discriminate detention

Chisun Lee's story in the Village Voice about the hundreds of black men in Oneonta who were the subjects of a police roundup in 1993 is quite terrifying. There's a story here about racial profiling and the genesis of the age of infinite detention in the micropolitics of policing and the construction of the racialized figure of the criminal, but there's also a story about blackness and higher education - a narrative i heard folks reference a lot back in New Haven -- a narrative of fellow students refusing to open a gate for you when you lost your ID card, of having the cops called on you when you were trying to use the gym or study in the library, of being restrained by multiple officers at a student party and nearly arrested for being while black. 13 years after the roundups in Oneonta, university campuses remain violently racialized in ways which belie the myth or perhaps simply demonstrate the utter failure of the university's embrace of enlightenment universalist rationality. That there have been no consequences for the Oneonta PD is unnaceptable. That the racial logic behind their actions remains very much in place is horriffic.