Racialization, Criminalization, and the Articulation of Multiple Alterities: A Perspective on the United States

This chapter investigates the carceral state’s central role in the crafting and deployment of racialized social distinctions. The author offers a framework for understanding the conditions under which police and vigilante violence has reached crisis proportions. Harrison highlights parallels, convergences, and disjunctures between (1) the experiences of racial profiling, discriminatory policing, and incarceration among immigrant and non-immigrant populations; (2) state-initiated wars on crime, illegal immigration, and terror; and (3) the three main sectors of the penal system. The chapter problematizes the multicriminalization that blinds the wider populace to the pervasive forms of racism for which a racial reckoning is long overdue.