Beyond Boomerang

This review article examines the historical relationship between American imperial power and its impact on racist domestic policing through an exploration of Stuart Schrader’s Badges Without Borders. I argue that conventional approaches to the “boomerang” effect of imperial violence on the metropole fail to adequately capture the complex, fugal relationship between racist state power within the United States and its expressions abroad. Schrader’s in depth, historical and archival interrogation of these relationships sheds new light on U.S. imperialism and its capacity to deflect attention away from its own violence. In holding the “foreign” and “domestic” together “in a single analytic frame,” Schrader gives us a new language for combatting racist police violence precisely when we need it most.