Racial Impurity and Dangerous Bodies: Pollution and the Criminalization of Blackness in US Society

At the center of contemporary struggles over aggressive policing practices is an assumed association in U.S. culture of blackness with criminality. Rima L. Vesely-Flad examines the religious and philosophical constructs of the black body in U.S. societyexamining racialized ideas about purity and pollution as they have developed historically and as they are institutionalized today in racially disproportionate policing and mass incarceration. These systems keep threatening populations in a constant stateof harassment and tension so that they are unable to pollute the morals of mainstream so.