Everyday sovereign exclusion: conceptualising police violence and deaths in custody as a racial production of homo sacer

ABSTRACT Although Giorgio Agamben figures prominently in research examining sovereign state-based exclusion, his theories are marked by two commonly identified limitations. The absolute nature of Agamben's conceptualization of exclusion diminishes meaningful minority resistance, and his disembedded account of excised peoples as homo sacer hides the common racial basis of sovereign violence. Consequently, this article draws on the work of Achille Mbembé and Alexander G. Weheliye to reframe Agamben's sovereign exclusion as an everyday and contested process that is inseparable from the racial production of minorities. This reconceptualised framework is used to demonstrate how police violence towards Black Americans in the United States of America and the death of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in custody in Australia is orientated towards the production of political communities. I argue that these cases of racial exclusion treat Bla(c)k people as homo sacer to define the colonial sovereign-state polities of the US and Australia in covert racial terms.


Introduction
Giorgio Agamben is a prominent figure within scholarship on sovereign state-based exclusion.Much of this research draws on Agamben's (1998, 8;2005, 36) comprehensive theoretical framework that sees the extrajudicial treatment of people as a constituting sovereign power occurring prior to, and establishing the jurisdictional boundaries of, constituted law.However, Agamben's (1998Agamben's ( , 2000Agamben's ( , 2005) ) theory about the excision of individuals to enact political jurisdiction and power is undermined by several commonly identified conceptual flaws.It is argued that the complete nature of exclusion that Agamben (2000, 41) theorises is unrealistic, and even more concerningly, that his theory creates a rhetorical device used to diminish the meaningful actions and resistances of minorities (Owens 2009;Weheliye 2014).Part of this problem is the way Agamben's notion of the 'camp' has often been interpreted as a spatially delimited and complete state of exception, something that is exceedingly difficult to find historical examples of (Turner 2016;Wells 2019).Furthermore, Agamben's (1998, 73) abstract framing of excluded peoples as homo sacerpersons defined by their ability to be killed with impunityis criticized for ignoring the racial grounds on which exclusion commonly occurs (Weheliye 2014;Whitley 2017).
Addressing these criticisms is important because Agamben's conceptualization of sovereign exclusion can provide important insights into the situation faced by minorities who, despite residing at the heart of their state-based political communities, are treated as killable by police, prison guards and other state authorities.Additionally, Agamben's theory draws our attention to the productive aspect of this exclusion, namely that it is used to produce a states' political community.Consequently, this article reframes Agamben's conceptual framework so that it better explains the contemporary fashion in which people are actually treated as if they are outside of the state polity.This reframing draws on the work of Achille Mbembé (2003) and Alexander G. Weheliye (2014) to conceptualize sovereign exclusion, not as something produced and bounded by the exceptional spatiality of the 'camp', but as a mobile phenomenon enacted through everyday relationships between polity members and authorities.This brings the issue of race to the centre of Agamben's work by emphasizing the inseparability of practices of exclusion from the racial grounds on which those practices are regularly constituted.
Additionally, this article deploys its reconceptualised framework of sovereign exclusion to demonstrate how two prominent examples of official everyday minority persecution are in fact instances of political community and authority construction.This is significant because it suggests that the practices in question are not subversions or failures of the law, but constituting processes that create the necessary conditions for the law.The two practices in question are police violence towards Black Americans in the United States of America (US) and the failure to care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples held in custody leading to their death in Australia.These practices have been selected because, while they are part of different historical patterns of racial production and exclusion (Hazel 2018;Wolfe 2001), they occur in democratic and affluent countries that uphold non-discrimination legal principles.There is thus a contradiction between the multicultural and non-discriminatory legal frameworks of the US and Australia and the treatment of Bla(c)k people as if they are killable. 1 I argue that a racially attuned and mobile form of Agamben's notion of sovereign exclusion explains the ongoing contradictory existence of racial exclusion and non-discriminatory legal frameworks in the US and Australia.The racial exclusion is the constituting of political authority by treating Bla(c)k people as homo sacer.This continues to define the colonial political communities of the US and Australia in racial terms, providing the grounds for contemporary democratic frameworks that are already and covertly racialized; even though resultant constituted legal frameworks are rarely racially framed.This is a key reason why, whether it is at the hands of American police or under the gaze of Australian prison guards, Bla(c)k people are more commonly cast as if their death is of no legal consequence compared to white American and Australian populations.

The history of sovereign racial exclusion in the US and Australia
The claim that racial exclusion in the US and Australia is a form of sovereign-polity production is no doubt a controversial one.However, historically the racial construction of US and Australian state-based political communities was commonplace.In the US the practice of slavery produced a racially 'othered' form of cheap labour that was used by, and defined, a white majority American political community (Wilson 2018).The drawing of a boundary between the main white-American polity and a Black 'other' continued with Black Codes, Jim Crowe Laws and segregation (Wilson 2018).While in Australia, the exclusion and dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples paved the way for European settlement and land ownership, establishing a state-based political community defined by whiteness (Wolfe 2001;Watson 2009).
These are very different histories of sovereign exclusion, and it is important not to flatten the diverse cohorts of people subject to sovereign violence in the US and Australia or to conflate the nature of that violence.Yadira Perez Hazel (2018, 61) suggests that differences between the historical treatment of Black Americans and Blak Australians continues to influence political movements as 'Black Americans negotiate belonging in a colonizing country they were kidnapped and forced to build.For Blak Aboriginal Australians the fight is for self-determination and sovereignty over their land'.
