by Paul Butler
41. Melissa S. Kearney et al., “Ten Economic Facts About Crime and Incarceration in the United States,” The Hamilton Project, May 2014, 11.
42. Scholars and researchers often conduct “damage-centered” research, which documents the pain and brokenness of marginalized peoples and seeks to hold accountable those in power. Damage-centered research, however, espouses a problematic “theory of change” that reinforces a “one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless.” See Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79:3 (Fall 2009): 409–27.
43. Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 1985), 163.
44. Evan McMurry, “CNN’s Don Lemon Backs Up Bill O’Reilly: ‘He Doesn’t Go Far Enough’ in Criticizing Black Culture,” Mediaite, July 27, 2013.
45. Ibid.
46. David Remnick, “Going the Distance: On and Off the Road with Barack Obama,” New Yorker, January 27, 2014.
47. “President Obama March on Washington Speech (video, transcript),” Politico, August 28, 2013.
48. Katherine Fung, “Don Lemon: Bill O’Reilly’s ‘Got a Point’ About Black People (video),” Huffington Post, July 28, 2013.
49. Mario Luis Small et al., “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty,” ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629 (2010): 2–3. Scholars, too, have re-focused on culture, including “asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty and even explicitly explaining the behavior of the low-income population in reference to cultural factors.” The new generation of scholarship, though, “is often reluctant to divide explanations into ‘structural’ and ‘cultural,’ because of the increasingly questionable utility of this old distinction.” Ibid.
50. “Hip-hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” Media Education Foundation, 2006, available at http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Hip-Hop-Transcript.pdf.
51. Regina Austin has pointed out that misogyny also “plays a substantial role in defining the persona of the Black male outlaw. In the mythology of Black banditry, women—like cars, clothing, and jewelry—are prized possessions.” See Regina Austin, “The Black Community, Its Lawbreakers, and a Politics of Identification,” Southern California Law Review 65 (1989): 1784–85.
52. The sociologist Michael Eric Dyson notes, “[T]he notion of violent masculinity is at the heart of American identity. The preoccupation with Jesse James and the outlaw, the rebel, much of that is associated in the American mindset, the collective imagination of the nation, with the expansion of the frontier. In the history of American social imagination, the violent man using the gun to defend his family, his kip and kin, becomes a suitable metaphor for the notion of manhood.”
53. “Hip-hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” Media Education Foundation.
54. Ibid.
55. Alexia Elajalde-Ruiz, “Nearly Half of Young Black Men in Chicago Out of Work, Out of School: Report,” Chicago Tribune, January 25, 2016; Ben Casselman, “How Baltimore’s Young Men Are Boxed In,” FiveThirtyEight, April 28, 2015.
56. See Tracey L. Meares, “Place and Crime,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 73 (1998): 669, 678.
57. See Julie A. Phillips, “White, Black, and Latino Homicide Rates: Why the Difference,” Social Problems 49:3 (2002): 352. In this article, Julie Phillips described a study that found “the associations between homicide and various measures of socioeconomic deprivation, such as poverty, unemployment, and family structure, are stronger for whites than for blacks.” See also Graham C. Ousey, “Homicide, Structural Factors, and the Racial Invariance Assumption,” Criminology 37:2 (May 1999).
58. Graham C. Ousey, “Homicide, Structural Factors, and the Racial Invariance Assumption,” Criminology 37:2 (1999).
59. Steffensmeier et al., “Scope and Conceptual Issues in Testing the Race-Crime Invariance Thesis: Black, White, and Hispanic Comparisons,” Criminology 48:4 (2010), available at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4233132.
60. Laura Sullivan et al., “The Racial Wealth Gap,” Demos, 2015.
61. Ben Walsh, “Here’s How the Government Could Close the Staggering Racial Wealth Gap,” Huffington Post, February 22, 2016.
62. “Kids Count 2015 Data Book: State Trends in Child Wellbeing,” Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2015, 15, figure 4.
