Excited to read this. Post-civil rights Black America saw the rise of a Black professional/elected class AND the rise of mass of incarceration and maybe we need to reckon with how those two phenomena informed each other.
https://twitter.com/AsteadWesley/status/1316363478333091841
we flick at this in this week’s episode but as one example: a whole generation of Black lawyers, prosecutors, and electeds signed on to the logic of carceral state and rather explicitly tied their jobs to their sense that they were inheritors to the mantle of civil rights
And @brentinmock has written smartly about this but the term “Black on Black crime” was initially Speaking to the concern that Black people in segregated Black communities were uniquely in danger of crime and violence.
Less “it be your own people!” and more “911 is a Joke.”
Less “it be your own people!” and more “911 is a Joke.”
Anyway, one of the (many) things that KH doesn’t talk about explicitly at great length in her campaign biography is if and how her time in DC at Howard during the height (nadir?) of the Crack Era shaped the tough-on-crime stances she took as as a prosecutor
But it’s pretty clear that the post-civil rights Black elite’s belief that representation could be a powerful counterweight to (or at least fetter to) racist structural imperatives has not really been borne out
And as I’ve whined about on here a lot: the idea that all Black people are equally in jeopardy of feeling the full brunt of our system of policing and punishment allows the Black elite/aspirational class to commandeer these discussions 😬
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
