Using a multifaceted and transdisciplinary approach, Marisol Lebrón analyzes the development of punitive governance in Puerto Rico. Lebrón’s approach pays particular attention to how capitalist colonial settings in Puerto Rico lead to the categorization of racialized, gendered, and classed populations as problematic subjects who then become the target of state violence as public policy. Intertwined with the state and its legitimacy, the book also looks at how these populations resist repressive policies and affect social relations of power on the island.
Keyword: police brutality
Good [Black] Guys With Guns: Performance and the Anti-Black Logic of US Gun Culture
This article examines the police shooting of twenty-one-year-old E.J. Bradford at the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover, Alabama on November 22, 2018. After a brief investigation, the Alabama Attorney General’s Office absolved the officer who shot Bradford of any wrongdoing. Through a close reading of the Alabama AG’s report and a performance analysis of Bradford’s actions that night, this article argues that Bradford behaved exactly as he was trained to as a concealed carry permit holder and former enlistee in the Army. Bradford was the epitome of the NRA’s vaunted “good guy with a gun” who intervenes in a violent situation to save others’ lives. However, within the context of the United States’s gun culture, which envisions “good” gun owners as white and encourages police to rehearse responses that perpetuate anti-Black racism, Bradford was always going to be seen by police as suspect.