However, important commonalities exist across the histories of sovereign exclusion in the US and Australia.From a postcolonial and sociological perspective (e.g.Said 1978;Waters 2002), the differing systems of sovereign exclusion both appear to construct discursive and political racial categories.In a form of 'orientalism' that has been described as 'Aboriginalism', the doctrine of terra nullius and subsequent colonial Australian policies are intertwined with colonial discourses that erase the rich culture and history of First Nations Australians by producing a new racial identity: that of the uncultured 'savage' (Attwood 2020).Likewise, policies of slavery and segregation produced a racial category that framed Black people as objects of cheap labour and property (Weheliye 2014).Patrick Wolfe (2001) sees the relevant colonial and ascribed racial categories as different types of 'Blackness'one characterized as exploitable and enslaved labour and the other as a dispossessible form of indigeneityboth of which rely on overlapping and racist discourses of white supremacy (Bonds and Inwood 2016; Weheliye 2014). 2  Another common aspect of the official and sovereign racial exclusion suffered by Bla (c)k Peoples in the US and Australia prior to the mid-twentieth Century, was its enactment through express legal instruments (Watson 2009;Wilson 2018).Consequently, the Civil Rights Movements of the 1950s and 1960s, which began in the US and had a profound influence in Australia (Edmonds 2012), sought to reform the overt legal entrenchment of racial inequality and segregation.US Civil Rights activists focussed on repealing Jim Crow laws (Jones-Eversley et al. 2017;Morris 1999), and in Australia, advocates challenged the constitutional excision of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples from the Australian population (Watson 2018).Despite the significant legal reforms won by Civil Rights Movementswhich included US court cases making many Jim Crowe laws unconstitutional and an amendment of the Australian Constitution to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People in the national censusracial exclusion has remained a prominent part of the American and Australian political landscape. 3 What is unique about the post Civil Rights era of Bla(c)k exclusion, is its more covert nature.Modern racial exclusion in the US and Australia is rarely written into official laws and rules, or openly articulated by members of governments.Instead, it is performed in the unequal and violent treatment of people by government representatives (Aymer 2016;Crusto 2020).This shift in contemporary exclusion is part of a more general change in how racism operates, which is captured by the concept of 'new racism': the construction of racial hierarchies based on culture and identity as opposed to biology (Moran 2011, 175-176).The novelty of 'new racism' is disputed by scholars who argue that apparent examples of 'new racism' treat the cultural features used to 'other' as fixed to racial groups and thus proxies for biological descriptors (Moran 2011, 176).Regardless, there is clearly an increasingly hidden nature to the racist framings and treatment of people.

Everyday racial violence as an expression of sovereign power
The theoretical framework used in this article to identify the racialized construction of political communities draws on, but at the same time seeks to reframe, Giorgio Agamben's critical account of sovereignty.Agamben (1998;2000;2005) does not see sovereignty or political authority as arising from positive constitutions or social contracts.Instead, Agamben (2005, 36) follows Carl Schmitt (1985) in arguing that the ultimate authority and power of the state, is the power to decide who the law applies to, or in other words, who exists as part of the polity and who remains outside of it.In Agamben's (2005, 7) words, sovereign exception is 'the constitutive paradigm of juridical order'.
Significantly, sovereign exception 'is not an event achieved once and for all but is continually operative in the civil state in the form of the sovereign decision' (Agamben 1998, 109).In a Heideggerian move, Agamben (1998, 18, 83;2005, 36, 73) sees the extra-judicial performance of exception as a constituting sovereign power that underlies constituted laws.Sovereign exception may coincide with state laws that diminish peoples' rights, making exception part of a juridical measure, but 'it cannot be understood in legal terms' (Agamben 2005, 1).What establishes exception is always a performance, the treating of a person as if they lack basic rights, as if they are not part of the polity, as if they are just 'bare life' (Agamben 1998, 83).
These fundamental tenets of Agamben's theory, I argue, are more important than ever when it comes to examining the exclusion of minorities.As is well documented in recent applications of Agamben's work (e.g. Caton 2006;Everuss 2020aEveruss , 2020b)), modern democratic states such as the US and Australia have placed people into legal holes where they are under the complete biopolitical control of the state but lack the rights of that state's political community.This situation was encountered by inmates in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay (Caton 2006;Minca 2005;Ibrahim and Howarth 2019).And, in Australia it is the position of asylum seekers arriving by boat, who are deemed not to have reached Australia's migration zone regardless of their physical location (Everuss 2020a(Everuss , 2020b)).Indeed, The Australian Government has expressly stated in domestic law that their treatment of maritime asylum seekers is not deemed invalid or illegal even if such treatment 'is inconsistent with Australia's international obligations' or breaches '[t]he rules of natural justice' (Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Act 2014 ss 22A & 22B).Agamben's framework for sovereign exclusion is uniquely positioned to describe how such blatant eviscerations of constituted law can occur in democratic states that purport to uphold the rule of law, and indeed to provide an explanation as to why such exclusion occurs, namely, to establish the authority and jurisdiction of sovereign states.
However, despite the ongoing importance of Agamben's theory, conceptual flaws have been identified in his framing of exclusion.These flaws relate to two key constructs that Agamben centres his theory around, the first of which is the figure of homo sacer.Homo sacer is a Roman legal category describing a person 'who may be killed and yet not sacrificed' (Agamben 1998, 8).Agamben (1998, 73) uses homo sacer to exemplify the excluded person who is removed from the law/soverign polity, and consequently brought closer to the soverign because no legal framework is left to mediate the actions of authorities towards them.Furthermore, the existence of homo sacer continues to illustrate that behind constituted law is the constituting authority of sovereign power and this is why Agamben (1998, 83) argues that homo sacer 'preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted'.
The second construct of Agamben's work that has been a source of criticism is that of the space in which homo sacer resides, which is Agamben's conceptualization of the 'camp'.Agamben describes a 'camp' as 'the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule' (Agamben 2000, 39).In this space the actions of sovereign agents are indistinguishable from the life of detainees as 'power confronts nothing but pure life, without any [political or legal] mediation' (Agamben 1998, 171).For many the 'camp' is seen as a static and fixed geographical location (e.g.Minca 2005;Turner 2016), an interpretation supported by Agamben's (1998;2000) strong focus on Nazi concentration camps.
A problem identified with Agamben's constructs is that they describe a form of exclusion that is absolute (Whitley 2017, 13).Homo sacer is entirely defined by their excision from the polity because they are 'stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life' (Agamben 2000, 41).Likewise, 'camps', as fixed sites of complete exception, contain no meaningful resistance or action that could mediate sovereign power and render inmates anything more than 'pure biological life' (Agamben 2000, 41).This is problematic because thinkers critical of Agamben's work are quick to point out that no matter how violent 'camps' may be, their detainees find ways to meaningfully resist exclusion and perform their political value (Owens 2009;Turner 2016).The difficulty of reaching Agamben's threshold of exclusion is highlighted by Charles Wells (2019, 417), who suggests that the Guantanamo Bay detainees described by Agamben as homo sacer, do not fit the definition.Wells (2019, 417) refers to the difficulty that the US Government had in dealing with detainees when seeking to shutdown Guantanamo Bay, stating that 'after more than a decade of detention, what is striking is that prisoners at Guantanamo cannot be killed'.
