White Power: Policing American Slavery-Wow! eBook

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White Power: Policing American Slavery

Author(s): Gautham Rao (Author)

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Language: English
Print length: 320 pages
ISBN-10: 1469694840
ISBN-13: 9781469694849

Book Description

Beginning in the colonial era and growing through the American Revolution and the Southern plantation system, slaveholders’ violent police regime continued after Emancipation, through Reconstruction, to today. Moving across time, space, and place, White Power uncovers how slaveholders created their own white supremacist police and government to deny Black people rights, power, and humanity.

Legal historian Gautham Rao introduces us to laws that empowered white people to forcibly exercise their desired racial superiority over Black people, shows how they spread from the South throughout the nation, and traces the rebellions, fugitivity, activism, and legal systems that challenged them. Rao’s narrative includes slaveholders, lawmakers, and the Ku Klux Klan, dramatic escapes by runaway enslaved people, abolitionist activism in courtroom showdowns, and pitched battles between white paramilitaries and enslaved rebels. He offers a new interpretation of the history of policing in the US, centering the institution and legacy of slavery and speaking to the origins of today’s persistence of white vigilance, white supremacist militia groups, and white racist cops determined to maintain power over Black people by force. Equally determined, however, was Black Americans’ refusal to accept it.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A powerful new book. . . . The hope is that Rao’s thorough research and urgent warning will resonate with the citizens of an already deeply embattled nation.”—Arts Fuse

“American slavery was not just an economic system. It was a method of social control that created a brutal racial hierarchy. Gautham Rao’s meticulous research and clear-eyed analysis demonstrates that the historical will to dominate Black people is still with us today with devastating consequences.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, author of On Juneteenth

“With deep research, clear thinking, and vivid writing, Gautham Rao uncovers the long, tangled history of race, slavery, and policing. In the collective duty of white people to enforce slavery, he detects the source of our enduring curse of racial inequality.”—Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804

“Written by one of the most innovative legal historians of our time, White Power is as compelling as it is timely. Gautham Rao plumbs the archive to illuminate the intertwined histories of slavery, policing, and white supremacy in the United States.”—Justene Hill Edwards, author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank

“Rao has crafted a history of slavery and law that stretches beyond the local or regional, illuminating the long national history of slavery and policing. White Power expertly shows how everyday people and seemingly august institutions were shaped by and bent to the fears and desires of the slaveholding oligarchy, profoundly shaping jurisprudence and practical governance at the local and national level for more than two centuries.”—Ryan A. Quintana, author of Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina

“A sweeping and strikingly counterintuitive argument that the colonial and antebellum system of white power did not end with emancipation, but was reconfigured afterward with the same motivation and intent. Rao’s longitudinal approach presents a significant contribution to scholarship on the origins of modern policing.”—Stephanie McCurry, author of Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South

Book Description

The violent legacy of the US’s slaveholding oligarchy and the brutal policing of Black Americans

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White Power: Policing American Slavery

White Power: Policing American Slavery

Book Description

Editorial Reviews

Review

Book Description

About the Author

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