By Vesla M. Weaver — Two new books, including National Book Award nominee ‘Locking Up Our Own,’ address major blind spots about the causes of America’s carceral failure. Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman, Jr.; Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform by John F. Pfaff
William A. Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on…
By Dedrick Asante-Muhammad — As Women’s History Month comes to an end, we at the Racial Wealth Divide Initiative think it is important to reflect upon how racial economic inequality…
What is euphemistically referred to as “modernity” is marked with the indelible stain of what might be termed the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, with the bloody process of human bondage as the driving and animating force of this abject horror. By Gerald Horne — The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. At the onset of the seventeenth…
The Enduring Impact of President Johnson’s Crime Commission Elizabeth Hinton, Boston Review — In his televised speech following five days of civil unrest in Detroit during the summer of 1967, President Lyndon Johnson announced the creation of the Kerner Commission to evaluate the uprisings there and in other cities, and to prescribe policies to suppress future disorder. The American public also demanded insight into why cities burned and what drove…
By Emily Badger, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce and Kevin Quealy, New York Times — Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of…
Cotton Harvest with dog lying in pile of cotton. Six pickers face toward the camera. On the far left is the presumed plantation owner holding still for Coovert’s exposure. Photo…
By Walter Johnson — In Memory of Cedric Robinson (1940–2016) It is a commonplace to say that slavery “dehumanized” enslaved people, but to do so is misleading, harmful, and worth resisting. I hasten to add that there are, of course, plenty of right-minded reasons for adopting the notion of “dehumanization.” It is hard to square the idea of millions of people being bought and sold, of systematic sexual violation, natal…
Jerkins talks about her insightful new essay collection ‘This Will Be My Undoing.’ Hope Reese, Vice — When Morgan Jerkins entered Princeton University at age 19, she felt that she had “made…
Kim Bellware, Vice — Shock has emerged as the signature emotional response to the organized confusion of the Trump era. The president is at war with the same agents of federal law enforcement investigating his old campaign. Just months after an alt-right rally in Charlottesville ended in death, emboldened white supremacists are littering college campuses with propaganda. And an immigration system that was already broken has been thrown into even more chaos by a White House bent on vindictive, nativist policies.