#naomi murakawa

[emdroid]

RUHA BENJAMIN AND PRINCETON FACULTY WITNESSES SPEAK OUT ON CLIO HALL SIT-IN (excerpted)

That last paragraph is powerful.

[rotationalsymmetry]

Hey so that reminds me. I have this book — Abolition. Feminism. Now. By Angela Y Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R Meiners, and Beth E Richie, copyright 2022 so very recent — that I have yet to crack open and could use some gentle encouragement to actually read.

And here you are, presumably on tumblr to be entertained, edified, and/or have your brain put through a blender for a few minutes. So let’s have a poll.

[Image descriptions:

Book cover (title and authors as above, abstract background in orange, reddish, and violet tones.)

Back cover. Purple background. Orange and white text reads: “An urgent, vital contribution to the indivisible projects of abolition and feminism, from leading scholar-activists Angela Y David, Gina Dent, Erica R Meiners, and Beth E Richie. As a politic and a practice, abolition increasingly shapes our political moment — halting the construction of new jails and propelling movements to divest from policing. Yet erased from this landscape are not only the central histories of feminist — usually queer, anti capitalist, grassroots, and women of color-led — organizing that continue to cultivate abolition but also a recognition of the stark reality: abolition is our best response to endemic forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence. Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated from vibrant community-based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. traces necessary historical genealogies, key internationalist leanings, and everyday practices to grow our collective and flourishing present and futures.

Table of contents. Includes: preface, introduction, part 1 abolition. Part 2 feminism. Part 3 now. Epilogue. Appendices: intimate partner violence and state violence power and control wheel. Incite!-critical resistance statement on gender violence and the prison industrial complex. Reformist reforms vs abolitionist steps to end imprisonment. Further resources. Notes. Image permissions. Index.

list of other books in the abolitionist papers series, edited by Naomi Murakawa, namely: Change Everything: Radical Capitalism and the Case for Abolition by Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson; and We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transformative Justice by Mariame Kaba

Replicated image in the book of a pamphlet cover created by Jeff George and distributed by Survived and Punished (an organization that advocated for incarcerated survivors of abuse.) There is a large line drawing of a scale out of balance with a man in a business suit, large stacks of money, and sky scrapers on the heavy end and a small group of protesters holding a sign saying “free all survivors” on the other end. Large handwritten text says “no good prosecutors now or ever” and smaller stencil-like text says “how the Manhattan district attorney hoards money, perpetuated abuse of survivors, and gags their advocates.”

End image descriptions.]

[kissingcullens]

How Not to Think Like a Cop, with Naomi Murakawa

“Naomi Murakawa, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton and the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.

Naomi talks with us about her J-A roots in Oakland, how her dad’s career in the criminal-legal system got her thinking about carceral politics, why police reform has long been a trap, and the history of hate crimes legislation in the US. She shares her observations on Black Lives Matter, the emergence of abolitionist thinking, and the discourse around “anti-Asian violence.”

What can crime statistics tell us about the world? How do we stop ourselves from thinking like cops? Which groups are pushing Asian America in a more punitive direction? And how should “Asian American history 101” inform our analyses of recent violence?”

Time to Say Goodbye Podcast, April 2021

🔥🔥🔥🔥

[colasarchive]

Going over the wave of original ToHeart girls made for the defunct mobile game [ToHeart Heartful Party]

Rea Hanazawa

CV: Tomoko Kaneda - Born October 23

A girl absolutely attached to her phone even when it’s out of charge. Rea loves new and cute things. She devotes most of her time to the daily updates on her blog and become a bit obsessed with the number of hits she’ll receive.

Sakurako Konno

CV: Mai Fuchigami - Born December 1st

A polite honor student who values spending time relaxing. Sakurako radiates a calm atmosphere and never seems to be in a hurry. She’s a member of the tea ceremony club and likes to wear kimono.

Moemi Tsukifune

CV: Sayuri Yahagi - Born November 26

An otaku girl too shy to join the manga club. Moemi is soft spoken and stutters often, unable to convey her feelings. Though when the conversation comes to her interests she becomes incredibly talkative. She's a big fan of doujinshi.

Hina Mitsuhoshi

CV: Anju Inami - Born June 24

A girl who loves instant yakisoba. So much so that her entire body is nearly made up of yakisoba. She has learned everything important in her life from instant yakisoba and can smell instant yakisoba sauce from a mile away.

