that law enforcement can exploit to justify their suspicions across various policing circumstances. Second, if avoiding encounters with the police automatically raises suspicion, then the notion that Black people followed by law enforcement are always free to leave—and thus are not technically seized—is flawed. The idea that Black individuals are inherently suspicious merely by virtue of their Blackness perpetuates a troubling narrative in modern policing, poisoning the foundational principles established in Terry v. Ohio.
The reasonable suspicion standard, therefore, masks both the conscious and unconscious racial biases harbored by police officers, rendering Black people particularly susceptible to discriminatory treatment. Carbado emphasizes that this vulnerability is particularly acute in the lives of Black women, whose lived experiences often occupy “a marginal space in our national consciousness,” especially in conversations about policing. According to Carbado,
“the regulation of Black women’s sexual autonomy and violence against their bodies (including in the form of sterilization) have been core-and not peripheral-features of racism.”
Ultimately, the manner in which courts interpret the reasonable suspicion standard implies that in certain communities—especially those with low-income demographics predominantly comprised of Black and other racially and ethnically minoritized individuals—Black people are perpetually at risk of being stopped and frisked, effectively rendering them prey within their own homes.
Consequently, for many Black Americans, the concept of home evokes a complex mix of emotions—an amalgamation of beautiful and terrifying memories. It’s a place where one resides, yet in the still of night, one questions whether they truly belong. It’s a tapestry woven with threads of fear, rage, joy, and love, all bound together by an enduring faith in America. Perhaps this duality epitomizes what it means to be an American.
It’s a sentiment almost as ingrained in the American identity as Shirley Temple and the White baby dolls that are idolized by both the Black children and adults in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. These “blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned” dolls, which “all the world had agreed ... was what every girl child treasured,” establish a standard of beauty that Morrison’s characters are encouraged to emulate. Adults applaud children when they care for these dolls, perhaps driven by the mistaken belief that safety lies under the cloak of whiteness afforded by White culture.
In a poignant scene from Morrison’s novel, a conversation about Shirley Temple unfolds between Pecola and her friends, Claudia and Frieda. Pecola is handed a cup of milk emblazoned with the actor’s image. Transfixed by the image, Pecola spends “a long time with the milk,” gazing affectionately at the silhouette of Shirley Temple’s dimpled face, before reflecting with Frieda about “how cu-ute” Shirley Temple appears. As literary scholar Jan Furman argues, the girls’ admiration for Shirley Temple as the epitome of beauty and acceptance reflects the “process and symbols of imprinting the self during childhood.”
In contrast, Claudia rejects this societal standard of beauty, contending,
“I hated Shirley. Not because she was cute, but because she danced with Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy, and who ought to have been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with me.”
Claudia’s rejection extends to the White Raggedy Ann dolls as well. She is “physically revolted by and secretly frightened of’ them, tempted to” [b]reak off the tiny fingers, bend the flat feet, loosen the hair, twist the head around” and “[r]emove the cold and stupid eyeball.” Each act is a defiance against the imposed ideals of beauty and belonging.
The adults rebuke Claudia, labeling her as ungrateful rather than rebellious. In their unwavering allegiance to the status quo, the Black adults in Claudia’s life inadvertently perpetuate the notion that she and other Black girls are inherently inadequate. The pursuit of belonging—both within oneself and within one’s community—is fraught with complexities, especially in Black communities where children and adults must navigate racialized subjectivities amidst intersecting class and gender dynamics.
This journey can manifest in various forms: self-hatred may be expressed through the abuse of one’s family members, as seen in the case of Cholly; rage may manifest in the form of bullying toward peers, exemplified by the Black boys who derogatorily call Pecola “black e mo,” an expression Claudia interprets as “their contempt for their own blackness.” Even shame may arise from the idolization of unattainable societal standards of beauty, as demonstrated by Pecola’s fixation on Shirley Temple and her longing for the “bluest eye.”
For me, graduating from college and venturing into Baltimore, Maryland, for graduate school shaped my understanding of the concept of home through my relationship with my first car. The MIT Federal Credit Union granted me a loan to acquire a used, modest, manual transmission 1999 Honda Civic Ex Sedan, coated the color of a four-leaf clover. Baltimore held the allure of a promising future for me as a Black American college graduate, yet it also evoked the specter of past encounters with racialized policing in Black American cities.
Consequently, my car became both a sanctuary and a tomb. It served as a means of navigating the unfamiliar terrain, ferrying me from the basement room I rented on North Wolfe Street near the Johns Hopkins Medical Campus to the brick-lined pavement surrounding the Whiting School of Engineering on North Charles Street. In my lucky green Honda Civic, I found solace, contemplating my right to remain silent and my capacity as an educated Black man to speak.
I attempted to make the car my own, to imprint my subjective Black experience upon its contours so that I might feel a sense of pride, safety, and belonging once inside. I tried to transform my car into a home away from home a place where I could feel truly at ease. With my meager graduate student stipend, I could not afford much. After securing essentials like a bed, desk, and television set with my scholarship money, I turned my attention to customizing my Honda to reflect my personality.
I began by replacing the stock clutch for a short shifter to enhance my control over the vehicle. Next, I adorned the front and rear bumpers with a lip kit to impart a more aggressive and aerodynamic aesthetic. Finally, I upgraded the stock muffler with a cat-back exhaust system, not only to augment the car’s horsepower but also to amplify the exhaust note, signaling to onlookers that my car possessed power and prestige. Each modification was a deliberate choice, a testament to my desire to assert my individuality and command respect on the road.
Like Pecola’s yearning for blue eyes to attain beauty, my aspiration was to imbue my car with the appearance of greater speed and attractiveness. I had come to believe—perhaps from admiring David Hasselhoff effortlessly maneuver his Pontiac Firebird on Knight Rider, or from worrying as O.J. Simpson eluded authorities in his Ford Bronco, or even from swooning over Brian O’Conner’s (played by actor Paul Walker) Nissan Skyline GT-R in Fast & Furious—that true liberty in America requires not merely power, but also purpose.
This purpose could entail averting an imminent threat or pursuing a lofty ambition. I customized my car to exude speed and emit a commanding roar because I wanted everyone, including myself, to perceive me as the forgotten sun casting a thread of light on the burning bush under the cliff.
I wanted them to know that my purpose was to transcend the confines of societal expectations. I wanted them to see that I was more than just another Black man defying the odds.
I was powerful. I was prestigious. I was free.
In solidarity,
Note: This is the second in a three-part series. Stay tuned for Part 3, The Law of the Body, where I will explore how policing penetrates the flesh—shaping not just public behavior, but the felt experience of Black embodiment.
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