New York City has been shining surveillance lights on its black population for the last 300 years

Throughout history, “you see light being used as a disciplinary and surveillance tactic,” said Simone Browne, a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at University of Texas-Austin, speaking in April at a conference in Washington D.C.

“And it’s not just about the visual,” she said of the presence of floodlights specifically. “Think of the psychic effects of having this large hum of a generator of a light in your home.”

This is not the first time New York City has used light to surveil its black population. In March 1713, the Common Council of the City of New York, the pre-cursor to today’s City Council, approved “A Law for Regulating Negro & Indian Slaves in the Night Time.”

It was a “lantern law” and required any slave older than 14 to carry “A Lanthorn and lighted Candle in it…as the light thereof may be plainly seen.” Basically, if you were a slave and out at night, you needed to carry a light in front of you so you could be easily identified. The law was enacted following a slave rebellion the previous April.

Alvaro Bedoya, the Director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, likens lantern laws to more modern cases of overreaching surveillance, such as the FBI’s wiretapping civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

“It shows how technology has been used to surveil the black community for a very very long time,” Bedoya told me via phone. “Surveillance [has always been] used to control enslaved people.”

According to Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, authors of the history Gotham, the lantern law was “in part” a way of curtailing attendance at a school set up for the city’s slaves which often held its classes at night.

As Browne, the UT-Austin professor, writes in her book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, punishment was made partially the duty of the public, who were effectively deputized and allowed to take slaves caught without a light to jail, where they were punished at the discretion of their masters. Initially their punishment could be up to 40 lashes, and the law was later revised so that the number was slightly lower, up to 15.

Browne writes that the lantern is best thought of as a “prosthesis:”

[M]ade mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to dawn, made knowable, locatable, and contained within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a simple device made for a visual surplus where technology met surveillance…and encoded white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law.

Browne said lantern laws also dehumanized slaves in a broader sense, turning them into human streetlights. “The lantern… kind of incorporated black and indigenous people into the public infrastructure of lighting,” Browne told me by phone.

The laws and their effects were by no means limited to New York. “A Chronological History of the Boston Watch and Police,” published in 1865, recounts a story from 1769 that reads like a tall tale about a slave who keeps finding loopholes in the law to avoid carrying a lighted candle.

New York City’s lantern law passed away with the state’s gradual abolition of slavery in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But some began to rail against it at least as early as March 1784, when the law was amended and expanded to include restrictions on behavior like assembly and carrying weapons. Browne’s research turned up an anonymous letter writer published in the New York Journal and State Gazette who referred to the law as cruel and inconsistent. It compared the treatment of “a white drunkard” allowed to “disturb the street til midnight, with impunity” to that of a “poor black girl of fifteen.” “If a gale of wind unfortunately extinguishes the candle in the lanthorn,” wrote the author, “[she] is hurried to gaol, and next morning ignominiously scourged in public.”

Lantern laws weren’t the only technological surveillance brought to bear on New York’s slaves in the 1700s. At the Color of Surveillance conference put on by Georgetown Law’s Center in April, Browne also discussed the incredibly detailed ads placed in newspapers to assist in catching runaway slaves.

Those too have a modern analog. You might compare elaborate descriptions of slaves in newspaper ads to the monitoring of black visitors to a neighborhood on social networks like Nextdoor. Nextdoor and other community watch apps are plagued with racial profiling, with a focus on “suspicious” people that seems often to be race-based. Unlike those newspapers of old, Nextdoor is trying to fight against being a surveillance network that polices black bodies. It recently made changes to try curbing racism on its app, adding more moderation for racist comments, asking users to only describe “truly suspicious activity,” and banning users from listing race in their descriptions of reported activity.

Two years after it was initially announced, the new lighting of New York City’s public housing remains, ironically, opaque. Residents continue to express a mix of concern and relief at the presence of the lights. The mayor’s representative told me they had received 11 complaints about the bright lights, all of which had been resolved, and that most feedback praised the new lighting.

Meanwhile, new lights continue to pop up. The city is currently running a study involving 400 new lighting units to determine their effect on crime. The study, which began in March and will run for 6 months, has been praised by at least one conservative think tank.

Nobody wants to live in the dark, and perhaps the city’s study will bear out that crime is reduced by the new lighting. Nonetheless, it remains a form of architectural policing, a way in which the city’s low-income residents are treated differently from their better-off neighbors.

“We often think of policing as not the quotidian things,” Browne said, “Like, ‘what’s the big deal about light?'”

Ethan Chiel is a reporter for Fusion, writing mostly about the internet and technology. You can (and should) email him at [email protected]