Police and racial identity formation: thinking the Military police of São Paulo as a site of racial socialization to Whiteness

Based on ethnographic observations in the Military Police of São Paulo, this article examines how police identity formation shapes officers’ racial self-identification and complicates existing conceptualizations of how the police reproduce racial domination. I show that the police environment influences officers from mixed-race backgrounds in their choices of racial identification, often prompting a rejection of Blackness and/or encouraging a self-racialization as White. I argue that this occurs because the institution functions as a racially socializing environment, structuring officers’ interpretations of race through the transmission of a ‘White socialisation’. In a police force where Black and Brown officers constitute the majority of lower ranks, I demonstrate how these dynamics inform our understanding of the mechanisms that sustain racialized policing, and operate as a means to secure the foundations of a police system that relies on the embodied denial of race to enforce racial inequalities.