Policing Black Bodies

December 1, 2017

Intended to provoke controversial and uncomfortable discussion, Hattery (women & gender studies, George Mason Univ.; Interracial Relationships in the 21st Century) and Smith's (American ethnic studies, Wake Forest Univ.; Race, Sport and the American Dream) 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.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

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