“I’ve been stabbed ten times, I’ve been shot.”
“You get beat the fuck up. You will have no chance.”
“Until you start hanging around us.”
These are snippets of conversations featured in a documentary about members of Check It, one of the first Black LGBTQ+ “gangs” in Washington, D.C. Check It’s experiences illustrate how systemic oppression, rooted in American slavery, adapts through new technology and legal forms to control Black, poor, and queer communities. While modern-day gang policing continues to rely on racist, classist, and sexist institutions, Check It’s contributions as a safety network underscore the significance of grassroots organizing in bringing about self-determination and community empowerment. Their experience teaches us that much of freedom work occurs outside of a courtroom, statehouse, or council hearing – and that structural change requires community-based resistance as a foundation. As state surveillance evolves, movement workers must wield policy and litigation to empower, not overshadow, communities.
Check It: The First Identified Black LGTBQ+ “Gang”
Check It was founded in 2009 by several Queer, Black high school freshmen as a form of protection from state and community violence. In addition to aggressive policing, disinvestment, and de facto segregation, many of Check It’s members experienced complete social marginalization due to their gender and sexual identity. This outcasting resulted in abuse, traumatic experiences in the foster system and juvenile justice systems, and homelessness.
What formed as a survival network to mitigate the consequences of being Black, Queer, and poor in America was quickly criminalized. Members of Check It were arrested for assaulting people, though these “assaults” often occurred as acts of self-defense against targeted violence. And, like many individuals with criminal records and gender nonconforming presentations, Check It members were pushed into the underground economy, where every action to make a dollar could be transformed into a slew of criminal charges.
Initially, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) characterized Check It as a violent gang that operated in and around the Gallery Place/Chinatown neighborhood. But, Check It organized by building relationships with community leaders, pooling financial resources, and engaging in a media campaign that included their 2015 documentary. Within six years, the group grew to over 200 members. By 2017, Check It began a business in historic Anacostia, where members sold in-house designed clothes, hosted community events, and held musical performances. As their community power grew and public perception of the group shifted, the state could no longer ignore them. In 2019, the D.C. Council awarded Check It a $2 million grant to purchase a building in the historic part of Anacostia in Southeast DC. Their building, Check It Enterprises, became a storefront and creative space for Black queer community members and today operates as a museum.
Check It’s Blackness, gender and sexuality, and ranking within D.C.’s socioeconomic caste system combined to produce harms left unaddressed by the state or existing community models of protection. Banding together was essential for members’ survival, yet, the MPD’s imposition of the “gang” label redefined the group from a community safety network to a criminal enterprise. While Check It’s eventual integration into the D.C. community is a success story, state practice has not evolved to address intersectional harms. One policy, created around the same time as Check It, continues to find ways to criminalize people based on race, gender, and class: D.C.’s gang database.
Gang Policing & The Criminalization of Solidarity
Since 2009, the MPD has coordinated with federal law enforcement agencies to surveil communities, relying on D.C.’s gang database to compile its targets. The database disproportionately targets low-income Black and Latinx people for spending time with family, friends, and neighbors. MPD primarily surveils Black and Latinx neighborhoods – 99% of the “gangs” in the database are named after street corners or D.C. apartment complexes. Inclusion in the database can jeopardize an individual’s housing, employment, and custody of their children.
How do we understand both Check It’s experience and modern-day D.C. gang policing as phenomena at the intersection of mass incarceration and racialized, sexualized, and poverty-based surveillance? In Dark Matters, Dr. Simone Browne positions surveillance as core to the Black experience, as Blackness is intentionally subverted through surveillance. Surveillance upholds and empowers “boundaries, borders and bodies along racial lines and where the outcome is often discriminatory treatment of those who are negatively racialized by surveillance.” This type of surveillance is most visible in what Dr. Browne calls unfinished emancipation, where the genocidal and unremedied consequences of slavery are intergenerational and transcend to modern-day policies.
Sexualized surveillance operates similarly to racialized surveillance, except it relies on gender stereotypes and hierarchies and subverts any gender identity, expression, or sexual orientation outside of cis-heterosexual males. In D.C., the MPD tags Black, LGBTQ+ individuals based on their mere association with one another, even though these networks operate as lifelines. Even the nonviolent practices Check It used to keep each other safe, like walking, standing, or traveling together to avoid being assaulted, could be used to label them as a gang under current D.C. gang policing policies.
Poverty surveillance is also central to gang policing, and public housing has long been a locus of surveillance. Federal legislation like The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 created ex-ante justifications to surveil and punish public housing tenants for minor infractions, often serving as grounds for eviction. Aggressive enforcement of local “order maintenance” policies have long left communities subject to widespread, unannounced housing sweeps and violent raids. That the majority of the “gangs” in D.C.’s gang database are named after public housing complexes should come as no surprise. If a person lives in the same public housing complex as someone accused of being a gang member and talks to their community members, they can be put on the database.
