Historian, author and activist Paul Street has high praise for James Forman Jr.’s new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Forman is a professor at Yale Law School and a former public defender in Washington, DC. His book “fills a giant hole in the literature,” illuminating the role played by “Black elites in the rise of the mass incarceration system,” said Street, himself an expert on race and the U.S. penal system. “Many ordinary, working class Black voters in the 70s and 80s have actively supported the racially disparate war on crime and drugs that ended up producing racist mass incarceration,” said Street, whose latest book is titled They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy.
Poultry-processing plants are critical sites of racial capitalist accumulation produced through an unequal valuation of people and places.
This week voting in November and the crisis of the Democratic Party was on your mind.
Required reading for black study and abolition: a syllabus for an abolitionista on the run. “Abolition requires an ongoing radical belief in the impossible.”
Underground labor allowed many women to sustain themselves and the people and religious institutions that they cared about.
In a 1977 interview, the renowned Trinidadian writer, historian and socialist assessed the state of Black struggle in the Caribbean, the United States and Africa.
