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


  • Superpredator: The Media Myth That Demonized a Generation of Black Youth
    Carroll Bogert
    Superpredator: The Media Myth That Demonized a Generation of Black Youth
    25 Nov 2020
    By the end of the 90s corporate journalists were feverishly dehumanizing young blacks in news stories, editorials and commentaries.
  • Letters from Our Readers
    BAR Comments Editor Jahan Choudhry
    Letters from Our Readers
    25 Nov 2020
    This week the lives of the incarcerated, Susan Rice’s bid to be Secretary of State, and the incoming administrators of the empire were on your minds.
  • BAR Book Forum: Lavelle Porter’s “The Blackademic Life”
    Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
    BAR Book Forum: Lavelle Porter’s “The Blackademic Life”
    25 Nov 2020
    Despite academia’s inherent racism, black scholars have figured out ways to work within these institutions.
  • BAR Book Forum: Erin Manning’s “For a Pragmatics of the Useless”
    Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
    BAR Book Forum: Erin Manning’s “For a Pragmatics of the Useless”
    25 Nov 2020
    Schizoanalysis opens up new alliances (approximations) in the uneasy overlaps of neurodiversity and black life.
  • Alexander Hamilton: An American Slave-Master 
    Bashir Muhammad Akinyele
    Alexander Hamilton: An American Slave-Master 
    25 Nov 2020
    The Broadway show is a fiction and bamboozlement: Hamilton was a depraved enslaver of people, just like most of the Founders of the White Settler State.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us