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Naomi Murakawa presents "The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America"

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Thursday, November 13th 2014

7:30 pm

Red Emma's

The explosive rise in the U.S. incarceration rate in the second half of the twentieth century, and the racial transformation of the prison population from mostly white at mid-century to sixty-five percent black and Latino in the present day, is a trend that cannot easily be ignored. Many believe that this shift began with the "tough on crime" policies advocated by Republicans and southern Democrats beginning in the late 1960s, which sought longer prison sentences, more frequent use of the death penalty, and the explicit or implicit targeting of politically marginalized people. In The First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state-a system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos-was, in fact, rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early 1960s, not in the period after. Murakawa traces the development of the modern American prison system through several presidencies, both Republication and Democrat. Responding to calls to end the lawlessness and violence against blacks at the state and local levels, the Truman administration expanded the scope of what was previously a weak federal system. Later administrations from Johnson to Clinton expanded the federal presence even more. Ironically, these steps laid the groundwork for the creation of the vast penal archipelago that now exists in the United States. What began as a liberal initiative to curb the mob violence and police brutality that had deprived racial minorities of their 'first civil right-physical safety-eventually evolved into the federal correctional system that now deprives them, in unjustly large numbers, of another important right: freedom. The First Civil Right is a groundbreaking analysis of root of the conflicts that lie at the intersection of race and the legal system in America.

“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 of 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 right--was 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 state“--Nikhil 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

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