Policing Black Bodies
How Black Lives Are Surveilled and How to Work for Change
By (author) Angela J. Hattery, Earl Smith
Not available to order
Publication date:
08 December 2017Length of book:
284 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442276963
From Trayvon Martin to Freddie Gray, the stories of police violence against Black people are too often in the news. In Policing Black Bodies Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith make a compelling case that the policing of Black bodies goes far beyond these individual stories of brutality. They connect the regulation of African American people in many settings, including the public education system and the criminal justice system, into a powerful narrative about the myriad ways Black bodies are policed.
Policing Black Bodies goes beyond chronicling isolated incidents of injustice to look at the broader systems of inequality in our society—how they’re structured, how they harm Black people, and how we can work for positive change. The book discusses the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration and the prison boom, the unique ways Black women and trans people are treated, wrongful convictions and the challenges of exoneration, and more. Each chapter of the book opens with a true story, explains the history and current state of the issue, and looks toward how we can work for change. The book calls attention to the ways class, race, and gender contribute to injustice, as well as the perils of colorblind racism—that by pretending not to see race we actually strengthen, rather than dismantle, racist social structures. Policing Black Bodies is a powerful call to acknowledge injustice and work for change.
Policing Black Bodies goes beyond chronicling isolated incidents of injustice to look at the broader systems of inequality in our society—how they’re structured, how they harm Black people, and how we can work for positive change. The book discusses the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration and the prison boom, the unique ways Black women and trans people are treated, wrongful convictions and the challenges of exoneration, and more. Each chapter of the book opens with a true story, explains the history and current state of the issue, and looks toward how we can work for change. The book calls attention to the ways class, race, and gender contribute to injustice, as well as the perils of colorblind racism—that by pretending not to see race we actually strengthen, rather than dismantle, racist social structures. Policing Black Bodies is a powerful call to acknowledge injustice and work for change.
Intended to provoke controversial and uncomfortable discussion, Hattery and Smith's book focuses on what they expose as America's deeply rooted culture, history and ideology of deliberately violating black bodies in the name of policing. In ten chapters, they concentrate not simply on exonerated police killings of unarmed black men but also on mass incarceration in what they report as a new plantation economy with a pipeline running from schoolrooms to prison cells in a prison-industrial complex. Their concerns reach the indignities and insults blacks suffer daily not only at the hands of law enforcement and the criminal justice system but in every aspect of life amid the fiction of colorblind racism. Well documented, passionately argued, and engagingly written, this powerful analysis of systematic racism describes how society supports white, male, patriarchal, heterosexual privilege while oppressing marginalized peoples. Verdict: An essential work that advances an acute awareness of our responsibility to make society equitable for all.