Yasuko Tsubaki

CV: Yukiyo Fuji - Born April 7

A member of the health committee who is a regular at the infirmary. Yasuko is shown to be quite sickly and collapses often. Though she has a pessimistic outlook on life and feels like she’s going to die, she looks quite healthy.

Maika Marioka

CV: Rie Murakawa - Born April 30

A quiet girl who’s always alone in the library reading books. Maika’s pessimistic about life and has a very negative view of herself. She often tries to avoid people since large crowds feel suffocating.

Krin

CV: Ikumi Nakagami - Born May 18

A student originally from Africa. An adventurous girl excited to learn more about the new world around her (This character unfortunately seems to have a lot of bad stereotypes so I’m keeping it short)

Miya kurohane

CV: Marie Miyake - Born October 31

A cool and mysterious girl. Miya is a self proclaimed 100,016 year old witch who works for the ruler of darkness. Though it seems like a joke at first, her power might actually be real...

Ranju Ayabuki

CV: Yuko Goto - Born June 4

A math teacher quite popular with students. Ranju has a blunt personality and cool demeanor, except when confronted with cute girls. She’s a night owl whose favorite foods are tomato juice and liver.

Yumi Kinjo

CV: Shiho Nakasumi - Born July 20

A calm and easygoing swimmer from Okinawa. Yumi’s the ace of the swim team and highly respected. She actually prefers scuba diving though, and would much rather be swimming by the coral reefs than in a pool.

Chirin Omiya

CV: Mai Fuchigami - Born June 16

A good natured girl with a big appetite. Chirin loves to eat and is always up to date on the newest restaurants. However, she worries about her weight and tries to exercise often. This doesn’t stop her love for sweets though.

Mizuho Akatsuki

CV: Natsumi Takamori - Born November 4th

A train otaku attending the nearby private school. Mizuho enjoys all things railway, and doesn’t believe anyone could dislike them. She’s bright and friendly but not great at reading the atmosphere.

Kohime Yamashina

CV: Naomi Ozora - Born August 16

The daughter of shrine owners in Kyoto. Kohime’s currently training to be a shrine maiden at one near the school. She’s old fashioned but has a lot of interest in foreign cultures. She also likes to draw fortunes.

XAr-10(E) ARTY

CV: Sarah Emi Bridcutt - Born March 25

A police robot developed by a new company. Initially she outperformed Kurusugawa’s robots, but her functions are still immature. ARTY has now been brought to school to be reconditioned as a maid robot for testing.

[jeaninthephilippines]

Chosen Family

This year alone, I was able to see Mr. Campos 3 times. I hadn't seen him since I got married about 11 years ago.

The typhoon rains almost made meeting up impossible. The rain was letting up slowly from Sunday through Monday. We spent a lot of time on the group chats trying to excuse him from attending Mari's vow renewal on Monday lunch time.

He still showed up making the drive. Everyone was late and we spent about 4 hours at the restaurant in the hotel. I am sure the wait staff but if there's anything I learned this trip is that some minor inconveniences are okay to savor the moment with the people in front of you.

We spent time talking about everything about Guam, adult lives, history, classmates, trips, and the past. Veronica immediately gelled with Mr. Campos and after everything was said and done, she told me and Mari, I understand the hype and why it's so important for him to continue his presence in your lives.

Below is the vow renewal prayer written by a Queer Pastor:

the blessing—-

Blessed beloveds–

coming and becoming together:

Together, we move in fierce and tender rhythms of care, of solidarity, of joyful alliance.

- We need each other, and we have each other.

- We are from each other; may we be for each other.

Naomi Murakawa asks — Why be a star when you can make a constellation?

Alone, dazzling — one can burn so bright.

But. Beloveds: finding each other, dancing together, we pattern new possibilities.

- Possibilities beyond pain, beyond fear, beyond aloneness.

- Possibilities born of laughter and dream, of refusal and resistance and recreation.

- Possibilities that point us toward sweetness and salve.

We, surrendering into the sacred patterns that heal and hold us.

We, of stardust and spirit and breath.

We, of soil and seeds and spells.

We, of queer and radical rootedness.

Breathing together, we conspire together.

We, of movement and lineage and aliveness that stretches beyond the ages.

We, of elder wisdom and generations yet to come.

We, aligning and realigning into constellations —ancient and emerging— bending our collective life toward freedom.

