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.
“I felt proud to be black in a country in revolution with a leader of Iberian ancestry who had launched Operation Carlota, in one of the hardest terrains on the African continent…”
Reuters reports on a mysterious government document seeming to confirm that sanctions will be lifted on Eritrea.
The Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais revealed that Black people's limited electoral power is not protected, and it never has been.
The attack on Mali was a coordinated international destabilization campaign, but as is usually the case, any coverage from the Western press hides the full story.
The spectacle of major sporting events does not simply distract from a city's crackdown on the working class. It is a mechanism through which it is normalized and accelerated.
