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.
Newly released FBI files provide direct documentation that the FBI chief and other high officials were involved in the raid and the coverup that followed.
This week the uprising in Washington and Du Bois’s writings on the Soviet Union were on your mind.
We need a different relationship to and with time and temporality to imagine new worlds and to begin bringing those new worlds into being.
The author dissects Black time and space in order to better understand the nature and mechanics of Black life and death lived in the antiblack world.
In practice, defunding police leads to endless dickering with local politicians and allows reformists to present themselves as abolitionists.
