Incarceration – Recall This Book

132* Policing and White Power with David Cunningham and Daniel Kryder

This June 2020 episode, part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book’s first exploration of police brutality, systemic and personal racism and Black Lives Matter. Elizabeth and John were lucky to be joined by by Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham,two scholars who have worked on these questions for decades.

Many of the mechanisms that create an oppressed and subordinated American community of color can seem subtle and indirect, despite the insidious ways they pervade housing law (The Color of Law), education (Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together, Savage Inequalities) and the carceral state (The Condemnation of Blackness, The New Jim Crow, Locking Up Our Own).

117* Laurence Ralph Reckons With Police Violence (EF, JP)

In the third episode of our Global Policing series, Elizabeth and John spoke back in 2020 with anthropologist Laurence Ralph about The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. The book relates the decades-long history in which hundreds of people (mostly Black men) were tortured by the Chicago Police. Fascinatingly, it is framed as a series of open letters that explore the layers of silence and complicity that enabled torture and the activist movements that have helped to uncover this history and implement forms of collective redress and repair. Elizabeth and John ask Laurence about that genre choice, and he unpacks his thinking about responsibility, witnessing, trauma and channels of activism. Arendt’s “banality of evil” briefly surfaces.

“People are always reckoning. People are always trying, no matter how overwhelming the odds may be, people are always trying to fight back.”

44 Adaner Usmani: Racism as idea, Racism as power relation (EF, JP)

racism, mass incarceration, Southern plantation economy,
and W.E.B. Du Bois

Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-discern class inequality and inegalitarian power relations can produce racially differentiated outcomes? Adaner Usmani, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard and on the editorial board at Catalyst joins Elizabeth and John to wrestle with the subtle and complex genealogy of Southern plantation economy and its racist legacy.