Such criticisms force a reinterpretation of homo sacer and 'camps' away from the more absolutist of Agamben's terms so that their fluid, ephemeral and contested nature can be established.Even in the direst circumstances, a person is only homo sacer from the perspective of the sovereign and polity that perform and accept their framing as such, and this is subject to challenge, including by homo sacer themselves.This contested and partial version of homo sacer accords with Achille Mbembé's account of sovereign exclusion.Mbembé's (2003) work parallels Agamben's by equating sovereign exclusion to death, either physical or in another substantial form, such as the death of a slave's humanity when they are cast as mere possessions.However, Mbembé (2003, 22) states that: [i]n spite of the terror and the symbolic sealing off of the slave, he or she maintains alternative perspectives toward time, work, and self.… Treated as if he or she no longer existed except as a mere tool and instrument of production, the slave nevertheless is able to draw almost any object, instrument, language, or gesture into a performance and then stylize it.
In a similar vein, Alexander G. Weheliye's (2014, 12) notion of 'habeas viscus' draws attention to a form of humanity that, 'in contrast to bare life, insists on the importance of miniscule movements, glimmers of hope, scraps of food, the interrupted dreams of freedom found in those spaces deemed devoid of full human life'.Furthermore, Weheliye (2014) argues that the actions and experiences of the oppressed need to not only be acknowledged, which Agamben fails to do, but also to be interpreted as something meaningful that is more than resistance to exclusion.
Therefore, Agamben's theory should be reframed so that sovereign exclusion does not actually render someone 'bare life' but is an action that treats them as if they are 'bare life', and which is subject to resistance by proclaiming the individual to be more than 'bare life' (Everuss 2020a).Furthermore, the actions, freedoms and agency of people should not be framed purely in terms of what is taken away by a sovereign or expressed as resistance, because even in 'camps' people engage in meaningful practices of communication and culture that are not purely designed in response to their treatment (Weheliye 2014).
Nevertheless, acknowledging the actions and meaningful relations of the oppressed does not undo the mechanisms of oppression they face.It does not stop people from being treated as if they are killable, as if they are homo sacer.In short, sovereign representatives still attempt to exclude, and even if this exclusion is not complete in nature, it can have devastating impacts.As such, Agamben's relational structure of sovereign exclusion remains highly relevant to the actions of modern state representatives.Wells (2019) is right that Guantanamo Bay is not permanently a space of exception, but there have been moments when those residing in Guantanamo Bay were placed in a sovereign state of exception, when unpunished deaths occurred due to the violent treatment of detainees, and thus, when a 'camp' existed (Ibrahim and Howarth 2019).
What the analysis of this article suggests is that there is far greater flexibility in where states of exception occur than posited by either Agamben or Mbembé.While these authors looked to the spatial examples of concentration camps, plantations and colonies, 'topographies of cruelty' can fluidly spring to life across urban settings in democratic states.These spaces of exclusion are established relationally, when police officers, prison guards or other sovereign agents treat people as if they are killable, thus excising them from the polity who are deemed to politically matter.In such circumstances, people are not excluded because they enter an excised space, but an excised space is created because they are excluded.This is a more fluid account of Agamben's theory that moves away from the 'camp' being a fixed geographical space, and towards an alternate interpretation of his work, namely seeing the 'camp' as a form of logic or governmentality (e.g.Diken and Laustsen 2006).It is an interpretation supported by Agamben's claim that 'camps' are 'the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living' (Agamben 1998, 166), but not by Agamben's reliance on the fixed site of the Nazi concentration camp as his primary camp exemplar.This flexible establishment of exclusion at the site of the body, as opposed to a geographical camp, was identified by Claudio Minca (2006, 387) in the police killing of Jean Charles De Menezes, a Brazilian electrician shot dead by London police in 2005 because '[h]is behaviour and clothing (according to the agents, much too heavy for the warm London temperature), rendered him an homo sacer'.This example demonstrates that camps are performatively enacted at the space of bodies and disappear when their enacting performances cease.
Framing spaces of exception or camps as relationally constructed and performative not only implies an enhanced flexibility in terms of where they can exist, but also in terms of who can establish them.Camps are not just produced by political leaders who have the power to amend laws, but also by lower-level authority figures that physically interact with polity members.This point is made by Judith Butler (1997, 357) who suggests that sovereign 'power is no longer restrained within the sovereign form of the state' and is instead '[d]iffused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus'.For Butler (2004, 54), this form of sovereignty emerging through governmentality 'makes itself known primarily in the instance of the exercise of prerogative power'.The prerogative power grants 'petty sovereigns' 'the power to render unilateral decisions, accountable to no law and without any legitimate authority' (Butler 2004, 56).Thus, there is a downloading of sovereign authority from the legislative state to its petty sovereigns.
This also, I suggest, raises another significant criticism of Agamben's work, and indeed studies of 'bare life' and biopolitics more generally.All too often these concepts propose a false universality to the exercise and experience of exclusion.Agamben (1998, 115) states that '[i]f today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri'.However, as Butler (2004, 68) points out: such general claims do not yet tell us how this power functions differentially, to target and manage certain populations, to derealize the humanity of subjects who might potentially belong to a community bound by commonly recognized laws; and they do not tell us how sovereignty, understood as state sovereignty in this instance, works by differentiating populations on the basis of ethnicity and race'.
In contradiction to Agamben's theory, sovereign exclusion is not equally distributed across populations as certain groups, particularly racial minorities, are more commonly subject to exclusionary sovereign violence than others.
Accordingly, while the 'camp' is a general part of the political order or the nomos of society, it regularly differentially impacts members of society on racial grounds.This is identified in Mbembé's (2003) account of the relationship between race, racism and 'bare life' produced by 'necropolitics', or the politics of death.Mbembé (2003, 17) sees racism as, firstly, providing the necessary grounds to distinguish insiders from outsiders; and, secondly, fuelling the 'enmity' between these cohorts so that the polity accepts the death of those who are excluded.In other words, race provides the grounds to distinguish homo sacer from polity members and entrenches the divide between the two.
