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


  • Students for Justice in Palestine
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Repression of Campus Palestine Solidarity Reveals the Nature of the State
    01 May 2024
    Campus protests in solidarity with Palestine have been met with brute police force and condemnation of the participants. Their mobilization is a threat to the political system, which cannot operate…
  • Henry Lous Gates Article
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    ESSAY: Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars: a Dissenting View, Prof. John Henrik Clarke, 1992
    01 May 2024
    Read John Henry Clarke’s response to Henry Louis Gates’s demagoguery as he maliciously deploys a critique “Black anti-semitism” to ingratiate himself with the white zionist power elite.
  • Raymond Nat Turner
    Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    Dis-honest Broker
    01 May 2024
    "Dis-honest Broker" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence, recently performed at UpSurge!NYC at Sister's Bookstore in Harlem, NY. The show was a celebration of National Poetry and Jazz…
  • VOA Burkina Faso mural
    Netfa Freeman
    Is U.S. Imperialism Maneuvering Toward “Humanitarian Intervention” in Burkina Faso?
    01 May 2024
    As Burkina Faso attempts to move away from neo-colonial domination by France and the United States, the possibility of intervention via "humanitarian" channels grows more likely.
  • Alliance of Sahel States
    The Coalition for the Elimination of Imperialism in Africa
    For the Defense of the Alliance of Sahel States, for Revolutionary Pan-Africanism
    01 May 2024
    The Coalition for the Elimination of Imperialism in Africa, calls on all of us to stand in support of the Alliance of Sahel States, which is clearing the way for the unification of Africa.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us