Reddit Reddit reviews Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

We found 8 Reddit comments about Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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American History
United States History
U.S. State & Local History
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
Farrar Straus and Giroux
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8 Reddit comments about Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America:

u/jsingal · 46 pointsr/stupidpol

I'm honestly not familiar enough with the subreddit to offer substantive advice. You guys know I am no Language Cop, but from what I've seen there's a bit of this edglord strain of calling everything 'retarded' or whatever, and I think that, whatever one thinks about the offensiveness of the term, it's a bit politically silly. If someone comes to this subreddit who might otherwise be sympathetic to your message and is given excuses to discount you guys and not take you seriously, no one wins. I'm not suggesting you guys should call a Fatway against wrongspeakers, but it's worth keeping in mind.

As for pushing back against LWI, I think simply 1) talking a lot about how class influences everyone, every day, and 2) highlighting the real difference of opinion among members of marginalized groups, and how those differences are themselves often influenced by class.

Now, there's a bullshit way to do (2) and a real way to do (2). The bullshit way is to be like UHHHHHHH YOU REALIZE LOTS OF BLACK PEOPLE ARE REPUBLICANS, RIGHT??? I mean, a few! But a tiny few. Saying "Black people vote overwhelmingly Democratic" is a perfectly acceptable, non-essentializing statement.

But there are more specific examples that are quite powerful, and which get the point across nicely. One is black class dynamics and their relationship to overpolicing. A few year sago I wrote about a really good book that talks about this stuff:

>Michael Javen Fortner, a political scientist at City University of New York, is hoping to complicate the story that the Rockefeller laws, and others like them, were foisted on black people by white people. His book, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, out September 28 from Harvard University Press, tells the story of Harlem’s struggles with drugs and crime from the 1940s through the passage of the Rockefeller laws. Key to this story is the role of Harlem’s residents in forcefully advocating for a tougher, more punitive approach to the neighborhood’s “pushers” and addicts.

This was a bit of a controversial book -- poke around and you'll find heated responses to it. But it's absolutely, completely, beyond a shadow of a doubt true that there were plenty of Harlemites calling for tough on crime approaches. Does that mean that white supremacy, usually pegged as the culprit in the institution of these laws, had no influence? Of course not. It can be both. And I actually reject the idea that Fortner's book and Michelle Alexander's (which he portrays his as a response to, if memory serves) are totally at odds. It could be that the Rockefeller Laws were politically overdetermined: Maybe, if the black community was united in its opposition, the laws would have still passed, but later on, or would have been weakened, or whatever.

But the point is that of COURSE black people don't like crime, and of COURSE when they live in a neighborhood with a lot of crime, many of them do the human thing: Get mad and seek to punish the perpetrators. And in Harlem and elsewhere, this often takes place along explicitly class-related lines. Middle-class Harlemites wanted to keep their kids and their homes safe from the ravages of heroin, so they blamed it on poor users and dealers. That's how human works! Color plays a huge role in a lot of stuff, but class matters, too.

Another great example, but DC- rather than NYC-focused, is Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman Jr. of Yale Law School. Somewhat similar storyline, and it offers reality-based counterpoints to platitudes about how diversity (which is important!) magically causes certain problems to go away. Diversifying the DC police department did NOT solve the problems many LWI types would like to think it would.

Anyway, this is already getting longwinded but I guess my point is, if you claim to care about African-American life (for example), and that level of care extends only to your Twitter feed and to a few high-profile exemplars whose politics might not be represented in the communtiy at large, do you really care about African-American life? That's the sort of argument I would make to comrades who essentialize. Ask them to read these sorts of books and what they think of them.

u/goys-r-us · 17 pointsr/changemyview

No probbbbbbb. I'll dump a few, let me know if you want any other specific areas of focus.

u/prizepig · 11 pointsr/AskALiberal

There was a Pulitzer prize winning book last year that was centrally concerned with this issue. https://www.amazon.com/Locking-Up-Our-Own-Punishment/dp/0374189978

There are plenty of other books, and news, and media that reflect this issue too.

I don't think it's correct to say that this doesn't receive publicity, or that it's a provocative position. I think (or hope) that it's a well understood and accepted thing. It's definitely an important part of how I understand the complicated history of race, crime and punishment in our country.

u/GaryTheKrampus · 10 pointsr/ChapoTrapHouse

> The black community needs to fix itself in order to escape the cycle of shit they're caught up in.

There’s actually an interesting conversation to be had about this, because it sort of has this intuitive appeal if you don’t know the reality of it. Sort of like, it would be real nice if it worked that way, yeah?

This attitude was held by many prominent black officials in the aftermath of the civil rights reforms, and historically many authoritarian policing practices were put in place on a wave of black popular support. It’s hard to imagine now, but once black activists had won legal equality, there was an attitude sort of like now the police must be on our side. Many black activists supported the war on drugs; Louis Farrakhan spoke in favor of it. Eric Holder was a huge supporter of random drug & gun sweeps. Marion Barry built his career on DC’s Pilot District Project. Institutionalized mandatory minimum sentences were primarily supported by black activists. But each of these policies has lead to the mass incarceration crisis we now face, which disproportionately impacts black Americans.

It is now clear that the net effect of these “black community self-policing” efforts has not been to reinforce order in black communities, but to demolish it. Why did this happen? In each case, it’s because an effort internal to an oppressed community has been co-opted by their oppressors. A sort of polity judo. What can we learn from this? It’s evidence of the fundamental struggle of liberation, that a combined internal and external effort is necessary for any effort on the behalf of an oppressed community to succeed.

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America is a good book on the topic (apologies for linking to the Great Satan), and I would encourage any Chapo fan to listen to the interview with the author on this episode of The Dig, a podcast which is earnestly very good in exactly the way Chapo isn’t.

u/theacctpplcanfind · 1 pointr/BlackPeopleTwitter

"Dems pushing" is a vast oversimplification of all those policies. There were plenty of conservatives who contributed to literally all of those laws--you seriously think the only people pushing for drug laws were Dems?? Or stricter policing? I highly recommend the book Locking Up Our Own for a way more nuanced view on how we got to the state we're in when it come to policing and incarceration. Blaming one side or the other for these complex issues, and much worse using the past as a gauge for what you should support in the present is not the way to go.

u/matthewkermit · 1 pointr/AskALiberal

> In contrast, however, the war on drugs can be squarely lain at the feet of the republican party.

I'd agree with you there 80%. There's been new scholarship on the support black communities had for the war on crime. I haven't read the book, but read interviews with the author to try to understand his thesis.

u/trevor5ever · 0 pointsr/law

I recommend Let's Get Free and Locking Up Our Own if you have time for a couple of quick, accessible reads.

u/JaiBlade · -1 pointsr/BlackPeopleTwitter

https://www.amazon.com/Locking-Up-Our-Own-Punishment/dp/0374189978

A book for anyone trying to be ignorant right now.