Alexander G. Weheliye (2014) takes this further, arguing that the very process of sovereign exception is a process of racialization.For Weheliye (2014, 4), the type of activity that Agamben and others describe as sovereign exception is the classification and distinction of the human from the nonhuman, and 'bare life' and biopolitical discourse 'misconstrues how profoundly race and racism shape the modern idea of the human'.It is mistaken to conceptualize the sovereign classification of the human and nonhuman in separate terms to the racial construction of populations.Even if the former could exist without the latter, it would proceed by deploying the mechanisms and techniques that have been developed to racially produce excluded populations.In Weheliye's (2014, 5-6) terms: [e]ven if distinctions among different groups of humans are based not on race but on nationality or religion, for instance, there exists no such thing as an absolute biopolitical substance, because those differentiations not only obey the procedural tenets of racializing assemblages but also very often are translated to visual phenomena.
As will be shown in this article, this assemblage of sovereign exclusion is enacted by onthe-ground petty sovereigns who draw on institutional cultures to racially define human and nonhuman subjects (Sekhon 2019;Valdez, Coleman, and Akbar 2020).More specifically, it is suggested that the unequal and bias performance of extreme violence against Bla(c)k people is a racializing process that treats them as homo sacer, placing them within embodied racial 'camps'.

When bla(c)k lives become killable
The previous section drew on critical sovereignty theories to describe a form of polity production and related minority exclusion that is enacted through on-the-ground performances.In what follows, I examine two such types of performances that respectively occur in the US and Australia.It is argued that these performances similarly construct racial sovereign polities by treating Bla(c)k minorities as homo sacer in a way that leaves little juridical imprint.

Police violence in the United States
The first exclusionary practice examined here is the performance of violence and deadly force on Black Americans by police officers.This violence is exclusionary not just because of its brutality, but because it regularly results from racist cultures of policing.James Buehler (2017, 296) states that 'substantial evidence indicates that Black individuals and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic individuals are more likely than White individuals to be stopped by police or arrested'.This is evident in the police use of stop, question and frisk policies (SQF) to target Black Americans (Braga, Brunson, and Drakulich 2019;Fradella, Morrow, and White 2021).For example, while Black people made up 24.4% of Boston's population in 2010, they accounted for 63.3 percent of those subject to SQF between 2007-2010 (Butler 2018, 92).Likewise, in 2019 Black people made up 61 percent of those subject to SQF in NYC, even though they roughly accounted for only one quarter of residents (Fradella, Morrow, and White 2021;US Census Bureau 2019).
SQF feeds into a system of enhanced policing of Black people that Paul Butler (2018) describes as 'the hard stare'.Most arrests of Black Americans are for misdemeanours, such as public spitting, public intoxication, drinking in public, riding bikes on the sidewalk, traffic offences and jaywalking.Butler (2018, 62) suggests that misdemeanour behaviours are rife across all communities, but it is Black communities that police spend most of their time monitoring.In 2017 Black people were 4.5 times more likely to be arrested for misdemeanours than white people in Las Angeles, and in 2016 Black people were 5.7 times more likely to be arrested for misdemeanours than white people in Seattle (Cadoff, Chauhan, and Bond 2020).The result of the 'hard stare' is that Black people are more commonly placed before 'street sovereigns' where their rights may potentially be ignored and their bodies subject to direct and unmitigated violence (Sekhon 2019;Valdez, Coleman, and Akbar 2020).In other words, Black people more often endure the sovereign decision.
However, the sovereign exclusion of Black people is not just driven by their over-policing, but also by their physical treatment once they encounter police.Research on available police data shows that Black people are more likely to receive violent treatment by police than white people (Butler 2018;Morrow, White, and Fradella 2017). 4A study of NYC's SQF and national Police-Public Contact Surveys, found that '[e]ven when officers report that civilians have been compliant and no arrest was made, blacks are 21.2 percent more likely to endure some form of force in an interaction' (Fryer 2019(Fryer , 1259)).Furthermore, Black men are around 2.5 times and Black women about 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts (Edwards, Lee, and Esposito 2019, 16794).
Not every act caught up in these statistics is an act of sovereign violence.To wield sovereign power is to act before the law exists, it is a pre-law process for which there can be no legal repercussion (Agamben 2005, 1).Justified and legal police force, even deadly force, or police violence deemed to breach the law and resulting in criminal sanction, are not examples of sovereign violence/exclusion.However, evidence indicates that Black people are more likely to be subject to extrajudicial police violence; the type of violence that treats them as homo sacer.For instance, Cody Ross, Winterhalder, and McElreath's (2021, 324) analysis of police related deaths identified 'statistically reliable evidence of anti-Black racial disparities in the killing of unarmed, nonaggressing civilians by police in both 2015 and 2016'.This finding was supported by research on police killings by Fagan and Campbell (2020, 952), which found: Black suspects are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than are persons of other racial or ethnic groups; even when there are no other obvious circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of deadly force reasonable.
Another example of Black Americans being subject to extrajudicial police violence is evident in the frequency by which they are subject to police chokeholds, an action described as modern day 'lynching' and part of a historical process of white state violence towards Black Americans (Aymer 2016, 368;Crusto 2020, 8).Chokeholds are banned in many parts of the US and even in places where they are not expressly prohibited, the use of aggressive chokeholds with enough force to kill is seen by many to inherently breach US law (Crusto 2020).Such chokeholds go far beyond an urgent need to restrain and become an unwarranted act of violence.Accordingly, violent chokeholds are not a normal deployment of the law, but instead a discretionary act in which a sovereign agent treats the law as if it does not apply to what they are doing.
In the jurisdictions where relevant data existswhich is very fewthe deployment of police chokeholds has been found to be a racialized practice.63 percent of the more than 200 complaints per year of police chokeholds in New York between 2006 and 2010a jurisdiction where chokeholds were explicitly bannedwere made by Black people (Coyne and Hall-Blanco 2016, 165).A similar figure was found by an NBC investigation into the use of Chokeholds by the Minneapolis Police Department between 1 January 2015 and 1 June 2020 (Siegel, Lehren, and Blankstein 2020).Over that time Minneapolis police used 'neck restraints' 237 times, rendering subjects unconscious 44 times, more than half of whom were Black.
The obvious counter position to the argument being made here is that the performance of chokeholds and other instances of unsanctioned violence are simply breaches of the law.This is indeed the augment behind the 'bad apple' narrative that seeks to individualize patterns of police violence against Black Americans (Illing 2020).However, the violence in question is not normally treated as an illegal act by the state (Butler 2018;Crusto 2020;Matteis 2015).Of the more than 1000 fatal police shootings per year between 2005 and 2015, only 54 officers were charged, and most were cleared or acquitted (Crusto 2020).
