heroin’s resurgence: James Forman, Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 147–48.
“the PCP capital of the world”: Ibid., 135.
come to be called crack: David Farber, Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 38–43.
“We’re making no excuses”: “Text of President and Mrs. Reagan’s Saturday Radio Address,” UPI, October 2, 1982.
people who participated: Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, H.R. Rep. No. 98-598, at 59 (1983).
“the cheapest game in town”: Ibid., 41.
national association surveyed: Ibid., 65.
one twenty-four-hour period: Ibid., 69.
Reagan reversed that ratio: Grischa Metlay, “Federalizing Medical Campaigns Against Alcoholism and Drug Abuse,” Milbank Quarterly 91, no. 1 (2013): 154.
“simple abandonment”: H.R. Rep. No. 98-598, at 115.
“The response of a rational person”: Editorial, “Dead and Dying Infants,” Washington Post, October 4, 1989.
resources to assist: Forman, Locking Up Our Own, 147.
Just 13 percent: Michael Massing, The Fix (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 53.
Legislators in Delaware: Tom Troy, “Lawmaker Recommends Whipping Post for Drug Traffickers,” UPI, January 26, 1989.
most crack users: Shannon Mullen et al., “Crack vs. Heroin: An Unfair System Arrested Millions of Blacks, Urged Compassion for Whites,” Asbury Park Press (December 2, 2019), www.app.com/in-depth/news/local/public-safety/2019/12/02/crack-heroin-race-arrests-blacks-whites/2524961002.
“tarred and feathered”: Editorial, “An Open Letter to PCP Dealers & Other Dogs!” Los Angeles Sentinel, September 25, 1980.
Maxine Waters: Forman, Locking Up Our Own, 134.
“should be dealt with”: Ibid., 137.
“more prosecutors, more judges”: Farber, Crack, 135; H.R. Rep. No. 98-598, at 41.
1984–1989: The Hip-Hop Generation
“I found it almost”: Rakim, Sweat the Technique: Revelations on Creativity from the Lyrical Genius (New York: HarperCollins, 2019), 124–25.
“most important hip-hop”: Rakim, Talib Kweli, and Chuck D, “Sweat the Technique: The Politics and Poetics of Hip-Hop,” a discussion of Rakim’s Sweat at the California African American Museum, March 11, 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=8kmaT4KVGf8.
1989–1994: Anita Hill
“We were all Anita”: DeNeen L. Brown, “The Scathing Ad 1,600 Black Women Bought to Oppose Clarence Thomas,” Washington Post, September 20, 2018.
“In matters of race”: Toni Morrison, “Introduction: Friday on the Potomac,” in Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1992), xxx.
In Clarence Thomas: Ron Elving, “Anita Hill’s Challenge to Clarence Thomas: A Tale of 2 Lives and 3 Elections,” NPR, September 20, 2018.
“While we appreciate”: William J. Eaton and Douglas Jehl, “NAACP Vows to Fight Thomas’ Confirmation,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1991.
“He talked about pornographic”: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, Nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to Be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 102nd Congress, first sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991).
“Having made Anita Hill”: Nell Irvin Painter, “Hill, Thomas, and the Use of Racial Stereotype,” in Morrison, Race-ing Justice, 205.
“A conversation”: Morrison, “Introduction,” in Race-ing Justice, xxx.
70 percent of African Americans: “Black Support for Nominee Rises,” Chicago Tribune, October 15, 1991.
Sexual harassment cases: U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Enforcement Guidance, Vicarious Employer Liability for Filing a Charge of Discrimination Unlawful Harassment by Supervisors, www.eeoc.gov/employees/charge.cfm; www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/publications/index.cfm.
“Clarence Thomas Effect”: Lawrence Bobo to author, September 13, 2019.
“One can easily amass a lot”: Ibid.
“There is no way”: Anita Hill, “How to Get the Kavanaugh Hearings Right,” New York Times, September 18, 2018.
“We believe Anita Hill”: “We believe Anita Hill. We also believe Christine Blasey Ford” (advertisement), New York Times, September 26, 2018. See Alexandria Symonds and Katie Van Syckle, “Your Beliefs Here: A Look at Advocacy Advertising in The Times,” New York Times, September 28, 2018.
1994–1999: The Crime Bill
“Ultimately, the human cost”: Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Vintage, 2017), 187–88.
“I think I have”: Quoted ibid., 193.
“Today the bickering”: Bill Clinton, “Remarks on Signing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994,” September 13, 1994, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1994), 2:1539–41.
moral panic: See Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), for a discussion of the complicated process of racism and criminalization in the UK.
