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.
"Did you see an infantile, juvenile flight of fancy?" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
You cannot defeat a king with a parade. The failure of "No Kings" is the refusal to build real power beyond a single day of protest.
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Firoze Manji. Manji, a Kenyan with more than 40 years’ experience in…
A false narrative of "Christian genocide" is being weaponized against Nigeria, which is itself victimized by western neo-colonial policies.
The cause of the explosion at Mitchel Houses in the South Bronx harkens back to the arson-for-profit schemes of the 1970s that caused mass destruction of Black and Latine communities. Decades later,…
