Criminality was still imputed to color a century and a half after Douglass.

Evidence

The racialization of crime—the tendency to “impute crime to color/’ to use Frederick Douglass’s words—did not wither away as the country became increasingly removed from slavery. Proof that crime continues to be imputed to color resides in the many evocations of “racial profiling” in our time. That it is possible to be targeted by the police for no other reason than the color of one’s skin is not mere specu lation. Police departments in major urban areas have admitted the existence of formal procedures designed to maximize the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos arrested— even in the absence of probable cause. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, vast numbers of people of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage were arrested and detained by the police agency known as Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 74

Categorization

• XREF: Bridges the post-slavery analysis to modern policing and post-9/11 detention — the continuity is the spine of Davis’s abolitionist argument.