“the black urban working”: Joe William Trotter, Jr., Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 162.
capitalism has always: Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
“There was talk of”: Adam Nossiter, “Making Hard Time Harder, States Cut Jail TV and Sports,” New York Times, September 17, 1994.
1999–2004: The Black Immigrant
quiet and soft-spoken: Kadiatou Diallo and Craig Wolff, My Heart Will Cross This Ocean: My Story, My Son, Amadou (New York: Random House, 2003).
2004–2009: Hurricane Katrina
“gendered nature”: Barbara Ransby, “Katrina, Black Women, and the Deadly Discourse on Black Poverty in America,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 3, no. 1 (2006): 215–22.
“And so many of”: “Bar: Astrodome ‘Working Well’ for Evacuees,” UPI, September 5, 2005.
“dirty, desperate”: Ransby, “Katrina, Black Women.”
“the Bricks”: Jane Henrici, Chandra Childers, and Elyse Shaw, Get to the Bricks: The Experiences of Black Women from New Orleans Public Housing After Hurricane Katrina, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, August 25, 2015, iwpr.org/iwpr-issues/race-ethnicity-gender-and-economy/get-to-the-bricks-the-experiences-of-black-women-from-new-orleans-public-housing-after-hurricane-katrina/.
falling to 230,172 residents: Allison Plyer, Facts for Features: Katrina Impact, August 26, 2016, www.datacenterresearch.org/data-resources/katrina/facts-for-impact/.
37 percent: “Study: Less Black Women in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, November 3, 2010, iwpr.org/media/press-hits/study-less-black-women-in-post-katrina-new-orleans/.
“the hunger and thirst”: Avis Jones-DeWeever, Women in the Wake of the Storm: Examining the Post-Katrina Realities of the Women of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, April 2008, 1, vawnet.org/sites/default/files/materials/files/2016-08/D481.pdf.
2009–2014: The Shelby Ruling
a new voter ID law: “Wisconsin’s Voter-ID Law Suppressed 200,000 Votes in 2016 (Trump Won by 22,748),” Nation, May 9, 2017.
voter suppression has taken: Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democra
cy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).
16 million people: “Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right to Vote,” Brennan Center for Justice, July 20, 2018, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/purges-growing-threat-right-vote.
Conclusion
“full freedom”: Kim D. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 210–11.
CONTRIBUTORS
Derrick Alridge is the Philip J. Gibson Professor of Education and an affiliate faculty member in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. An educational and intellectual historian, Alridge is the author of The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History (2008) and co-editor of Message in the Music: Hip-Hop, History, and Pedagogy (2011) and The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming in 2021).
Esther Armah is an internationally award-winning journalist, radio host, writer, public speaker, and playwright, who has lived and worked in New York, London, and Accra. She is executive director of the Armah Institute of Emotional Justice. Her life’s work is Emotional Justice, a framework she created, for which she won a Community Healer Award at the 2016 Valuing Black Lives Global Emotional Emancipation Summit in Washington, D.C. Her Emotional Justice essays have been featured by WARSCAPES, Ebony, AlterNet, Essence, Gawker, and the Jay Z 4:44 Syllabus, and in books Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, & Racial Violence (2016) and Love with Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (2019), which won a 2020 Lambda Literary Award. She has written five Emotional Justice plays that have been produced and performed in New York, Chicago, and Ghana. She was named Most Valuable New York Radio Host in The Nation’s 2012 Progressive Honors List for her work on Wake-Up Call on Pacifica’s WBAI. She was named one of Africa’s 30 Women Leaders in 2019 by CMO Asia and the Africa Leadership Academy.
Molefi Kete Asante is professor and chair of the Department of Africology at Temple University. He is the co-founder of Afrocentricity International and president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies, as well as the founding and current editor of Journal of Black Studies. Asante, often called the most prolific African American scholar, has published ninety-two books; among them are Radical Insurgencies (2020), The History of Africa (3rd edition, 2019), The African American People: A Global History (2011), Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation (2009), Revolutionary Pedagogy (2017), African American History: A Journey of Liberation (1995), African Pyramids of Knowledge (2015), Facing South to Africa (2014), and the memoir As I Run Toward Africa (2011). Asante has published more than five hundred articles and is one of the most quoted living African authors as well as one of the most distinguished thinkers in the African world. At Temple University, he created the first PhD program in African American Studies in 1988. He has directed more than 135 PhD dissertations, making him the top producer of doctorates among African American scholars. He created the theory of Afrocentricity.
