Race

Law & Justice, Politics

The Problem Isn't Just Police—It's Politics

In this interview, sociologist Alex Vitale explains how the policing crisis in the United States begins with politics—the decision to embrace neoliberal austerity and to turn the social problems it creates over to police.

Alex Vitale, Scott Casleton

Law & Justice, Race

How Police Abuse the Charge of Resisting Arrest

We must reject the current legal regime under which resisting arrest is so widely accepted as a justification for police brutality and officer shootings.

Lisa Cacho, Jodi Melamed

Law & Justice, Politics

Power over Policing

A new special project from Boston Review. 

Politics, Race

America’s Long War on Children and Families

A new book shows how Trump’s family separation policy belongs to a much longer history of U.S. government forces—alongside state and local entities—taking children from families deemed inimical to the idealized American family form.

Paul M. Renfro

Race, Reading Lists

Abolition Isn't Only About Police

We also need to abolish prisons—as well as put an end to counterterrorism. An abolitionist reading list. 

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Race

Black Bereavement, White Condolences

“This sudden attention to the ongoing grief of black life can also feel like a slap in the face. Didn’t you notice we were dying?”

Marina Magloire

Race

Some Statues Are Like Barbed Wire

Activists fighting to remove statues of slavers and colonizers understand better than most how public memorials can be a form of violence.

Jonathan Beecher Field

Race

Terror and Abolition

At a moment when the call to abolish police and prisons is louder than ever, we should also demand an end to counterterrorism, which functions largely to ensnare people of color.

Atiya Husain

Race

Why Has COVID-19 Not Led to More Humanitarian Releases?

Jalil Muntaqim, a Black Panther imprisoned since 1971, is one of thousands of elderly prisoners the United States has refused to free during the pandemic.

Dan Berger

Law & Justice, Race

The Pain Just Stays in Your Head

Police brutality is not isolated and exceptional. As Chicago’s decades-long history of police torture illustrates, it is built into the systemic nature of racial violence.

Gili Kliger

Race

The Struggle to Abolish the Police Is Not New

Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. Understanding why can help us ask for change in our own time.

Garrett Felber

Race

The Fire This Time

These protests are too widespread to go away. There will be no peace without justice on multiple fronts.

Scholars for Social Justice