From what history has the violent machinery of “law and order” emerged? Does it belong to the Right alone? Was the carceral state (and its analog, the militarized border) built in spite of liberal racial politics, or through them? Beyond its penchant for spectacle and the vulgarity with which it is presented to the world, does Trump’s immigration enforcement regime represent a break with bourgeois liberal traditions, or an elaboration of an already established, decades (if not centuries) old, racialized logic?
Naomi Murakawa’s The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (2014) offers an abolitionist perspective that can help liberals and socialists alike think through these questions. And in so doing, can help to clarify the political stakes of this moment: If the acts of violence unfolding on the streets of US cities are as much expressions of postwar liberalism as they are of conservative excess, then what is the task before those of us who want to see safe, free communities?
The Emergence of Racial Liberalism
Following World War II, fascism looked to be defeated, scientific racism and eugenics seemed to have lost social purchase, and overtly racist violence became increasingly embarrassing for a state claiming global moral leadership. This shift was coupled with increasing official endorsements of formal equality, a growth in antidiscrimination law, and the rise of “race-neutral” policymaking, giving an impression of a new racial order emerging in the mid-twentieth century US (31).
These shifts in official doctrine were not without consequence. Parsing what they signaled is one of Murakawa’s central concerns. Lynchings throughout the US persisted through the mid-twentieth century. Likewise, hundreds of “racial conflicts” spread through postwar US cities. The exploitation and domination conditioned by that violence also remained unchanged. What changed, Murakawa argues, was the ideological framework through which that violence was understood and managed: the emergence of racial liberalism.
Liberals responded to the racial violence in the mid-20th century US with genuine moral repulsion, but without a willingness to challenge the role capital plays in structuring that violence. This choice to maintain their commitment to property pushed liberals into defining racism in individualist terms. Conceived in this way, the practical definition of racism was reduced to threats against personal safety, whether committed by backward individuals or benighted institutions.
Harry Truman’s President’s Committee on Civil Rights, and its 1947 report, To Secure These Rights, is illustrative of this new postwar approach to racism. Drawing from An American Dilemma, Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark study of the Jim Crow American south, alongside over one hundred other sources, the committee sought to widen the federal government’s role in establishing and protecting civil rights. The report defined the essential rights that all Americans possessed. Among these essential rights, alongside the rights to citizenship, freedom, and equality of opportunity, was the “right to safety and security of the person.” This right to “safety,” Murakawa notes, is treated by the committee as the most significant pre-condition of democratic freedom. “Freedom can exist only where the citizen is assured that his person is secure against bondage, lawless violence and arbitrary arrest” (qtd. 41).
Notable here, as she points out, is that violations of civil rights imagined in the report are defined by their arbitrariness – “the dangers of ‘arbitrary’ arrest, of ‘discriminatory’ administrations, and of ‘private and arbitrary violence.’” Disorganized and unpredictable force needed an antidote in an organized and predictable state. The threat to civil rights as imagined by mid-century liberals wasn’t structural violence; rather, it was “lawless violence,” that is, violence “absent…legal formality” (43).Violence sanctioned by law, by contrast, remained outside this understanding of racial injustice.
Truman’s committee epitomized mid-century Democratic policymakers’ ideological balancing act. While Black freedom struggles were fighting to expand the bounds of citizenship and realize liberation from the exploitation of racial capitalism, liberals met the movement with an effort to define civil rights in terms that protected the individual and naturalized the state. Where the movement challenged structural racism, labor exploitation, and economic inequality, liberals reframed those struggles as demands for individual liberty and state power.
Conveniently, the moral failings of individual racists and the administrative defects of untrained local police forces each required a similar kind of remediation: the expansion of a neutral, technocratic state with the power to “rehabilitate” individual transgressors and “professionalize” rogue police forces. Police training found its way into multiple mid-century policy initiatives. Democrats supported the 1957 Katzenbach Commission (83), the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 (79), the Safe Streets Act of 1967 under Johnson (85), all in the name of increased funding for police training. Professionalization and bureaucratic standardization were held up as practices best suited to eliminate racial bias. Tougher sentencing, pretrial detention, and professionalized criminal justice administration all became Democrat priorities. Framed as modernizing reforms with robust oversight, these measures in fact expanded law enforcement capacity at both local and federal levels, granted police greater autonomy, and insulated them from political accountability.
