Charles White, Trenton Six, 1949.
Our sixth post for Black History Month (BHM) concerns Blacks in the United States and their fraught and unequal treatment in the criminal justice system, which the mass media has only fairly recently considered worthy of closer attention. Some of the conditions and problems that occur here are also linked in various ways (directly and indirectly) to racial disparities in economic opportunity, welfare and well-being (or what the late G.A. Cohen defined as lacking ‘equal access to advantage’*), disparities that of course also involve matters of political power and class more generally.
Jacob Lawrence, To the Defense, 1989.
As with some of our earlier posts, first I will provide the resources available at the Cross Cultural Solidarity History Project on our subject matter. They also link to more material at other online sites:
- Histories of Lynching
- Mass Incarceration: articles
- Mass Incarceration: books
- State Repression of the Black Freedom Struggle
William H. Johnson. Chain Gang. c. 1939–40. Oil on plywood.
The following resources are available from yours truly:
- Attica Prison Uprising (September 9, 1971 – September 13, 1971): Notes, Timeline, and Essential Reading
- Toward a Manifesto for a People's (i.e., democratic) Law School
- The Myriad Dimensions of Prosecutorial Misconduct: A Reading Guide
- Beyond Punitive Liberal Capitalist Society: Toward a Syllabus
- Punishment and Prison bibliography (with addendum on policing in the U.S.)
I hope to have at least a couple of more posts in recognition and honor of Black History Month before the month’s end.
* For a philosophical treatment of this idea in general (thus not focused on racial disparities as such), please see Cohen’s posthumously published book (Michael Otsuka, ed.), On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2011). For an attempt to address this from a social policy perspective (one cognizant of the philosophical literature) based on the premise that it addresses differing views and arguments among egalitarians that “appear to converge on the same general policy prescription in the short to medium term: identify the worst off and take appropriate steps so that their position can be improved,” please see Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit, Disadvantage (Oxford University Press, 2007). Finally, and more historically and broadly, see Thomas Piketty (Arthur Goldhammer, trans.) Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.