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


  • Urgent Solidarity With Haiti Is Needed
    Margaret Flowers
    Urgent Solidarity With Haiti Is Needed
    17 Feb 2021
    “President” Jovenel Moïse has dismantled the democratic institutions of the state and rules unilaterally with the support of the police, military and western allies.
  • For Biden Administration, Black Lives Don’t Matter in Haiti!—A BAP Statement on Haiti
    Black Alliance For Peace
    For Biden Administration, Black Lives Don’t Matter in Haiti!—A BAP Statement on Haiti
    17 Feb 2021
    The new US administration has already shown its support for paramilitary terror and political suppression in Haiti.
  • Black Liberation in Context: Political Prisoner Speaks on Torture at 2005 Human Rights Conference
    Sundiata Acoli
    Black Liberation in Context: Political Prisoner Speaks on Torture at 2005 Human Rights Conference
    17 Feb 2021
    Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army political/prisoner of war Sundiata Acoli told human rights activists “torture is nothing new” in U.S.
  • Medical Racism Has Shaped U.S. Policies for Centuries
    Deirdre Cooper Owens
    Medical Racism Has Shaped U.S. Policies for Centuries
    17 Feb 2021
    A Black medical truth-teller traces the link between a 1793 yellow fever epidemic and today’s coronavirus racial disparities.
  • DNA and Our Twenty-First-Century Ancestors
    Duana Fullwiley
    DNA and Our Twenty-First-Century Ancestors
    17 Feb 2021
    Home DNA ancestry kits include no ancestors, instead comparing customers to other present-day people based on assumptions about race and ethnicity. 
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us