Slave Patrols and White Privilege
There’s a review on Monkeyfist.com of Sally E. Hadden’s Slave Patrols: Law and Violencer in Virginia and the Carolinas, in which the political economy of slave patrols is considered, particularly the degree to which White citizens traded civil rights and individual liberties for racialized communal goods:
This contortion of property rights — in which patrollers were supposed to avoid damaging the human property of slave owners, but could roam, warrantless and at will, through the physical property of a white citizen — is every bit as revealing as the gross violations of due process at the heart of lynching, especially when you recall that the very idea of African Americans possessing due process rights was disputed by many whites. Lynchings were the way white people enacted that dispute, directly on the bodies of African American men whom they slandered as, and no doubt believed to be, sexually monstrous. But precious few, if any citizens disputed white rights to property and legal search. The violations of property rights routinely undertaken by patrollers were violations of white rights. The freedom of patrols to conduct warrantless searches of white-owned property suggests the degree to which whites were willing to give up ostensibly transcendent, founding civic values in order to secure racialized communal goods.
You can read the entire review on Monkeyfist.com. It’s part of work I’m doing on a book about antiracist politics, from a chapter provisionally titled, “Patrols, Lynchings, and Clearances: The Face of White Terrorism”.