ADVANCE PRAISE FOR WHITE POWER: POLICING AMERICAN SLAVERY: 

“Gautham Rao’s meticulous research and clear-eyed analysis demonstrates that the historical will to dominate Black people is still with us today with devastating consequences.” – Annette Gordon-Reed, MacArthur “Genius Award” winner, National Book Award winner, author of On Juneteenth and Carl M. Loeb Professor, Harvard Law School.

“With deep research, clear thinking and vivid writing, Gautham Rao uncovers the long, tangled history of race, slavery, and policing. In the collective duty of white people to enforce slavery, he detects the source of our enduring curse of racial inequality.” – Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize winner, author of The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, and Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair, Emeritus, University of Virginia.

WHITE POWER: POLICING AMERICAN SLAVERY

The violent legacy of the US’s slaveholding oligarchy and the brutal policing of Black Americans

Beginning in the colonial era and growing through the American Revolution and the Southern plantation system, slaveholders’ violent police regime continued after Emancipation, through Reconstruction, to today. Moving across time, space, and place, White Power uncovers how slaveholders created their own white supremacist police and government to deny Black people rights, power, and humanity.

Legal historian Gautham Rao introduces us to laws that empowered white people to forcibly exercise their desired racial superiority over Black people, shows how they spread from the South throughout the nation, and traces the rebellions, fugitivity, activism, and legal systems that challenged them. Rao’s narrative includes slaveholders, lawmakers, and the Ku Klux Klan, dramatic escapes by runaway enslaved people, abolitionist activism in courtroom showdowns, and pitched battles between white paramilitaries and enslaved rebels. He offers a new interpretation of the history of policing in the US, centering the institution and legacy of slavery and speaking to the origins of today’s persistence of white vigilance, white supremacist militia groups, and white racist cops determined to maintain power over Black people by force. Equally determined, however, was Black Americans’ refusal to accept it.

WHITE POWER: POLICING AMERICAN SLAVERY IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER!

PUBLICATION DATE: MAY 12, 2026