Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
Summary
Argues that Blackness has been a central site where surveillance is practiced, theorized, and resisted. Browne traces modern surveillance back to the methods used to control enslaved and free Black people: branding, slave ship design, runaway notices, and lantern laws requiring Black people to carry lit candles after dark. She follows these through to biometrics and post-9/11 airport security. She also documents “dark sousveillance”: ways Black people have watched back, evaded, and resisted.
Why it’s useful here
- Corrects the history. Surveillance didn’t begin with the internet or with Snowden. Who is watched has always followed racial lines.
- Grounds the privacy thread in the same history of enclosure and control that Federici traces for gender.
- “Dark sousveillance” is a model for anti-surveillance practice rooted in community, not only individual tools.
Key ideas
- Racializing surveillance
- Lantern laws as an early technology of visibility and control
- Dark sousveillance: resistance to and evasion of surveillance
- Biometrics and the continuity of racial sorting
Related
- eubanks-2018-automating-inequality.md
- federici-2004-caliban-and-the-witch.md