63. Patricia Cohen, “Racial Wealth Gap Persists Despite Degree, Study Says,” New York Times, August 16, 2015.
64. Max Ehrenfreund, “Wealthier Black Kids More Likely to Go to Prison than Poor White Kids,” Washington Post, March 25, 2016.
65. Patrick Sharkey, “Sorry, Conservatives: America Is Not Even Close to Being a Colorblind Country,” The Week, May 28, 2014.
66. Tracey L. Meares, “Norms, Legitimacy and Law Enforcement,” University of Oregon Law Review 79:2 (2000): 394–95 (citing Mercer L. Sullivan, “Getting Paid”: Youth Crime and Work in the Inner City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Robert J. Sampson, “Urban Black Violence: The Effect of Male Joblessness and Family Disruption,” American Journal of Sociology 93:2 (1987); Robert J. Sampson and William Julius Wilson, “Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality,” in Crime and Inequality (John Hagan and Ruth D. Peterson eds., Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 37, 42.
67. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. See Phillips, “White, Black, and Latino Homicide Rates.”
72. “White Supremacy,” Oxford American English Dictionary.
73. See Frances Lee Ansley, “Stirring the Ashes: Race, Class, and the Future of Civil Rights Scholarship,” Cornell University Law Review 74:6 (September 1989).
74. David Wade, “The Conclusion That a Sinister Conspiracy of Foreign Origin Controls Organized Crime: The Influence of Nativism in the Kefauver Committee Investigation,” Northern Illinois University Law Review 16:2 (1996): 384.
75. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 17.
76. Ibid., 22.
77. David Leonhardt, Amanda Cox, and Claire Cain Miller, “An Atlas of Upward Mobility Shows Paths out of Poverty,” New York Times, May 4, 2015.
78. Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility,” April 2015, available at http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/images/nbhds_exec_summary.pdf.
79. Phillips, “White, Black, and Latino Homicide Rates,” 349–374.
80. Sullivan et al., “The Racial Wealth Gap.”
81. Lois Beckett, “How the Gun Control Debate Ignores Black Lives,” ProPublica, November 24, 2015.
82. Ibid.
5: Do the Brothers Need Keepers?
1. Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ Initiative,” The White House, February 27, 2014.
2. Lizette Alvarez and Cara Buckley, “Zimmerman Is Acquitted in Trayvon Martin Killing,” New York Times, July 13, 2013.
3. Michael D. Shear, “Obama Starts Initiative for Young Black Men, Noting His Own Experience,” New York Times, February 27, 2014.
4. Jennifer Senior, “The Paradox of the First Black President,” New York Magazine, October 7, 2015.
5. Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin,” The White House, July 19, 2013.
6. Compare Stephanie Condon, “Obama: Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Me 35 Years Ago,” CBSNews, July 19, 2013, with Kirsten Powers, “Obama’s Trayvon Remarks Struck Right Notes,” USA Today, July 24, 2013.
7. Paul Butler, “Black Male Exceptionalism? The Problems and Potential of Black Male–Focused Interventions,” Du Bois Review 10 (2013): 485, 486.
8. Ibid.
9. Troy Patterson, “The Extinction of the Black Man,” Slate, October 26, 2012.
10. Perry Stein, “ACLU Questions Legality of D.C.’s Minority
Male School Program: What About Black Girls?,” Washington Post, May 9, 2016.
11. Amicus Curiae Brief for Respondents at 33, Fisher v. Texas, No. 11-345, 133 S. Ct. 2411 (2012).
12. Irin Carmon, “Valerie Jarrett Defends ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ Against Criticism,” MSNBC, June 18, 2014.
13. Butler, “Black Male Exceptionalism?,” 497–498.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 496–501.
16. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected,” Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, 2015.
17. Wendy Wang, “Interracial Marriage: Who Is ‘Marrying Out’?,” Pew Research Center, June 12, 2015, available at http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/12/interracial-marriage-who-is-marrying-out.
18. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “My President Was Black,” The Atlantic, January/February 2017.
