Racial profiling asdressage: a social control regime!

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Abstract
Racial profiling is a unique regime of social control specifically due to its reinvention of blackness as a signifier to criminality. The author argues that the ‘new black’ (or new non‐white) is reconstructed under this regime when previous regimes did not necessarily criminalize whole groups. This study employs panopticism, and its critique by Foucault, to argue that racial profiling as dressage aims to increase the visibility of black people – control minorities. Its different practices (like Driving While Black) aim to normalize, assimilate, and rehabilitate everyone to one centre. It is done by means of penetrating the consciousness through continuous surveillance, thereby making the black individual an obedient citizen. The article argues also that the expression of social control in the racial profiling regime is spatial too. This means that space is classified so that some activities are criminal only if they occur in the ghetto, or at the borders of white neighbourhoods. Racial profiling serves as a reminder of the black people's ‘place’. Thus, it is all about the perpetual visibility of the modern individual. The author argues that racial profiling is designed to enhance this visibility. Racial profiling is not the first regime to occur; it succeeded three preceding social control regimes: slavery, Jim Crow, and mass imprisonment. All these regimes are a manifestation of a fundamental structural fault of modern society: racism and inequality. That is the modern state surveillance function. So, the question addressed here is: how does surveillance through police practices shape the modern subject (how is the subject socially produced)?

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