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.
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Atiya Husain. Husain is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College…
The Black Radical Tradition is the rich legacy passed down by revolutionaries. It is an important tool today as we struggle to turn the Americas into a Zone of Peace.
The trial of former Peruvian president Pedro Castillo, the victim of a 2022 lawfare-style coup, has begun. The legal process used against him is a sham covering up the human rights abuses…
Trump administration interference in Panama has brought about a reckoning on migration and human rights throughout the region. These issues can no longer be ignored.
Presenting new research, Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel mount a devastating critique of the impact of structural adjustment in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on recent data on Africa’s…
