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


  • Jamarl Thomas
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    The Death of DEI with Jamarl Thomas
    31 Jan 2025
    Margaret Kimberley was recently a guest on Jamarl Thomas's YouTube podcast. She discussed her latest Black Agenda Report article on “The Death of DEI.” The issues surrounding DEI are contradictory.…
  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    The Death of DEI
    29 Jan 2025
    Black people must be discerning about racist attacks on DEI programs while also acknowledging that “diversity” can be a con that damages Black politics, just as it was meant to do.
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    POEM: Note to All Nazis, Fascists and Klansmen, Langston Hughes, 1943
    29 Jan 2025
    Langston Hughes’s 1943 poem against fascism is precise, droll, and eternal.
  • Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Why Hasn’t the UNSC Sanctioned Rwanda or Referred Its President to the ICC?
    29 Jan 2025
    The UN Security Council (UNSC) has never sanctioned Rwanda or referred its president to the International Criminal Court (ICC), despite decades of UN documentation of their international crimes in…
  • Clau O'Brien Moscoso
    Dollarization in Ecuador: How the Safest Country in Latin America Became a Money Laundering Transnational Crime Hub
    29 Jan 2025
    Ecuador was once a safe country. However, U.S. interference, the rise of neoliberal economic policies, the dollarization of its currency, and enhanced state repression have combined to worsen the…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us