Docile or dangerous? An intersectional analysis of Asian-descent adults’ policing experiences

Drawing from the experiences of sixty-three interviewees, I elucidate how Asian-descent people in the United States make sense of the intersecting dynamics that configure the link between racial typicality and policing. Their narratives foreground relationality, gendered racism, and classed racism as guiding frameworks for how they believe police officers assign meanings of dangerousness or docility to cues of Asian-ness. I argue that their experiences exemplify how police-citizen interactions function as boundary-making events that brighten racial boundaries via the differential deployment of authority and legal violence according to gendered and classed constructions of racial prototypes. This study contributes to the growing race scholarship that interrogates notions of racial groupness. And while I focus on Asian-descent individuals, my findings underscore broader gendered and classed racial boundary making processes that manifest via disparate policing. Altogether, this study offers a more nuanced and expansive theoretical conception of race making in American policing.