Chivalry, 'Race' and Discretion at the Canadian Border

• NCJ Number: 224262
• Journal: British Journal of Criminology Volume: 48 Issue: 5 Dated: September 2008 Pages: 620-640
• Author(s): Anna Pratt; Sara K. Thompson
• Date Published: September 2008
• Length: 21 pages
• Grant Number(s): 410-2002-0268
• Sponsoring Agency: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom

Annotation

This paper examines the ‘how’ of border control decisionmaking and the unsettled, ambiguous and heterogeneous configurations of racialized (race-based) risk knowledges that shape the pervasive discretion of frontline border control officers.

Abstract

While race is certainly present, racialized risk knowledges are constituted in connection with a variety of other knowledges. African-Americans are not just ‘Black,’ they are American and Black. Similarly, Jamaicans are not simply ‘Black.’ Muslim men from a variety of countries and regions are regarded as suspect. And, it is indeed men, not women, who represent the chief crime-security threats and who are targeted by the enforcement efforts at the border. Nationality, culture, religion, and gender are all prominent considerations. These are usually deployed in connection with a host of other possible signifiers, such as city of origin, make of car, and travel route. Both race and risk are dynamic and heterogeneous categories rather than static and fixed. In summary, the play of racialized risk knowledges in the discretionary decisionmaking of frontline border officers cannot be reduced in any simple way to something called ‘a racial profile,’ to the discriminatory beliefs of individual officers, nor to the racist intentions of authorities. Until frontline officers, senior officials, policymakers, and scholars take seriously the discretionary context and the dynamic and heterogeneous empirical contexts, efforts to address the problem of ‘racial profiling’, whether scholarly, political, or legal will continue to miss the mark. This paper takes the ambiguity surrounding racial profiling at the border seriously and traces the dynamic and heterogeneous configurations of racialized knowledges that constitute border risks and that shape the broad discretion of frontline border control officers in Canada. References