Perceptions, Policing and Impact

Calls for “social justice” have appeared throughout the history of humankind. They form a central part of Judeo-Christian, Islamic, and indeed virtually all faith traditions. Likewise, emphasis on social justice appears in the governing structures of many nations—in their laws and constitutions, and in their legislative and judicial bodies. Yet, despite the lofty references to justice found in revered religious and secular governing documents, struggles for social justice have continued over millennia across the globe. In the United States, our boasted “rule of law” enabled racial slavery to thrive for two centuries before the Civil War, and it enabled convict leasing to thrive in the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth. Both slavery and convict leasing operated legally as state-sanctioned economic exploitation of the bound labor of African-descended persons. These coercive systems, as well as racial segregation laws, voter disfranchisement laws, and other forms of racial discrimination relied on state-power for enforcement, and the key to this enforcement was policing.  Be they the slave catchers, sheriffs, and armed vigilantes in an earlier era, or the urban police forces in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, policing undergirds racial oppression by violent means of surveillance, arrest, and confinement. Racist perceptions have served in the past and present to criminalize Black families and the Black identity itself, thereby justifying mass incarceration and acts of police brutality. Thus, the centuries-long quest for a more perfect union can find no better example than the quest of Black communities for justice in America.

Books 

• Balto, Simon. Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power. United States: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
• bandele, asha., Davis, Angela., Cullors, Patrisse. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. United States: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2018.
• Butler, Paul. Chokehold: Policing Black Men. United States: New Press, (n.d.).
• Camp, Jordan T. and Christina Heatherton, eds. Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter. United Kingdom: Verso Books, 2016.
• Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete?. United States: Seven Stories Press, 2011.
• Dulaney, W. Marvin. Black Police in America. United States: Indiana University Press, 1996.
• Felker-Kantor, Max. Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD. United States: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Forman, James. Locking up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2017.
• Kali Gross. Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (2006).
• Hagan, John, and Ruth D. Peterson. Crime and Inequality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. 
• Hinton, Elizabeth Kai. 2021. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. New York: Liveright, 2021.
• Koher-Hausmann, Issa. Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing. Princeton, NJ, 2018.
• Lowery, Wesley. They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement. United States: Little, Brown, 2016.
• Manuel, Ian. My Time Will Come: A Memoir of Crime, Punishment, Hope, and Redemption. United States: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021.
• Morris, Monique W. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. United Kingdom: New Press, 2016.
• Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. United States: Graywolf Press, 2014.
• Ransby, Barbara. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.
• Ritchie, Andrea, J. Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2017.
• Roberts, Dorothy, E. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage, 1997.
• Story, Brett. Prison Land: Mapping Carceral across Neoliberal America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Articles

• Gross, Kali N., and Cheryl D. Hicks. “Introduction—Gendering the Carceral State: African American Women, History, and the Criminal Justice System.” The Journal of African American History 100, no. 3 (2015): 357-65. https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.100.3.0357 
• Hinton, Elizabeth Hinton and DeAnza Cook, “The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview,” Annual Review of Criminology 4, no. 1 (2021): 261-286. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-060520-033306 
• Murch, Donna. “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (2015): 162–173. https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav260
• Taylor, Clarence. “Introduction: African Americans, Police Brutality, and the U.S. Criminal Justice System: Historical Perspectives,” Journal of African American History 98, no. 2 (2013): 200-205. https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.98.2.0200 
• Western, Bruce, and Christopher Wildeman.“The Black Family and Mass Incarceration.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621, no. 1 (2009): 221–242. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716208324850

Videos

• When They See Us (Netflix)

“Five teens from Harlem become trapped in a nightmare when they’re falsely accused of a brutal attack in Central Park. Based on the true story.” https://www.netflix.com/title/80200549