Mitchell Crusto (2020) explains this stating that police receive 'hyper-protections' to prosecution, including the 'Blue Shield'the legal doctrines condoning lethal forceand the 'Blue Code'police culture protecting officers from personal and criminal liability and supporting systemic racism.Crusto (2020, 21) states that 'normal protections, combined with the hyper-protections of the Blue Shield and the Blue Code, make it nearly impossible to prosecute and convict a white male police officer for killing a Black person'.
For example, in the case of Eric Garnerwho was killed in 2014 from a chokehold applied by NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo (Aymer 2016;Matteis 2015) the official autopsy classified his death a homicide, but Officer Pantaleo was not indicted by a grand jury who considered the chokehold to be a 'neck restraint'.And, an internal police investigation cleared Officer Pantaleo, deeming his actions to be an allowed 'headlock' (Matteis 2015, 102).Such semantics regularly occur following acts of police violence, rendering Black people like Eric Garner killable in the face of the law.There are counterexamples where police officers are held responsible for illegal uses of force, but Crusto (2020) suggests these require 'exceptional' evidence; such as the shocking almost 10-minute video of George Floyd's murder that was filmed by witness Darnella Frazier and which led to the prosecution of Derek Chauvin.
Therefore, many instances of violence performed by police officers on Black Americans, particularly men, treat the latter as homo sacer in relation to the state.Their bodies are excluded from the state and its legal rights, and thus a 'camp' is created that is defined by the racial profile of its occupant.The 'camp' is not a geographical location that eviscerates political rights, it is the space of racially excluded bodies established by sovereign violence.The space in 'which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the citizen' (Agamben 1998, 171).This is the hidden structure at play.The sovereign structure that underpins the ability of a police officer to publicly strangle or shoot and kill a Black citizen with impunity.They can do so because their actions are a discretionary sovereign performance of exclusion that comes prior to all codified law.Indeed, whether the law technically prohibits their violence is irrelevant, as their actions establish the boundary between those to whom the law applies and those outside of the law.
This also means that the actions of a police officer are doing more than excluding an individual.The definition of homo sacer is a generative process that establishes a polity as well as a sovereign power to decide the members of that polity (Agamben 1998, 28).The American polity, those on whom the systematic use of police violence is not acceptable, is racially defined in contrast to a Black homo sacer.This polity is consequently white, or at least not Black, because the boundary of the 'camp' is established between white American polity members and Black American homo sacer.
Police violence accordingly constructs a racial system of sovereign exclusion and constitution.One that follows in the mould of past colonial state systems of racial oppression and segregation, including 'slavery and Jim Crow laws [that have] left a residue of systemic racism in the United States that has devalued the lives of African Americans' (Clayton 2018, 449).What is different about contemporary police violence is its clandestine nature.It achieves violent racial segregation without leaving a clear juridical trace behind.

Australian deaths in custody
The second practice examined in this article is the failure by Australian authorities to care for detained Indigenous Australians which, at its worst, amounts to wilfully allowing or causing their death.A shocking example is the case of Ngaanyatjarra Elder, Mr Ward, who was 'cooked to death in the back of a prison van' in 2008 (Baldino, Drum, and Wyatt 2010, 419).Following Mr Ward's arrest for allegedly drink driving, he was transported 352 kilometres across rural Western Australia by Graham Powell and Nina Stokoe, employees of a private security firm hired by the Western Australia Department of Corrective Services.During the four-and-a-half-hour journey the sealed compartment in which Mr Ward was locked reached extreme temperatures above 56 degrees Celsius, ultimately causing his death (Baldino, Drum, and Wyatt 2010, 420).While horrific, the case of Mr Ward is one of many where a detained Indigenous Australian was killed by extreme neglect from sovereign representatives.
Indeed, this was the case four years later when 22-year-old Yamatji woman, Ms Dhu, died in custody.In August 2014, Ms Dhu was detained for unpaid fines.At the time she was suffering from pneumonia and septicaemia due to an existing broken rib (Blue 2017).Once in custody, Ms Dhu was taken to hospital but returned to her cell because 'her pain [was] attributed to "behavioural issues" or "drug withdrawals" by two different doctors' (Klippmark and Crawley 2018, 696).Ms Dhu cried, vomited, and begged for help but was ignored and belittled by the officers on duty.When Ms Dhu was finally taken back to hospital, now in a critical condition, no medical staff took her temperature, and she was returned to lockup (Blue 2017, 300).Her condition deteriorated and she was again taken to hospital, but 'instead of calling an ambulance, [officers] handcuffed her unconscious body and dragged her by her arms from her cell into the back of a police van' (Klippmark and Crawley 2018, 696).When Ms Dhu arrived at hospital she was in cardiac arrest and died soon after.
Like with the performances of police violence against Black Americans, allowing Indigenous Australians to die in such a fashion is an act of state violence that treats them as homo sacer.This act begins with the imprisonment of Indigenous people, which regularly occurs because of special legal frameworks including imprisonment for unpaid fines, systems of mandatory detention and 'Move-on' laws (Evershed, Allam, and Wahlquist 2020;Klippmark and Crawley 2018).Indigenous people are also disproportionality targeted through the selective application of criminal law by sovereign agents.
For example, drug caution and infringement notice schemes giving police officers discretion to peruse criminal convictions for minor drug offences are administered in a way that makes certain offences racially specific (e.g.Criminal Procedure Act 1986 (NSW), section 333).Police officers caution and fine non-Indigenous Australians at much higher rates than Indigenous Australians, who are more likely to face criminal prosecution and detention.Indigenous Australians are four times more likely to face prosecution than non-Indigenous Australians when found with small quantities of cannabis in the state of New South Wales (McGowan and Knaus 2020).
Together the selective design and application of legal instruments to target Indigenous Australians has caused their overincarceration in Australia.In the 2016 Australian census, Indigenous Australians accounted for 3.3% percent of the national population (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016), but in June of 2020 they made up 29% percent of Australia's prison population (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2020).The overincarceration of Indigenous people, means that they are 10 times more likely to die in custody than non-Indigenous Australians (Evershed, Allam, and Wahlquist 2020).Overincarceration was a central focus of the 1987 Royal Commission into Indigenous Deaths in Custody, but since this time the incarceration rate of Indigenous Australians has increased by more than ten percent and there have been more than 470 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody (Longman 2020, 66;Evershed et al. 2021).
