Policing Black Bodies

Angela J. Hattery is professor of women and gender studies and co-director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Gender Based Violence at the University of Delaware. Her books include Intimate Partner Violence.Earl Smith is emeritus professor at Wake Forest University. He is the author or editor of several books, including Race, Sport, and the American Dream.Together they are the authors of African American Families Today: Myths and Realities.

Intended to provoke controversial and uncomfortable discussion, Hattery and Smith's book focuses on what they expose as America's deeply rooted culture, history and ideology of deliberately violating black bodies in the name of policing. In ten chapters, they concentrate not simply on exonerated police killings of unarmed black men but also on mass incarceration in what they report as a new plantation economy with a pipeline running from schoolrooms to prison cells in a prison-industrial complex. Their concerns reach the indignities and insults blacks suffer daily not only at the hands of law enforcement and the criminal justice system but in every aspect of life amid the fiction of colorblind racism. Well documented, passionately argued, and engagingly written, this powerful analysis of systematic racism describes how society supports white, male, patriarchal, heterosexual privilege while oppressing marginalized peoples. Verdict: An essential work that advances an acute awareness of our responsibility to make society equitable for all.

• CONTENTSPreface to the second editionAcknowledgments 1. Setting the Stage2. Social Protest, or a Logical Response to Policing Black Bodies3. Mass Incarceration4. School-to-Prison Pipeline5. The Prison-Industrial Complex: The New Plantation Economy6. Policing Black Women’s Bodies7. Policing Trans Bodies8. Police Killings of Unarmed Black People9. The Ultimate Failure: Exoneration10. Policing Black Athletes’ Bodies11. Intersectionality, Color-Blind Racism, and a Call to ActionNotes BibliographyIndex