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.
Combined with Revolutionary Love, we grow power through mutual aid, political education, release of the incarcerated, and community control over police.
To dismiss the logic of Robinson’s “racial capitalism,” one must ignore the only history of capitalism we have.
This week you discussed the struggle against the dollar and neocolonialism.
Britain is, indeed, the “mother country” of US white supremacy, having bythe 13th century become “The First Racial State in the West.”
Nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression and exclusion are an integral part of the neoliberal order.