In terms of the removal of Indigenous Australians from the Australian polity, selective detainment and overincarceration is only one factor at play.Once detained, the exclusion of Indigenous People is reinforced by a flagrant disregard for their physical wellbeing.Death when 'care [is] required but not given' is more than twice as likely for Indigenous Australians than non-Indigenous Australians (Evershed, Allam, and Wahlquist 2020).And, in addition to Mr Ward's and Ms Dhu's deaths, Coroners Reports of Indigenous Deaths in Custody contain harrowing descriptions of neglect.For example: 5   An Aboriginal woman with a chronic injury and a tooth abscess was denied pain medication for six weeks … she took her own life.The coroner said the pain was "a contributing factor in her despair" during her final weeks.
An Aboriginal man in the grip of cardiac arrest was made to walk to a guard station to use a portable oxygen unit before an ambulance was called.
Another Aboriginal man died of heart disease lying on a concrete bench in a Darwin police watch-house cell.The coroner said "a sick middle-aged Aboriginal man was treated like a criminal and incarcerated like a criminal; he died in a police cell which was built to house criminals … In my view, he was entitled to die as a free man."(Evershed, Allam, and Wahlquist 2020).
These are not isolated incidents, but part of a pattern of exclusionary neglect treating detained Indigenous Australians as homo sacer.
Thus, Indigenous Australians incarcerated by racist structures and then treated as killable are being placed in Agambenean 'camps', where the actions of sovereign representatives are indistinguishable from the physical existence of homo sacer (Agamben 1998, 183).As with those that exclude Black Americans, these 'camps' do not encompass entire and static geographical structures, but instead the bodies of the excluded.Mr Ward's 'camp', established when he was treated as killable, moved across inland Australia.Ms Dhu's 'camp' followed her from police detention to the hospital, where although it is standard practice to check the temperature of patients, her temperature was not taken (Blue 2017).
The positioning of Indigenous Australians in custody as homo sacer is also evidenced by the lack of criminal repercussions for their deaths.In fact, there has not been a single conviction in relation to the 432 Indigenous Deaths in custody between the 1991 Royal Commission's recommendations and June 2020 (Whittaker 2020).The potential for convictions is diminished by what Craig Longman (2020, 66) describes as 'a reticence on the part of those involved (including police or prison witnesses) to give full and frank accounts of what happened'.Despite the extraordinary power of police and prison officers due to their ability to 'represent the physical manifestation of the State's lawful and coercive force' (Longman 2020, 68), when it comes to the manifestation of that force against Indigenous Australians they are not made to account for their actions.
Accordingly, what is identified in the Australian context is not a series of isolated incidents, or the unsanctioned actions of bad cops and overzealous prison guards, but a hidden sovereign structure treating Black bodies as homo sacer.Morgan Brigg (2007, 403) describes this system of state exclusion as part of a structure in which 'Aboriginal people are governed as an "included-exclusion" within the Australian political community'.Also like the US context examined above, the exclusion of Indigenous Australians in custody creates a racially articulated polity formed in contrast to a Blak homo sacer.This aligns with Australia's original European settler polity, structurally embedded by the colonial legal frameworks of terra nullius (Havemann 2005).Indeed, throughout Australian history, there has been a constant pattern of exclusionary policies targeting Indigenous Australians including the 'White Australia Policy', the Stolen Generation, the entrapment of Indigenous Australians in biopolitical camps, and the ongoing Northern Territory Emergency Response (Moreton-Robinson 2009; Ransley and Marchetti 2021).This pattern of exclusion removes Indigenous Australians from political spaces so that those spaces can be inhabited by white residents (Everuss 2020b).
Current systems of Indigenous detention are therefore continuing to perform a possessive and racial form of settler colonial sovereignty (Klippmark and Crawley 2018).Ethan Blue (2017, 300) describes this process in relation to the failures to assist Ms Dhu, which he says constitutes a series of micro-solidarities of paternalistic whiteness and the settler state, in which state agentswho wear official uniforms and have to deal with 'those people'those rendered sick, unwell, unruly, and disorderly by the historical and social forces of colonialismcommunicate a shared experience to one another.
In other words, the everyday treatment of Indigenous Australians by sovereign agents enacts a contemporary form of sovereignty along well-established and historical racial lines.
While the structure of Indigenous incarceration and exclusion is systemic and embedded within contemporary Australian sovereignty, it is hidden.It manifests in shady excluded locations and is buried under racist depictions of Indigenous people.For instance, the overincarceration of Indigenous Australians is regularly framed as resulting from 'high rates of Aboriginal involvement in serious crime' (Weatherburn, Fitzgerald, and Hua 2003, 65).The systematic and racist nature of the criminalization and sovereign exclusion of Indigenous people is only brought to light when instances of violence towards Indigenous Australians are connected to identify the overarching structure involved.
Interpreting homo sacer as a racialized category This paper is not arguing that Bla(c)k peoples are always or inherently positioned as homo sacer.It is not suggested that every time a Bla(c)k person comes into contact with police officers or prison guards they are treated as killable.Instead, the practices described above indicate that Bla(c)k people are more likely to fall into the category of homo sacer than white people.That the risks of being placed into a situation where they may become killable, and then being treated as killable once in such a situation, is more common for Bla(c)k people.
For Agamben (2000, 31-32) this type of exclusion through the production of homo sacer exposes the foundational condition of contemporary life.This is 'bare life', a form of basic biological existence (zoe) on which the political identities and rights that are provided by polity membership (bios) can be placed (Agamben 1998, 90).Agamben (2000, 41) argues that all members of a polity can become homo sacer and thus be 'stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life'.However, this framing of homo sacer, and the interpretation of Agamben's 'camps' as a general logic of modern politics instead of territorial locations, provides no account for how exclusion is influenced by race and power (e.g.Diken and Laustsen 2006;Whitley 2017).This is problematic because, as this paper shows, the stripping of bios is interconnected with political power, and minorities including Bla(c)k people are more likely to have their political rights taken away.
The suggestion that Bla(c)k populations maintain a more tenuous grip on their statebased bios than their white polity counterparts is a significant contextualization of Agamben's theory.It shows how race plays a central role in sovereign exclusion/polity construction.Furthermore, as suggested by Weheliye (2014), race not only provides the grounds for exclusion, race is constructed by that exclusion.Removing someone from the polity is intertwined with what Weheliye (2014) sees as the racializing process of denying their humanity.Whether it is police violence or prison guard neglect, the actions of sovereign representatives produce homo sacer and at the same time create a racial other.Homo sacer is therefore an inherently racialized subject.
