Jared Sexton & Steve Martinot — The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy (2003)
Social Identities, vol. 9, no. 2 (2003), pp. 169–181.
Sexton and Martinot argue that police violence against Black people in the United States is not an exceptional failure of an otherwise functional system but the avant-garde of white supremacy — the leading edge of a social structure that requires anti-Black violence as its operational condition. The police do not merely enforce the law in racially biased ways; they constitute the racial boundary that makes the law’s domain possible. Anti-Black violence is not a bug but a feature.
This argument is positioned against liberal accounts that treat racial disparities in policing as correctable failures amenable to reform, diversity training, or better institutional design. Sexton and Martinot argue that the problem is structural: white supremacy is not a bias within an otherwise neutral system but the ontological condition of that system’s existence. Addressing it requires confronting the structure itself, not its symptoms.
For OM: this essay grounds the Moloch critique’s claim that some coordination problems have “axiomatic, ontological roots” — the game board itself is violent, not merely the games played on it. No coordination mechanism design can solve a problem whose cause is the rules that define the game.