Racial violence and historicity in the U.S. Criminal justice system

In the immediate aftermath of nationwide Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in 2020, states and municipalities in the United States implemented new laws and policies to reform the relationship between law enforcement and historically marginalised groups. Sweeping police accountability acts in many states constrained police use of force and promoted community policing. New police training programmes acknowledged the historic role of law enforcement in racial oppression and reoriented police to protect groups from hate crimes, or crimes motivated in whole or in part by bias or bigotry. Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘juridical field’ facilitates our evaluation of post-2020 criminal justice reform initiatives and an assessment of how legal actors mobilise or elide the history of racially motivated violence in the United States. The phenomenological concept of ‘historicity’ facilitates our examining of U.S. law’s official ideology of history, allowing us to chart the contestation over the past in the present and to comprehend how the struggle over historical interpretation is itself influenced by contemporary power dynamics. The article examines historicity in U.S. criminal justice in two contexts: the training of police on hate crimes statutes, and court judgments in which a defendant has been convicted of a hate crime such as racially motivated cross burning. The official historical account of race and criminal justice in the United States currently shows signs of moving from ‘racial reckoning’ back to the ‘ahistorical historicity’ of racial amnesia and oblivion.