We need to fund more teachers and social workers, not police officers, in our schools. We need doctors, not cops, to deal with drug addiction and mental illness. We need full employment not the criminalization of poverty. We need organized and powerful communities not federal tank giveaways. We need to fund stronger, healthier neighborhoods, not bigger police departments.
The end of 2014 was a bloody time for Native Americans. Even as protesters rallied against the police killings of unarmed black people like Michael Brown and Eric Garner in December, Rapid City police fired five bullets into Allen Locke, a 30-year-old Lakota man living in South Dakota.
Police Accountability and the Criminalization of Communities of Color: Organizing in Ferguson and Beyond - a conference call for funders on September 15, 2014
The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement.
The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
