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


  • The Russia-China Alliance: More than a Bulwark Against Imperialism
    Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
    The Russia-China Alliance: More than a Bulwark Against Imperialism
    29 Apr 2021
    China’s communist party-led government and enormous non-white population strikes fear in the heart of the hegemon in ways that Russia alone simply cannot.
  • EDITORIAL:ON THE MOVE: The MOVE Organization and the Teachings of John Africa, June 28 and July 1, 1975
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    EDITORIAL:ON THE MOVE: The MOVE Organization and the Teachings of John Africa, June 28 and July 1, 1975
    29 Apr 2021
    The MOVE organization’s protests provoked some of the most intense forms of police brutality and repression witnessed in the country.  
  • Mumia Abu-Jamal: State Running Scared, Trying to Make Sure He Dies in Prison 
    An Interview with Johanna Fernandez
    Mumia Abu-Jamal: State Running Scared, Trying to Make Sure He Dies in Prison 
    29 Apr 2021
    Mumia’s case always raises larger questions about the barbarism of the criminal justice system.
  • Justice was served from Warfare States’ gaslit woks
    Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    Justice was served from Warfare States’ gaslit woks
    29 Apr 2021
    Justice was served sweet and sour in pepper spray soup—tear- gas gumbo—tears mixed with milk and milk of magnesia in crimson curry sauce; Served from warfare states’ woks on
  • The Class Collaboration of “Justice” 
    Erica Caines
    The Class Collaboration of “Justice” 
    29 Apr 2021
    After the guilty verdict, the clarity that was collectively growing became squandered with the words “it’s not justice, it’s accountability.”
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us