Tag
Police
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Abolish Sheriffs: Talking with Jessica Pishko
“My perspective is that we should abolish the office of the sheriff.”
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“Mississippi Masala” @30: Revisiting a Film Classic in Authoritarian Times
What might it mean to forge a politics explicitly based in the places we are, rather than a politics of the places from which we came?
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The Police: Gentrification’s Shock Troops
In Detroit today, politicians promise that real estate development—coupled with police violence—will guarantee the city’s spiritual redemption.[none-for-homepage]
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Hong Kong: “When We Burn You Will Burn With Us”
The most telling chant of the 2019 Hong Kong protests is “Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times” (光復香港 時代革命), not because it offers a vision …
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Gun Studies Syllabus
In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting of February 14, 2018, scholar Danielle McGuire invited historians on Twitter to propose readings that would provide resources for gun control activists. In response, Public Books reached out to scholars Caroline Light and Lindsay Livingston to develop a Gun Studies Syllabus. There are an estimated 310 million…
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Empathy Is Not Enough
Almost 30 years ago, education researcher and children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop introduced an analogy that has been widely embraced by the librarians, teachers, artists, and scholars involved in the #weneeddiversebooks movement. Stories featuring underrepresented minorities, Bishop observed, can function as both mirrors and windows. Members of marginalized groups can see themselves represented as…
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A Tapestry of Black Lives
James Baldwin’s legacy looms powerfully in this current moment. This may be all the more true for black writers. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, one of the contributors to Jesmyn Ward’s timely new anthology …
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Police Brutality, a Horror Story
Victor LaValle’s new novella bridges the weird and the ordinary, and reveals the ordinary to be all the more terrifying. LaValle employs the paranormal not to reject reality, but to open a portal into the experience of everyday social marginalization. What if, muses the book’s 20-year-old African American protagonist, “another world existed within—or alongside—the world…
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Black Lives Under Surveillance
Modern capitalism has always placed an undue burden on black bodies. Slavery, forced labor, and dispossession have moved hand in hand with forces of surveillance and the power of the state. In cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Oakland—and countless others that have never reached national awareness—abysmal economic conditions have found an intimate partner in…
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The Art of Protest
I marched with thousands on the streets of New York, asserting that “Trump is Not Our President” and “Love Trumps Hate.” So far we are free to assemble on Union Square in New York, to march up Fifth Avenue, to shout our anger, our fear, and our resolve. The street and soil are still ours to share. As I…
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“The Night Of” and the Didactic Procedural
Within a few minutes of starting the HBO mini-series The Night Of, any experienced television viewer knows that they are embarking on a crime procedural. The show’s credit …
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Art, Protest, Riot
If we could break America’s spellbound gaze on the presidential election, the pressing question of national politics would be this: will the recent fires ignited by Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the 2015 Baltimore protests smolder long enough to better society, or will they burn out? As we gear up for the final…
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From The War On Poverty To The War On Crime
Lethal police encounters between black Americans and law enforcement authorities have been a source of protest and resistance historically …
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“It’s When There Are a Lot of Them That There Are Problems”
The sorrow and outrage provoked by the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were underwritten by an all-too-familiar grand narrative: These were not the cowardly misdeeds of a group of disaffected and delusional youth; this was another instantiation of a primeval war of civilizations extending far beyond the Île-de-France. Accordingly, grandiose statements about…