19. James Comey, “Hard Truths: Law Enforcement and Race,” remarks delivered at Georgetown University, February 12, 2015.
20. Butler, “Black Male Exceptionalism?,” 485, 503–4.
21. Verna L. Williams, “Reform or Retrenchment? Single-Sex Education and the Construction of Race and Gender,” Wisconsin Law Review, 2004, 68–69.
22. Ibid., 71.
23. Ibid., 72.
24. Butler, “Black Male Exceptionalism?”
25. Ibid.
26. David W. Chen, “Bloomberg Says Math Backs Police Stops of Minorities,” New York Times, June 28, 2013.
27. Jonah Goldberg, “Discrimination and My Brother’s Keeper,” National Review, March 5, 2014.
28. Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
29. “Letter of 250+ Concerned Black Men and Other Men of Color Calling for the Inclusion of Women and Girls in ‘My Brother’s Keeper,’” African American Policy Forum, May 30, 2014, available at www.aapf.org/recent/2014/05/an-open-letter-to-president-obama.
30. DeNeen L. Brown, “Harry Belafonte Challenges Phi Beta Sigma to Join Movement to Stop Oppression of Women,” Washington Post, January 12, 2014.
31. Taryn Finley, “This Fact About Women of the Black Panther Party May Surprise You,” Huffington Post, September 2, 2015.
32. Perception Institute, “Black Male Re-Imagined,” 2013.
33. Question Bridge, available at http://questionbridge.com.
6: Nothing Works: Why the Chokehold Can’t Be “Reformed”
1. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Vintage, 1972), 149.
2. Bill O’Reilly, “President Obama and the Race Problem,” Fox News, July 22, 2013.
3. Katherine Fung, “Don Lemon: Bill O’Reilly’s ‘Got a Point’ About Black People,” Huffington Post, July 28, 2013.
4. “Obama’s Racial Identity Still an Issue,” CBS News, November 27, 2007.
5. “Obama’s Father’s Day Remarks,” New York Times, June 15, 2008.
6. Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law (New York: Vintage, 1997), 19.
7. Ibid., 74.
8. Ibid., 69–70.
9. Ibid., 75.
10. Ginger Gibson, “Trump, in Law and Order Speech, Calls for African-American Support,” Reuters, August 17, 2016.
11. Jeremy Diamond, “Trump: Democrats Have ‘Failed and Betrayed’ African-Americans,” CNN Politics, August 17, 2016.
12. Michael Javen Fortner, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 23.
13. James Forman Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” New York University Law Review 87:1 (2012): 38–42.
14. Michael R. Bloomberg, “‘Stop and Frisk’ Keeps New York Safe,” Washington Post, August 18, 2013.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Alana Semuels, “How to Fix a Broken Police Department,” The Atlantic, May 28, 2015.
18. Ibid.
19. “Mission,” National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, available at www.trustandjustice.org/about/mission.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. “Eric Holder’s Keynote Address: Shifting Law Enforcement Goals to Reduce Mass Incarceration,” Brennan Center for Justice, September 23, 2014, available at www.brennancenter.org/analysis/keynote-address-shifting-law-enforcement-goals-to-reduce-mass-incarceration.
23. Eric H. Holder Jr., “Time to Tackle Unfinished Business in Criminal Justice Reform,” Washington Post, February 27, 2015.
24. Ibid.
25. See Jim Abrams, “Congress Passes Bill to Reduce Disparity in Crack, Powder Cocaine Sentencing,” Washington Post, July 29, 2010.
26. “Message from the Movement 4 Black Lives Policy Table,” The Movement for Black Lives, available at www.movementforblacklives.org/message-from-the-movement-4-black-lives-policy-table.
27. “About the Black Lives Matter Network,” Black Lives Matter, available at www.blacklivesmatter.com/about.
28. Ibid.
29. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 1–2, 4.
30. Ibid., 15, 258.
31. Ibid., 258.
32. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 103.
33. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Other People’s Pathologies,” The Atlantic, March 30, 2014.
34. “Message from the Movement 4 Black Lives.”
35. Dana Liebelson and Ryan J. Reilly, “Inside Hillary Clinton’s Meeting with Black Lives Matter,” Huffington Post, October 9, 2015.
