The inconvenient truth of police history in the United States is that police departments were not designed to keep a generic public safe.
Tag: Black Lives Matter
Rage and Uprising
A politics of rage does not equate emotions with irrationality or impulsive behavior, but can affirm equality, claim agency, and ask for justice.
Defund the Police and Refund the Communities
The dueling crises of the pandemic and police brutality have brought many problems to the surface of our society and made them impossible to continue to ignore.
Preexisting Conditions: What 2020 Reveals about Our Urban Future
Crisis Cities brings together some of the world’s leading social scientists and humanists to grapple with the 2020 crises of our cities.
Tele-visionary Blackness
Black folks can call into being an alternative relationship to TV, one that prompts a shift in consciousness and just possibly alters the future.
Black Poetry after Beyoncé
How do black feminist artists negotiate their own work in the wake of commercial success beyond contemporary poetry’s wildest dreams?
Power, Poison, Pain, and Joy
Sitting atop a police car beneath an oversized American flag, Kendrick Lamar opened the 2015 BET awards with his single “Alright.” “We hate the po-po ...
Power, Poison, Pain, and Joy
Sitting atop a police car beneath an oversized American flag, Kendrick Lamar opened the 2015 BET awards with his single “Alright.” “We hate the po-po ...
We See You, Race Women
When I was in graduate school, whenever a black woman scholar presented her work a peculiar phenomenon emerged: peers always and only remarked on the speaker’s person, rather than on her ideas. At ...
A Tapestry of Black Lives
James Baldwin’s legacy looms powerfully in this current moment. This may be all the more true for black writers. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, one of the contributors to Jesmyn Ward’s timely new anthology ...
Atlantic Got Your Tongue
Safia Elhillo’s poetry comes to us exactly when we need it, in the era of the travel ban and the border wall. The richness of feeling and formal inventiveness of her work open up an alternative ...
Empathy Is Not Enough
Almost 30 years ago, education researcher and children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop introduced an analogy that has been widely embraced by the librarians, teachers, artists, and scholars ...
Virtual Roundtable on “Get Out”
In the weeks immediately following its release, Jordan Peele’s Get Out quickly established itself as the crossover film ...
Procedural Racism
Every detective story relays at least two narratives: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. In a police procedural, the story of the investigation has police officers discover ...
A Tapestry of Black Lives
James Baldwin’s legacy looms powerfully in this current moment. This may be all the more true for black writers. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, one of the contributors to Jesmyn Ward’s timely new anthology ...
The Book That Made Me: Learn How to Love
The Book That Made Me is a series about the books that have changed our lives. In this inaugural installment, a National Book Award–winning historian …
Black Lives Under Surveillance
Modern capitalism has always placed an undue burden on black bodies. Slavery, forced labor, and dispossession have moved hand in hand with forces of surveillance and the power of the state. In cities ...
On Black Girlhood
The bikini-clad teen is thrown to the ground. An officer, his knee in her back, grabs her braids and slams her head into the grass. She cries, “Call my mama.” When other teens, leaving a pool party ...
Mass Incarceration And Its Mystification: A Review Of “The 13th”
When prisoners in Alabama last spring proposed a national strike to protest “prison slavery,” they called out ...
Art, Protest, Riot
If we could break America’s spellbound gaze on the presidential election, the pressing question of national politics would be this: will the recent fires ignited by Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives ...
