Decolonial Intermediation in Crisis Heterotopic Space

This chapter is entitled “Decolonial Intermediation in Crisis Heterotopic Space”. Davis (2003) as part of their exposé question “Are Prisons Obsolete?” provides insights relevant to the application of a decolonial feminist analysis of local community policing in respect to the human rights of Black women to have security in public recreational leisure spaces. The plenteously detailed insights about the gendering of capitalistic policing services, elucidated in this book, render further luminosity to the extent to which policing directed at protecting the security of women in public space is perforated by oppressive patriarchal ideologies and practices perpetuating the gendering of recreational space. Kimberlé Crenshaw debates against such practice in that it is premised on the insistence of a post-racial society as espoused by neoconservative scholars, in which “the extension of formal equality to all Americans regardless of color – has already been achieved” or when articulated by Critical Legal Studies (CLS), a question is postulated as to whether “civil rights struggle represents a long, steady march toward social transformation” (Crenshaw 1988: 1334). When considering the Women’s Night Safety Charter (WNSC) by the London Assembly, one perceives that there is a cognizance of the significance of commercial interests to the legal ideology and hegemony of liberal reform discourse. Nevertheless, there is a reticence to respond to what Crenshaw identifies as “the relationship of racism to [this] hegemony” (ibid.). From a decolonial feminist perspective, the legacy of colonial racism is at the roots of the disproportionate violence perpetrated against Black women. Consequently, WNCS, as with the legal ideology of similar charters, “must include race consciousness if the accepted objective is to transcend oppressive belief systems” (ibid.: 1336).