36. Beyoncé, “Formation,” YouTube, February 6, 2016.
37. Michael Powell, “Colin Kaepernick Finds His Voice,” New York Times, September 13, 2016.
38. John Eligon and Scott Cacciola, “As Colin Kaepernick’s Gesture Spreads, a Spirit Long Dormant Is Revived,” New York Times, September 12, 2016.
39. Barack Obama, “Remarks at Morehouse College Commencement Ceremony,” May 19, 2013.
40. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President After Announcement of the Decision by the Grand Jury in Ferguson, Missouri,” November 24, 2014.
41. Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 6–7.
42. The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, “Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing” (2015), 58.
43. Ibid., 5.
44. Obama, “Remarks by the President After Announcement of the Decision by the Grand Jury in Ferguson, Missouri.”
45. See Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014.
46. “Message from the Movement 4 Black Lives Policy Table,” The Movement For Black Lives, available at www.movementforblacklives.org/message-from-the-movement-4-black-lives-policy-table.
47. Charles R. Lawrence III, “The Fire This Time: Black Lives Matter, Abolitionist Pedagogy and the Law,” Journal of Legal Education 65:2 (2015): 387.
48. For a critique of the celebratory tradition in evaluating race relations law, see Randall Kennedy, “Race Relations Law and the Tradition of Celebration: The Case of Professor Schmidt,” Columbia Law Review 86:8 (1986).
49. Marina Vornovitsky, Alfred Gottschalck, and Adam Smith, “Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S.: 2000 to 2011,” United States Census Bureau (2014), 3.
50. Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry, “Wealth Inequality Has Widened Along Racial, Ethnic Lines Since End of Great Recession,” Pew Research Center, December 12, 2014.
51. Drew Desilver, “Black Unemployment Rate Is Consistently Twice That of Whites,” Pew Research Center, August 21, 2013.
52. Janelle Jones and John Schmitt, “A College Degree Is No Guarantee,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, May 2014.
53. Margery Austin Turner et al., “Housing Discrimination Against Racial and Ethnic Minorities 2012,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, June 2013, 1.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56.
Lauren C. William, “Airbnb Has an Unsurprising Race Problem,” Think-Progress, May 7, 2016.
57. Benjamin G. Edelman, Michael Luca, and Daniel Svirsky, “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 16-069, December 2015.
58. Ibid., 11.
59. Ibid., 12.
60. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” The American Economic Review 94:4 (2004).
61. Michael S. Gaddis, “Discrimination in the Credential Society: An Audit Study of Race and College Selectivity in the Labor Market,” Social Forces 93:4 (2014).
62. Ibid., 17.
63. Ibid., 17–20.
64. Devin G. Pope and Justin R Sydnor, “What’s in a Picture? Evidence of Discrimination from Prosper.com,” The Journal of Human Resources 46:1 (2009).
65. Jennifer L. Doleac and Luke C.D. Stein, “The Visible Hand: Race and Online Market Outcomes,” The Economic Journal, 123:572 (2013).
66. Ibid., 490.
67. See, e.g., Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
68. Devon W. Carbado, “Critical What What?,” Connecticut Law Review 43:5 (2011): 1610.
69. Ian F. Haney López, “The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice,” Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review 29:1 (1994): 3–4.
70. Ibid., 7.
71. Ibid., 1–7, 163–67.
72. Ibid., 35.
73. Ibid., 119.
74. Haney López defines racism as “racial status-enforcement undertaken in reliance on racial institutions,” or actions that have “the effect of enforcing a racial status hierarchy.” Ian F. Haney López, “Institutional Racism: Judicial Conduct and a New Theory of Racial Discrimination,” Yale Law Journal 109:8 (2000): 1809–10.
75. Devon Carbado and Daria Roithmayr, “Critical Race Theory Meets Social Science,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 10:149 (2014): 151.
76. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992), ix. See also Carbado, “Critical What What?,” 1613 (asserting that racism is “built into the constitutional architecture of American democracy”).