These modes of surveillance converge in gang policing, a modern tool serving an age-old white supremacist agenda: criminalizing and incarcerating those deemed as ‘other’ by the system. In the case of DC’s gang database, poor, Black, Queer people are sorted and put onto a database and then labeled as “gang” members, “alienating [them] by producing a truth about the[ir] racial body and…identities” via a process called “digital epidermalization.” Building on Franz Fanon’s concept of “epidermalization,” or the process by which race is imposed on the body, digital epidermalization incorporates how surveillance and technology impose race and other identities onto the body through discriminatory and racist practices.
From European colonial views on gender binaries and the race science that validated the Atlantic Slave Trade, to Jim Crow, and now mass incarceration, tools of oppression have continued to evolve and leverage technology and legal frameworks to do so. D.C.’s gang database operates as a modern modality of oppression that not only dictates “truths” about marginalized communities but stifles their very ability to be in community. It determines, along racial, class, and gender and sexuality-based lines what forms of community are criminal versus acceptable. This is captured in the example of Check It, whose members had no other choice but to be arrested, physically assaulted, or left for dead. Instead of withering away quietly to the edge of society where their families, peers, and government pushed them, they built a way out of no way, facing further criminalization by their act of solidarity.
The state’s ability to criminalize everyday acts of solidarity makes it even more vital for legal advocates to prioritize community empowerment in their work. Legal battles alone will not equip vulnerable communities with the resilience needed to challenge their legal and social marginalization. Community resistance is essential for structural change, particularly given how modes of oppression will continue to evolve in unforeseen ways that may take years to surface in state policy.
Dark Sousveillance as the Foundation for Systemic Change
As gang policing and forms of surveillance continue to evolve and avoid critical scrutiny, Check It’s experience reminds us that throughout every iteration of oppression, groups have formed community safety nets to propel people to freedom and self-determination. Dark sousveillance, coined by Dr. Browne, is direct resistance to historically racialized surveillance practices. Dark sousveillance is not only watching the watchers who reify white supremacy and socioeconomic hierarchies, but also engaging in practices that challenge, subvert, or diminish racialized surveillance. Long before oppressed people had access to policy and legal strategies, community organizing has been central to the fight for freedom — from slavery to Check It and beyond.
Check It’s response to state violence with community support, including self-defense, is a form of dark sousveillance. It is a commitment to the Black radical tradition that builds worlds when you have been excluded from every other one. Check It’s community organizing laid the foundation for leveraging legal and policy means to mitigate arrests and convictions, start businesses, pursue interests, and ultimately obtain a seven-figure grant to create a permanent home in D.C.’s ever-gentrifying streets.
How do we follow in the Black radical tradition Check It created? How do we transform the state from one that invests in our oppression and servitude to one that invests in our freedom and self-determination? In addressing mass criminalization, more than just legal challenges are needed. Organizers, community members, policy advocates and attorneys must empower communities to see change in their neighborhoods, laws and resources and help build community-based power. These interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches “are not simply talking about the need to dismantle the larger system, [but are a]. . . a process of construction and creativity.” The horizon goal cannot be a successful Supreme Court case if neither the communities want it nor can the precedent catch up fast enough to make a difference in people’s lives.
Litigators and policy advocates need to understand that our work must be supplementary and complementary. Supplementary in that neither litigation nor policy change may be the focal point or answer for any community facing oppression. Complimentary in that neither litigation nor policy change should be adversarial to the communities, even if the goals are not the same.
Legal avenues pursuing non-reformist reforms must be paramount. Even if advocates do not have complete interest convergence with communities in bringing litigation or policy strategies, they should engage in strategies that only have the potential to advance, not hinder, collective horizon goals. For gang databases, from Chicago to New York, L.A. to D.C., community organizing has been integral to the movement. From going door to door and conducting community listening sessions to hosting political education events, organizers spent thousands of hours building relationships, respect, and understanding within policed communities. This collective community knowledge eventually bolstered litigation and other successful challenges to gang policing. None of this could be done without the life-changing work organizers did to inform, protect, and create opportunities for their communities. The bottom line is: when interests do not align with community organizers, the only demands that should be made aside from their demands are non-reformist reforms.
Movement theorists and practitioners need to amass the type of community power that facilitates a nationwide cultural shift. They cannot do this work alone. Systemic oppression will always take a new face, using new tools to enact itself, and the communities closest to the harm are the best positioned to articulate the solutions and support they need in that moment. As Check It’s example teaches us: creating a new world starts with community supported by litigation, media, and policy strategies, not the other way around. Lawyers and policy advocates bear a responsibility in feeding the growth of community power that can transform investments of oppression into investments of resources and lasting change.
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employer.
Kiah Duggins was tragically one of the victims of the DCA crash in January. If you are interested in learning about or contributing to her legacy, please check out Kiah’s Princess Project.
