Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Black Elites, and Many Black Voters, Supported Mass Black Incarceration
25 Jul 2017
🖨️ Print Article

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.


More Stories


  • Destruction of Al Shifa hospital
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Israel and the U.S. are Gangster States
    03 Apr 2024
    Any sign of even tiny opposition is enough to send Israel into a frenzy of bloodletting. Hospital attacks, murders of aid workers, violations of the sovereignty of embassies, are all par for the…
  • Palestine partition
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    STATEMENT: UN Palestine Commission Partition recommendation – Statement from the Arab Higher Committee, 6 February 1948
    03 Apr 2024
    The statement on the UN Partition of Palestine by the Arab Higher Committee is a reminder of the sordid history of the U.S. in the expropriation of land and the attempted ethnic cleansing of the…
  • Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Eric Nshimiye, Another Rwandan American Facing Trial in Another Rwandan Witch Hunt
    03 Apr 2024
    The totalitarian state of Rwanda is guilty of many forms of transnational repression, including the lawfare exemplified in the case of Eric Nshimiye.
  • Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    Raymond Nat Turner at the UpSurge Jazz Celebration
    03 Apr 2024
    BAR's Poet-in-Residence will perform next week in New York City.
  • Marching protesters
    Shaka Shakur
    The New Modern Day Militarized Fort! 
    03 Apr 2024
    The wave of cop cities being constructed across the nation must be analyzed through the lens of settler colonialism and the state's effort to maintain its dominance by expanding the police state.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us