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103 B.U. L. Rev. 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/bulr103 and id is 1 raw text is: ARTICLES THE CRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK RESISTANCE TO CAPTURE AND POLICING OMAVI SHUKUR* ABSTRACT The antiblack dimensions of antiresisting laws, that is, criminal proscriptions against physically resisting law enforcement, harden white social dominance and deepen black racial subordination. This Article contributes to the field by identifying and examining the relationship between black resistance to racial subordination and the development of antiresisting laws. This examination reveals three antiblack dimensions of these laws. First, they dissimulatively reinscribe fraught antebellum racial relations of power. Second, they were broadened to criminalize resisting unlawful arrest as part of the punitive frontlash against the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Movement, and the black-led urban uprisings of the 1960s. Third, they require black people to surrender their bodies to modern racially subordinating policing. This Article provides a race-informed conceptual framework interrogating the normative assumption that physical resistance to law enforcement and the capture of arrest violates a sacrosanct social contract and is thus rightfully punishable. Ultimately, this Article calls for a shift in the response to black resistance to the capture of arrest and racially subordinating policing away from punitive criminalization and toward transformative instigation to eradicate the harms animating said resistance. * Lecturer, Research Scholar, Columbia Law School; Adjunct Professor, New York University School of Law. J.D., Harvard Law School; B.A., Columbia University. This Article has benefited from presentations made at the Columbia Law School Academic Fellows Workshop, John Mercer Langston Workshop sponsored by Emory University School of Law, CrimFest Conference, Criminal Justice Ethics Schmooze, Decarceration Law Professors Workshop, and Northeastern People of Color/Mid-Atlantic People of Color Conference. I would like to thank the participants of these workshops for their assistance and others who gave comments, including Darren Hutchinson, Kendall Thomas, Bernard Harcourt, Olatunde C. Johnson, Frank Rudy Cooper, Jocelyn Simonson, Fareed Hayat, Alice Ristroph, and Irene Joe. I received excellent research assistance from Nayzak Ali. I thank Lucas Amodio and the Boston University Law Review editors for excellent editorial suggestions. This Article is dedicated to my grandfather Elza Robert Sampson, a black veteran who violently resisted a white sheriff's deputy in the Jim Crow South-and lived to tell the tale. 1

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