William J. Barber II is senior pastor of the Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach, and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. A 2018 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius award,” he is the author of The Third Reconstruction (2016), Revive Us Again (2018), and We Are Called to Become a Movement (2020).
Kathryn Sophia Belle is an associate professor of philosophy and is affiliated with African American studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of specialization include African American/Africana philosophy, Black feminist philosophy, continental philosophy (existentialism), and critical philosophy of race. Major figures she engages include Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Anna Julia Cooper, Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maria W. Stewart, and Richard Wright. She has published on race, feminism, intersectionality, and sex/sexuality. Under the name Kathryn T. Gines, she co-edited Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (2010) and wrote Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (2014). She is founding director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers, founding co-editor of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race, and founder of La Belle Vie Coaching, offering initiatives for high achievers, the happily unmarried, and erotic empowerment.
Joshua Bennett is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth. He is the author of three books of poetry and criticism: The Sobbing School (2016)—winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Being Property Once Myself (2020), and Owed (2020). Bennett earned his PhD in English from Princeton University and an MA in theatre and performance studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. Dr. Bennett’s writing has been published in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.
Daina Ramey Berry is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and chair of the history department at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the award-winning author and editor of six books, including The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (2017), which received three book awards. Her most recent book, A Black Women’s History of the United States (2020), co-authored by Kali N. Gross, has received starred reviews from Kirkus Review and Library Journal. In February 2020, it was listed as one of the top ten books to read by The Washington Post, and it is on the longlist for the Brooklyn Public Library’s Literary Prize.
Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., Jamelle Bouie is a columnist for The New York Times and a political analyst for CBS News. He covers campaigns, elections, national affairs, and culture. Prior to his work for the Times, Bouie was chief political correspondent for Slate magazine and a staff writer at The Daily Beast and he held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation. He attended the University of Virginia, where he graduated with a degree in political and social thought, and government. Bouie is also a photographer, documenting his surroundings using digital and analog tools.
Herb Boyd is an award-winning author and journalist who has published a number of books and countless articles for national magazines and newspapers, including the Amsterdam News. His most recent book is Harlem Renaissance Redux (2019). Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination (2017) received several awards and was named a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. Among his other books are The Diary of Malcolm X (2013), co-edited with Malcolm’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz, and By Any Means Necessary—Malcolm X: Real, Not Reinvented (2012), co-edited with Haki Madhubuti, Ron Daniels, and Maulana Karenga. Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America—An Anthology (1995), co-edited with Robert Allen of the journal Black Scholar, won the American Book Award for nonfiction. He teaches African American history and culture at the City College of New York in Harlem, where he also lives.
Donna Brazile is a veteran political strategist, a Fox News contributor, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and the King Endowed Chair in Public Policy at Howard University. She previously served as interim chair of the Democratic National Committee and of the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute. She managed the Al Gore presidential campaign in 2000 and has lectured at more than 225 colleges and universities on race, diversity, women, leadership, and restoring civility in politics. Brazile is the author of several books, including Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House (2017).
Jericho Brown is the author of The Tradition (2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipi
ent of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition, won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, BuzzFeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, organizer, and educator, as well as executive director of Bowery Poetry Club, artistic director of Urban Word NYC, and poetry coordinator at St. Francis College. Browne has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research, and the Rauschenberg Foundation. She is the author of Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice (2020), Woke Baby (2018), Black Girl Magic (2018), Kissing Caskets (2017), and Dear Twitter (2010). She is also the founder of the Woke Baby Book Fair (a nationwide diverse literature campaign) and, as an Arts for Justice grantee, is excited to release her first YA novel, Chlorine Sky, in January 2021. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Howard Bryant is the author of nine books—Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field (2020), The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism (2018), The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (2010), Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball (2005), Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston (2002), the three-book Legends sports series for middle-grade readers, and Sisters and Champions: The True Story of Venus and Serena Williams (2018)—and has contributed essays to fourteen others. He is a two-time Casey Award winner, in 2003 and 2011, for best baseball book of the year, and a 2003 finalist for the Society for American Baseball Research Seymour Medal. The Heritage received the 2019 Nonfiction Award from the American Library Association’s Black Caucus and the Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazard Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African American Studies. He has been senior writer for ESPN since 2007 and has served as the sports correspondent for NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday since 2006. He has won numerous awards, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for commentary in 2016 and 2018, and earned the 2016 Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. In addition, Bryant has appeared in several documentaries, including Baseball: The Tenth Inning and Jackie Robinson, both directed by Ken Burns, and Major League Legends: Hank Aaron, produced by the Smithsonian and Major League Baseball. In 2017 he served as the guest editor for the Best American Sports Writing anthology.
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