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


  • From Black Wall Street to Black Capitalism
    Too Black
    From Black Wall Street to Black Capitalism
    09 Jun 2021
    Contrary to the Black capitalist myth, most Greenwood residents were low wage working people employed by whites and living in substandard housing.
  • How to Wreck a Black Nation In the Age of “Black Lives Matter”
    Taytu Bitul
    How to Wreck a Black Nation In the Age of “Black Lives Matter”
    09 Jun 2021
    Today’s colonialists recruit Black politicians and Black terrorist groups who are willing to play along.
  • “New Bones” Abolitionism, Communism, and Captive Maternals
    Joy James
    “New Bones” Abolitionism, Communism, and Captive Maternals
    09 Jun 2021
    Joy James uses poet Lucille Clifton's image of “new bones” to reflect on a series of revolutionary anniversaries in 2021 and the nature of political leadership.
  • BAR Book Forum: Rachel Afi Quinn’s “Being La Dominicana”
    Rachel Afi Quinn
    BAR Book Forum: Rachel Afi Quinn’s “Being La Dominicana”
    09 Jun 2021
    Dominican racial logic frequently contradicts what US scholars think they know about how race works.
  • BAR Book Forum: Tiffany N. Florvil’s “Mobilizing Black Germany”
    Tiffany N. Florvil
    BAR Book Forum: Tiffany N. Florvil’s “Mobilizing Black Germany”
    09 Jun 2021
    Black History Month strengthened Black German claims of kinship with their nation and the larger diaspora.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us