Political Science Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Political Science Theses and Dissertations by Subject "African American Studies"

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    The Shadows of American Law: Enmity, Intersectionality and Police
    (University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) freeman, kahina marie; Gash, Allison
    This dissertation explores the concept of public enmity and its deployment at the founding, in the nation’s most pivotal state-building arenas: the courts, the military, and the emerging institutions of internal security. The Black Seminole people represented a perennial enemy bent on destroying the fabric of the fledgling nation through violence and atrocity. American tabloids valorized every act of violence committed for the sake of liberation as an act of heinous murder against innocent people. Jackson furthered these tropes in his few public speeches, utilizing the specter of Afro-Native violence to win the southern vote in 1828. Abraham, though never directly named, emerged as a scourge on American society bent on upending civilization. Jackson used his experiences as a military commander to justify the burgeoning of the militia system, which would give way to both slave patrols and the genocidal atrocities of the US Marshals during the frontier wars. This project seeks to accomplish three goals: establish a concrete definition of public enmity; identify how it operates as an invitation for a specific kind of state-building; highlight the work that it performs in specific institutional or policy spaces. I am motivated by what I argue is a missed opportunity to connect the development of police authority in the United States to the historical roots of public enmity. I argue that the conceptual work on police in American law would benefit from identifying the central role that enmity played in development of police authority in the Jacksonian era. I bridge policing to the public enmity narrative by presenting cases from the Jacksonian era and highlighting the crucial links between the development of a white nationalist ideology on the one hand, and the role of police authority in combatting national threats in the form of “internal enemies (Taylor, 2013).” I trace the debates on public authority during the Jacksonian era highlighting what prompted these debates, what populations were identified as enemies or threats to national sovereignty, and what institutions were mobilized to defend the nation. In the two cases that follow I highlight the relationship between enmity, sovereignty, and police authority.