In such circumstances, Bla(c)k people are not naturally diminished or altered, and they are not necessarily uncared for by a broader or different public.They are only defined/treated as homo sacer within their relationship to a sovereign state.People exist within a myriad of political communities including those based on kinship, cultural and national groupings; civic organizations; union membership; religious participation; and work.Membership of these groupings provide a range of political identities and rights outside of state-based polity association.This is a fundamental aspect of critical sovereignty and border theories, which frame political authority as overlapping and contested (e.g.Everuss 2020b; Ozguc 2021).
Nevertheless, political communities have differing levels of power, and the political boundaries of state sovereignties are enforced by police, penal systems, military personnel, and covert surveillance organizations (Sekhon 2019;Valdez, Coleman, and Akbar 2020).Being homo sacer in the eyes of a sovereign state renders a person killable in relation to these powerful institutions and actors, as evidenced in the unpunished violence outlined in this article.This violence is fuelled by a racial-biopolitics, illustrating Mbembé's (2003, 17) claim that '[i]n the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state'.
However, even when focussing on the sovereign state-based killability of Bla(c)k people, it is important not fall into Agamben's trap of reducing effected people to their exclusion.In contrast to Agamben's cynical framing of politics that sees exclusion as inherent and absolute, or at least inherently a possibility and absolute when it occurs, Mbembé (2003, 22) suggests resistance is always possible by maintaining 'alternative perspectives toward time, work, and self'.Indeed, the forms of exclusion described above are currently being resisted by the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM), which creates a space for Bla(c)k people to express their political identities and proclaim their worth with the support of allies and consequently challenge their treatment as homo sacer.This is evident in Patricia Hill Collins's (2017Collins's ( , 1471) ) description of BLM as embracing a flexible form of solidarity to support diverse intersectional claims sharing the broad position that 'Black individuals within Black communities were worthy of political protection'.

Bla(c)k camps and white polities
There is another side of the exclusionary structure identified in this article.Whether in the theories of Agamben or Mbembé, sovereign exclusion creates a political community of the non-excluded.Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr (2004: 48) describe this process as defining the 'political and moral community through the distinguishing of forms of existence that do not merit the protection of that community'.Therefore, this article suggests that the political communities of the US and Australian sovereign states are racially defined, and furthermore, are constructed as white.When police and other sovereign authorities do not choose to stop and frisk white Americans, when they hand expiation notices to white Australians instead of prosecuting them, when they refrain from using lethal force during arrests of white civilians or hear the pleas for medical assistance made by white detainees, they are defining those people as part of the national polity.Subsequently, in Agamben's terms, a white racial identity must be a central 'form of life' or official political identity of national state polities in the U.S. and Australia.
The construction of a racial polity was a foundational and explicit part of the U.S. and Australia's colonial formations.Structures of slavery in the U.S. and the application of the doctrine of terra nullius to legally remove Indigenous Australians from their lands respectively rendered Bla(c)k peoples less than human, outside the polity, and killable (Bonds and Inwood 2016).However, these racial sovereign structures were supposed to be reformed by anti-discrimination discourses and laws, which were the great successes of Civil Rights Movements.Instead, public authorities transitioned to producing white racial polities in a covert manner.The identification of everyday racial borderings in this article accordingly supports Anne Bonds and Joshua Inwood's (2016, 720) claim that 'Rather than being a relic of the past or an ideology of extremists, white supremacy continues to produce social and spatial relations that frame broad understandings of difference'.In relation to my argument here, white supremacy continues to function by producing the very socio-spatial dialectic of modern state boundaries. 6 A similar claim is made by Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton (2003) who suggest that by committing racialized violence, police act as the avant-garde to produce a white supremacist social order.For Martinot and Sexton, it is not an abstract polity that police violence creates, but an inherently white polity.This is because police violence distinguishes 'between those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom it goes without saying.Police spectacle is not the effect of the racial uniform; rather, it is the police uniform that is producing re-racialisation' (Martinot and Sexton 2003, 174).In other words, sovereign power in its primary moment of defining the polity also defines the polity's race.The two processes are inseparable, which follows Mbembé's (2003) claim that biopower inherently racializes subjects and Weheliye's (2014) argument that the political defining of 'humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans' is a racial process.Therefore, this article is as much an examination of the production of white US and Australian political communities as it is the exclusion of Bla(c)k minorities or the establishment of sovereign power; although all three are co-produced when police officers and prison guards act as petty sovereigns by deciding who the law applies to.
Thus, the camps used to define Australian and American polities are racially defined and produced.However, this is not the type of racial production that occured in the camp most frequently examined by Agamben (1998, 132), the Nazi concentration camp, which was enacted by explicit legal measures including the removal of the citizenship of inmates.Instead, the camps identified in this article are brought into existence when people are treated as if they are homo sacer, when their exclusion is performed in an ad hoc manner.This is similar to Australia's exclusion of asylum seekers, which is not so much produced by fixed camps, but by laws creating 'spaces of exception [that] are relative, existing in relation to certain subjectivities and not to others' (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004:47).However, the embodied camps following asylum seekers in Australia still have a stability and fixity granted by their entrenchment in legislation (Everuss 2020a(Everuss , 2020b)).In contrast, the mobile camps or spaces of exception discussed in this article are ephemeral and impartial because they are not constituted by legislation, but instead by situated interactions between polity members and sovereign agents.
This devolution of the camp is likely directly related to the fact that its racial basis conflicts with the multicultural legal frameworks of the U.S. and Australia.Explicit legal forms of racial exclusion are not, or at least are not often, permissible in the U.S. and Australia.As such, contemporary camps produced on racial grounds must remain in contradiction to constituted law.In other words, while Agamben's camp was expressly part of the legislative denial of occupants' rights, in the current situation, the victim's rights are asserted by overt legal frameworks but trampled by sovereign performances.In many instances, constituted law does not announce the contemporary camp but denies its existence.