Democratic policymakers expanded FBI jurisdiction, supported federal anti-lynching legislation, and backed multiple “liberal law and order” bills, insisting throughout that these measures were race-neutral and protective rather than punitive. As history has shown, the professionalized, well-funded, and legitimated policing and prosecution apparatus would become one of the most violent disciplining tools used against Black Americans fighting to achieve citizenship rights. Even landmark achievements like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were paired with aggressive crime-control policies that worked to address racial injustice through greater criminalization (70). Long before Nixon or Reagan then, mid-century Democrats elevated crime control to the center of its civil rights agenda. This commitment to “order” and “protection,” Murakawa argues, laid the groundwork for the expansive police state we are currently grappling with.
When, in 1947, Truman made his public commitment to Black Americans that the federal government would take up the cause of anti-racism, roughly 17,000 people were held in federal custody. Today, that number exceeds 150,000 in federal prisons, alongside an additional 60,000–70,000 people detained in immigration facilities. The racial liberalism he helped to codify may have been successful in displacing older forms of explicit racism; it did so by increasing the power of the state to punish. In so doing, it constructed the foundations of mass incarceration while presenting this process as unfolding through ostensibly egalitarian institutions.
The Coming (and Past) Attacks on Haitian Migrants
That power to punish is now being brought to bear on our neighbors, through local policing and through federal immigration enforcement. We have seen it for decades in the cities of Connecticut. We are seeing it in Minneapolis, MN, in Portland, ME, and soon (as of this writing) in Springfield, OH, where the Temporary Protected Status of Haitian migrants is under imminent threat, with intensified federal enforcement likely to follow. In our effort to think comparatively about liberal approaches to federal policing and those of Trump, it is worth recalling an earlier recent moment when Haitian asylum seekers briefly captured national attention. In September 2021, some 15,000 Haitian migrants fleeing poverty and political instability amid the height of the COVID crisis gathered beneath the international bridge in Del Rio, TX, seeking the chance to request asylum in the United States.
While the coming occupation of Springfield will likely generate familiar images of violence, it is difficult to imagine images more grotesque than those from Del Rio in 2021: Border Patrol agents on horseback swinging reins like whips as they chased Black migrants along the riverbank. While the Biden administration’s public condemnation reassured some, it did nothing to alter policy. The border remained militarized, and roughly 25,000 Haitians were expelled or deported during Biden’s presidency—nearly twice the number of Haitian migrants currently living in Springfield.
Enforcement is louder, more grotesque, crueler under Trump. The enforcement apparatus is larger. ICE and CBP are better funded, more numerous, and more insulated from accountability than ever before. Spectacle raids now occasion some of the most morally repugnant people in our government to vice-signal rather than apologize in a way that past administrations may have. Yet Murakawa helps us to see that these are not necessarily differences in kind. The current immigration enforcement regime conforms to the ruling class’s shared commitment to racial capitalism.
Against Liberal Temptation:
The mobilizations against state violence this winter have been heartening. The groundswell of interest in building radical community infrastructure in Connecticut – the kind we’ve seen in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis – suggests we may be entering a cultural and political moment rivaling the 2020 uprisings. In such moments, it makes sense to focus our energy on immediate responses to the cruelty and gratuitous violence we are bombarded with. But we should be careful not to let the acts that bring people into the streets also define the limits of our political response.
The work ahead asks us to deepen our historical engagement – not because history books have all the answers, but because historical understanding can help us to recognize the patterns we’ve seen before. Political education that takes history seriously can help us ask difficult questions about moments like this one, when liberal anger suddenly aligns with our longtime organizing efforts. As exhilarating as the radical possibilities of the 2020 uprisings were, they also offer important lessons about the limitations of liberal outrage as an historical force.
This matters because there is an expansive archive that testifies to the fraught nature of coalitional politics with white liberals. Non-white, working-class coalition partners have long maintained (justified) concerns that white liberal political involvement – typically late, attenuated, self-interested (not that that is always bad) – is motivated less by a desire to transform and more by a desire to absolve. Famously, this was James Baldwin’s argument in “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, Baldwin argued, offered liberals a language of moral outrage at enslavement with which to re-fashion whiteness at the dawn of a new racial order within the US. Baldwin’s mid-20th century white liberal contemporaries offered something similar during the crisis moment they were living through. The question he asks, and one worth sitting with in this moment of liberal mobilization against ICE violence, is what, if anything, does liberalism want to recuperate with its political interventions? Murakawa is a resource for us in this moment, precisely because she has shown us what abolitionism could help us destroy.
Works Cited:
Murakawa, Naomi. The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Harvard University Press, 2014.