“[A] groundbreaking, deeply researched and profoundly
heart-rending account of the origins of our national crisis of police
violence against Black America.” ―Peniel Joseph, New York Times Book Review
From
one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and
“riots” that shatters our understanding of the post–civil rights era.
What
began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of
George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive
nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded
into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to
the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of
color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent
in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian
Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of
2020 had clear precursors―and any attempt to understand our current
crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.
Even in the
aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the
civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward
greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers
an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from
Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to
chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary
consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical
corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions―explosions
of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she
suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never
disappeared, the optimistic story of a post–Jim Crow United States no
longer holds.
Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully
illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most
immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon
Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces
into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance
and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers,
plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions.
Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden
geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York,
Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California.
The
central lesson from these eruptions―that police violence invariably
leads to community violence―continues to escape policymakers, who
respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing
underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded
policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans
today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s
enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions
will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the
consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an
oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and
equality.
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