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.
In an 1860 speech commemorating radical abolitionist John Brown's raid on Harper’s Ferry, Frederick Douglass argued that slavery would only end if the slave owner feared the violent retribution
The Biden administration continues the Trump prosecution of Julian Assange. The case ought to be dismissed out of hand but the U.S.
President Joe Biden continues to play the cluelessly racist and paternalistic Ugly American in the Ho
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book.
