Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

Surveillance culture has become overwhelmingly a function of the representation of people of color as criminal actors. This vector is justified by Black men’s alleged “visible” (read: “obvious” or “inherent”) potential as agents of terror and urban crime, in particular. Torin Monahan defines “crisis vision” as a narrative construction that produces bias especially toward people of color. “Crisis vision’s” negative effect upon Black lives, Black families, and Black equality in the United States is more than apparent in statistics. Two million people are incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. This is a “500% increase over the last 40 years” and can be attributed to “changes in sentencing law and policy, not changes in crime rates” [1]. The trend toward the U.S. judicial system becoming one based on incarceration has resulted in “prison overcrowding and fiscal burdens on states to accommodate a rapidly expanding penal system” despite increasing evidence...