Further Reading — Chapter 36: Racial Surveillance and the Discriminatory Gaze

Primary Scholarly Works

1. Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015.

The canonical work on racial surveillance. Browne traces the genealogy of modern surveillance through the history of controlling Black mobility and labor, arguing that modern surveillance technologies are not merely analogous to but continuous with the racial control techniques of slavery and colonialism. Chapters on the lantern laws, the slave ship manifest as biometric document, and the passport as racializing technology are essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand why surveillance cannot be analyzed as racially neutral. Browne's concept of "racializing surveillance" — processes that reify racial boundaries rather than merely responding to pre-existing identities — is one of the most generative analytical contributions to surveillance studies of the past two decades.

2. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. 3rd ed. Routledge, 2015.

The foundational text of racial formation theory. Omi and Winant's argument that race is a socially constructed category continually remade through political, economic, and cultural processes provides the theoretical infrastructure for understanding how surveillance systems participate in the production of racial identity rather than merely responding to it. Essential background for understanding why "the algorithm doesn't see race" arguments are analytically insufficient.

3. Buolamwini, Joy. Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines. Random House, 2023.

Buolamwini's account of the Gender Shades research and its aftermath: how commercial facial recognition systems were built with documented racial and gender bias, how the companies whose systems were evaluated responded (poorly), and what it means to fight for accountability in a technical landscape where the myth of algorithmic objectivity is deeply entrenched. More accessible than academic texts on algorithmic bias; essential for understanding the human stakes of the research.

On Predictive Policing and Algorithmic Discrimination

4. Harcourt, Bernard. Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

A prophetic work that anticipated the predictive policing debate. Harcourt examines the use of actuarial methods — risk scoring, statistical prediction — in criminal justice, arguing that such methods are not neutral tools but are embedded in political choices about which populations to scrutinize and which to ignore. Essential for understanding the theoretical stakes of the feedback loop problem in predictive policing.

5. Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. St. Martin's Press, 2018.

Though focused on class as much as race, Eubanks's examination of algorithmic decision systems in public benefits, child welfare, and homeless services is indispensable for understanding how the feedback loops of surveillance systems compound pre-existing inequality. The chapter on Allegheny County's predictive child welfare algorithm is a masterclass in how data-driven systems can extend rather than resolve structural discrimination.

On Immigration and Border Surveillance

6. Molina, Natalia. How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. University of California Press, 2014.

Molina's concept of "racial scripts" — the recycling of racial narratives across immigrant groups over time — provides essential historical context for understanding contemporary immigration enforcement surveillance. She demonstrates how the racialization of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the early twentieth century created templates that were applied to subsequent immigrant groups, and how surveillance and documentation requirements were central to that racialization process.

On Indigenous Surveillance and Settler Colonialism

7. Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Coulthard's analysis of settler colonialism as an ongoing structure of dispossession provides essential context for understanding why the surveillance of Indigenous land defenders cannot be analyzed as ordinary law enforcement. His argument that settler colonial power is continuously reproduced through political, legal, and surveillance mechanisms — not merely historically established — reframes the Standing Rock surveillance as part of an ongoing colonial project rather than an exceptional response to a particular protest.

Journalism and Primary Investigation

8. Associated Press Investigation: The NYPD Demographics Unit. Multiple reports by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, 2011–2012. Available at AP Archive.

The original Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporting that revealed the existence and scope of the NYPD's covert surveillance of Muslim communities. The AP's reporting, based on leaked documents, detailed the unit's mapping of Muslim-owned businesses, infiltration of mosques and student organizations, and monitoring of political and religious activity — all without the legal predicate of any specific criminal investigation. The documents and reporting remain essential primary sources for understanding the operationalization of religious and ethnic surveillance.

9. Biddle, Sam, et al. "Leaked Documents Reveal the Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to Defeat the Pipeline Resistance." The Intercept, May 27, 2017.

The primary publication of the TigerSwan internal documents, which revealed the scope of private surveillance of Standing Rock water protectors, the counterterrorism framing of the movement, and the coordination between TigerSwan and law enforcement. The Intercept's full document cache, available online, is one of the most important primary sources for understanding contemporary surveillance of environmental and Indigenous activism.

Policy and Advocacy

10. Brayne, Sarah. Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Based on four years of embedded research with the Los Angeles Police Department, Brayne's sociological study of how police departments integrate big data and surveillance technology is the most rigorous empirical examination of predictive policing in practice. Brayne documents how data-driven policing extends police reach into communities, creates "secondary surveillance" of people connected to subjects of interest, and changes the relationship between discretion and data in law enforcement decision-making. An essential empirical grounding for the theoretical arguments of this chapter.

This reading list moves from foundational theory (Browne, Omi and Winant) through applied empirical work (Brayne, Eubanks) to journalism and primary sources (AP, The Intercept). Students beginning with Browne and Buolamwini will have the conceptual vocabulary for the more technical works; those interested in policy should also engage with the ACLU's reports on predictive policing and facial recognition, available freely on their website.