Additionally, it is not only in the production of the camp where the relationship identified in this article between sovereign exclusion and constituted law differs from that described by Agamben.Central to Agamben's theory is the notion that homo sacer is created by being removed from the law.This is partly true of modern racial camps because Bla(c)k Peoples are regularly excluded from having legal protections or rights when they are subject to violence that breaches the law but fails to incur prosecution.However, the inclusion of white majorities also occurs through suspensions, or at least weakened applications, of the law.As shown in the differential prosecution of drug offenses and misdemeanours, a key part of modern camps is the well-established overpolicing of racial minorities and the under-policing of white majorities.In these instances, it is precisely the privileged white polity for whom the law is diminished, while for the excluded minority the law is stringently enforced.This situation is not accounted for by Agamben's or Schmitt's conceptualization of the sovereign decision, which sees exception as synonymous with exclusion.Instead, what remains central to the performance of exclusion and defining of homo sacer is sovereign violence, which regularly extends beyond the permissible limits of overt law.This is ultimately the real sovereign decision: who is subject to violence, whether it is by state facilitated indefinite detention, police stranglehold or prison guard ambivalence.The law may be used as a flexible tool to help perform sovereign violence, but that violence comes before the law as it is a pre-judicial sovereign power.
Ultimately, this finding accords with a central tenet of Agamben's theoretical framework, that sovereign power involves the decision to treat some people as if they matter, as if they are politically pertinent, as if they have meaningful forms of life; while other people are treated as if they lack political worth and are just bare biological existence.However, there is always a need to move beyond Agamben's base framework and identify why certain people are more likely to be deemed to politically matter than others.And to do this we cannot just examine laws and other abstract juridical forms.Instead, we must look to the everyday settings in which sovereign agents interact with members of the polity; the types of settings where Black Americans and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are cast out from racially defined national political communities, and treated as if they are homo sacer.

Conclusion: challenging the racial creation of political communities
This article has sought to reframe Agamben's conceptual framework of exclusion and deploy this framework to shed new light on two extreme practices of exclusion.The reframing of Agamben's theory is essential to overcoming its failure to consider the grounds of contemporary exclusion, which are commonly racial, as well the identities and actions of those who are excluded.Essentially, Agamben provides a useful abstract structure for describing how people are positioned outside of polities in order to establish those polities, but exclusion is not an abstract process.It is performed on the ground, through the violence of sovereign agents.As such, exclusion should never be left as an abstract notion, and should always be conceptually embedded in political scenarios and contexts.This reframing of Agamben's theories has been supported in this article by bringing his work into a critical encounter with the theory of Mbembé and Weheliye, who in their own ways demonstrate the inherent racial underpinnings of sovereign exclusion and the ongoing agency of the excluded.
In addition to this theoretical contribution, this article has sought to shed new light on the structural and sovereign nature of two practices through which internal racial minorities of democratic and wealthy countries are treated as killable: police violence in the US and Indigenous Australian deaths in custody.Drawing on statistics and examples it has been shown that this violence committed on Bla(c)k communities is so systematic and extreme that it constitutes systems of state sovereign exception.This finding is unlikely to be surprising to many Black Americans and Indigenous Australians, who more commonly than their white counterparts experience being stopped by police or see friends and family members arrested and treated as if their lives lack value (Clayton 2018;Graham et al. 2020;Butler 2018;Coyne and Hall-Blanco 2016;Hazel 2018).
However, for those who do not easily fall on the dangerous side of a racially informed sovereign decision regarding polity membershipwhich includes the white author of this articlethe exclusionary systems that define the polity can remain opaque (Martinot and Sexton 2003).As Robin DiAngelo (2011, 54) stated in her well-known account of 'white fragility', 'White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress'; a statement that also rings true for white Australians.This is because the systems of exclusion outlined in this article are performative and contextual.They occur with enough regularity to form a practice, but do not appear beyond their individual manifestation.
This is what allows for a (white) polity's ignorance of the exclusionary racial measures that defines them, expressed as a lack of notice of the racialized structure at play and even outright denial of the existence of systematic racism (Lesick and Zell 2021;Graham et al. 2020).And, it is what underpins claims that a specific police murder is just a neck restraint gone wrong and an overzealous cop not following protocol (Illing 2020), or, that the overrepresentation of Indigenous Australian deaths in custody is simply due to high degrees of offending (Ransley and Marchetti 2021;Weatherburn, Fitzgerald, and Hua 2003).These political narratives are fundamentally undermined by the application of a racially informed version of Agamben's sovereign exclusion to the treatment of Bla(c)k Peoples in the U.S. and Australia.

Notes
1.The term Blak is used to describe the racial category of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians in this article.This follows a growing convention among Aboriginal leaders of dropping the 'c' to take ownership of the term and give it a specific Indigenous Australian character, as well as to break the connection between skin tone and Blak identity (Latimore 2021;Hazel 2018).2. Race is not just produced through the politics of 'racial taxonomy', but also 'through a multiplicity of different practices-gestures, sayings, tastes, ways of walking, religious convictions, opinions, and so forth' (Desmond and Emirbayer 2009, 336).Thus, while it is not a focus of this article, it is important to acknowledge that people can contribute to how their racial classifications are made.3.While I suggest that contemporary racial exclusion is less legislatively based, examples of legislated exclusion remain, such as Australia's Northern Territory Emergency Response (see Watson 2009).4.There is little data on national police violence in the US making racial bias in US policing difficult to prove and leading to conflicting scholarly accounts on the subject.This article follows research identifying racial bias, including that of Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo (2020) who argue that studies denying racial bias fail to acknowledge the limitations and bias of publicly available data (see Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo 2020;Butler 2018;Buehler 2017;Fryer 2019). 5.The Indigenous Deaths in custody statistics and coroner's reports come from a joint research project by Guardian Australia and the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology, Sydney (see Evershed, Allam, and Wahlquist 2020;Evershed et al. 2021).
6.This article examines the sovereign exclusion of Bla(c)k populations, but the insidious production of a white polity could likely also be identified in the sovereign treatment of other racial minorities.For example, Everuss's (2020aEveruss's ( , 2020b) ) research identifies the racial exclusion of asylum seekers in Australia in order to define the modern Australian polity.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Louis Everuss is a Research Associate and Coordinator at the UniSA Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, University of South Australia, where he also teaches across the sociology programme.Dr Everuss' primary research interests are located in the sociological study of mobilities, sovereignty, migration, globalization, political and media communication and climate change.His work has studied how systems of mobility are incorporated into representations of sovereign outsiders, and how public opinions of climate change are impacted by national context.