This brilliant book provides persuasive arguments and powerful analysis of how racial liberals deploy racial pity and 'neutral' administrative procedures to entrench images of black criminality and expand the US carceral state. Murakawa stands in the lineage of Angela Davis, Loic Waquant and Michelle Alexander in laying bare the disturbing contradiction between American ideals of criminal justice and American practices ... Read moreof state-sanctioned carceral violence against black people.
Cornel West
Naomi Murakawa's indispensable, highly anticipated book convincingly challenges conventional wisdom about the origins of US 'law and order' society. Like other civil rights reforms, criminal justice policy was designed and successively expanded over the post-WWII decades by liberals invested in narrow, racially neutral processes and fair procedures, but largely indifferent to a world of broad, racially disparate outcomes. Protection from arbitrary violence
the liberal's first civil rightwas the touchstone for a policy regime that continued to advance invidious associations of blackness and criminal behavior. Under this big tent, seemingly opposite racial politics converged to build the world's largest, most racially unequal, carceral stateNikhil Pal Singh, New York University, author of Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy
While most scholars agree that the roots of our current carceral state lay in law and order policies, Murakawa traces those policies to unlikely sources
the liberal Truman administration in its efforts to protect African Americans from mob and police violence. While the state did little to enforce such protections, it bequeathed our nation a criminal justice architecture that fueled mass incarceration. The First Civil Right not only overturns received wisdom, but reveals that 'racial liberalism' is not the solution but part of the problem.Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Tackling one of the most important topics of our time, this sharply-argued, richly-researched, and tough-minded book exposes the roots of our carceral state. In highlighting ideology, liberal as well as conservative, as well as putatively neutral ideas and procedures, The First Civil Right compellingly marries policy analysis and studies of race to a penetrating account of officially-sanctioned racial cruelty.
Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University
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