Controlling the Savage Enemy: Punishing the Other and Criminalizing Urban Space

Abstract

For many Americans dissatisfied with the leadership of President Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan must have appeared as a “macho” (Orman 1987), swashbuckling hero right out of a Hollywood movie, ready to save America from its fiercest enemies. These perceived enemies as constructed by the Reagan campaign were simultaneously foreign (Communists, terrorists, and Latin American dictators) and domestic (crack addicts, welfare queens, and gang members) or in the case of “illegal aliens,” somewhere in between. While these threatening enemies were of various nationalities, they were almost always dark complexioned. Reagan’s presidential mission, as he and his supporters saw it, was to rescue the country for the average, taxpaying, American citizen; in decoded words, for middle-class whites.¹