- Toward the liberating lifeforce of love.

- Toward transformation.

- Toward together.

Until all of us are free,

until we, we, we are free,

until free — we.

This was written by queer pastor and theologian, Anna Blaedel —

Mari talks about how I missed her wedding but still showed up on zoom in my bridesmaid outfit in 2022. She also wanted Campos to preside over her wedding. And their vow renewals taught me that love should always be reflected upon each year. They check in every month what they're doing well and what they need to work on. I am reminder that love is a lot of work and much to work on.

[tieflingkisser]

Liberal law and order, with regard to policing in particular, operates with a specific grammar of racism. It starts from the belief that racism is an idea, a misconception, an emotional misfire that is seemingly lodged in individual police officers who are afflicted by stereotypes and irrationalities. These “racist bad apple” officers are seen as elements that contaminate policing—which is otherwise believed to be acceptable. The project of liberal reform then becomes one of sealing off or minimizing those contaminants. This “decontamination” is pursued through administrative tinkering: more monitoring through body cameras (as if we need more evidence of gendered, transphobic, and racist police violence), more training (as if a two-day police seminar could train the racism out of someone), or hiring more police officers of color (with the presumption that they’re going to behave very differently from white officers).

-- Naomi Murakawa in Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter

[blackandcuba]

The international Black and Cuba roadshow continues at Princeton University. Professor Naomi Murakawa of the university's African American studies Department included the film and talkback with director Dr. Robin J. Hayes in the graduate seminar, African American Intellectual Traditions. The film is also part of the Princeton library's permanent collection. To screen Black and Cuba in your college classroom, see BlackandCuba.org.

[apas-95]

Honestly, cop bodycams, at this point, serve a single purpose, which is helping police departments to make their justification narrative more cohesive. The PD waited until the bodycam footage from Duante Wright's murder was available to provide any of the pre-made defenses about it - in this case, 'slips and capture'. With Floyd, they ran with 'excited delirium', the other main one, since their third excuse of 'resisting arrest' wouldn't work.

The fact that the murderer in this case was able to have it on public record that they shouted 'Taser! Taser!' before pulling their gun and killing an innocent person turns that bodycam into an instrument of justification; the same as with every other incident where officers scream 'stop resisting' at someone facedown on the floor.

This has been the whole point of these reforms since the beginning. The bourgeois state doesn't care that the cops are murdering people, they care that the way the cops are murdering people is causing unrest, and to them, the more training and equipment cops have to cover up their executions, the better.

I guess, in short;

"The technique of murder doesn’t comfort the dead. It comforts the executioners—and all their supportive onlookers. Like so much reform to address racism, all this legal fine print is meant to salve the conscience of moderates who want salvation on the cheap..." - Naomi Murakawa

[nexusromanova]

Please for your sake, don’t let a day be a waste

[brandonshimoda]

R.I.P. (Rest in PDFs), Part II

in progress ...

Part I (A-M) is here.

Note: If you see your work on here and prefer that it not be made freely accessible, please email me at: brandonshimoda@gmail.com, and I will remove it. Thank you!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Naomi Murakawa, The origins of the carceral crisis: Racial order as "law and order" in postwar American politics

Natasha Ginwala, Maps That Don’t Belong

Nathaniel Mackey, Other: From Noun to Verb

Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero. Translated by Sherif Hatata.

Nick Estes, Liberation, from Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

Occupy Poetics. Curated by Thom Donovan

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

Patrick Chamoiseau, School Days. Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

Patrick Wolfe, Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native

Pëtr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Phil Cordelli, New Wave

Phil Cordelli, Tidal State

Poetry of Resistance in Occupied Palestine, translated by Sulafa Hijjawi

Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right To Move

Rinaldo Walcott, Moving Toward Black Freedom, the first chapter of The Long Emancipation

Rinaldo Walcott, The Problem of the Human: Black Ontologies and “the Coloniality of Our Being”

Rinaldo Walcott, Queer Returns: Human Rights, the AngloCaribbean and Diaspora Politics

Rizvana Bradley, Aesthetic Inhumanisms: Toward an Erotics of Otherworlding

Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, from CEDE; [Truesse, Unknown Worker, Charles]; Chaos and Rectification

Roberto Tejada, In Relation: The Poetics and Politics of Cuba’s Generation-80

Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse. Translated by Richard Howard.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller.

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard.

Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning 

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Globalisation and US prison growth: from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

Saidiya Hartman, The Plot of Her Undoing (Notes on Feminisms)

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Saniya Saleh, Seven Poems. Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger.

Saniya Saleh, Seven Poems. Various translators

S*an D. Henry-Smith, Flotsam Suite

Shosana Felman & Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History

Simone Browne, Introduction, and Other Dark Matters; Notes on Surveillance Studies; Branding Blackness (from Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness)

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr

Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force. Translated by Mary McCarthy

Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills

Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty. Translated by Arthur Wills and John Petrie

Simon Leung and Marita Sturken, Displaced Bodies in Residual Spaces

Solidarity Texts: Radiant Re-Sisters

Sophia Terazawa, I Am Not A War

Sora Han, Letters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law

#StandingRockSyllabus, compiled by NYC Stands with Standing Rock Collective

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

Steve Biko, Black Consciousness and the Quest for True Humanity

Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, the Black Power chapter of Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America

Sukoon Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 2, Winter 2017

Suzanne Césaire, 1943: Surrealism and Us; The Great Camouflage (from The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945)

Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World

Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved:” An Open Letter to My Colleagues

Sylvia Wynter, Novel and History, Plot and Plantation

Tamara K. Nopper, The Wages of Non-Blackness: Contemporary Immigrant Rights and Discourses of Character, Productivity, and Value

Tavia Nyong’o, Racial Kitsch and Black Performance

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee

Thom Donovan, “In The Dirt of the Line”: On Bhanu Kapil’s Intense Autobiography

Tina Campt, Listening to Images

Tina Campt, The Lyric of the Archive

Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson

Toni Morrison, The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations

Toni Morrison, Memory, Creation, and Writing

Trinh T. Minh-ha, Documentary Is/Not a Name

Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Walk of Multiplicity

Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism

Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

Võ Nguyên Giáp, People’s War, People’s Army

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Translated from the German by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction

W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: Color and Democracy

Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity

Wendy Trevino, Brazilian Is Not A Race

Wendy Trevino, narrative

Winona LaDuke, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Environmental Futures

Worker-Student Action Committees, France May ‘68, by R. Gregoire and F. Perlman

Yanara Friedland, Abraq ad Habra: I will create as I speak

Ye Mimi, eleven poems

Yerbamala Collective, Our Vendetta: Witches vs Fascists

Yi Sang, The Wings. Translated from the Korean by Ahn Jung-hyo and James B. Lee

You Can’t Shoot Us All: On the Oscar Grant Rebellions

Youna Kwak, Home

Yūgen, edited by LeRoi Jones & Hettie Cohen (1958-1962), #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Yuri Kochiyama, The Impact of Malcolm X on Asian-American Politics and Activism

Yuri Kochiyama, Then Came the War

Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men

[96thdayofrage]

The exhausting depravity of Floyd’s death—the indelible image of Chauvin’s knee pinched into Floyd’s neck as fellow officers looked on with indifference—served as a vivid illustration of a fact Black activists have long known: that police brutality is not only endemic in the United States, but in Minneapolis specifically. The Minneapolis City Council seemed to recognize this last summer, when city officials announced a commitment to substantive police reform—up to and including the possibility of replacing the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). Such bold action was unthinkable prior to 2020.

In the weeks prior to Wright’s death, city legislators approved, or at least considered, a series of specific reforms of the MPD. In March, legislators put forward a ballot measure (to be voted on in November) to amend the Minneapolis city charter to deputize the city council with the authority to make significant changes to the city’s policing: once this has been approved, actions being considering include putting the MPD under the supervision of both the mayor and the city council (the MPD currently answers only to the mayor), in some way curtailing the growth of the Minneapolis police force, and even outright replacing the police department with an “office of public safety.” Piecemeal yet long overdue changes such as banning chokeholds and mandating that officers document when they unholster their firearm already preceded this effort to reform the police via charter amendment.

While these reforms appear ambitious, they are far from the coordinated effort to “defund” the MPD that they were initially billed as being. Indeed, in many senses they coopt the language of defunding, made popular by young activists, to attempt to sneak through the exact opposite: though they would reduce the growth of the police force, they would not in any obvious way address the militarization that has made the MPD into one of the most violent police forces in the country.

The violence of the MPD is, of course, part of a national story. As scholars such as Elizabeth Hinton, Stuart Schrader, and Naomi Murakawa have shown, modern, militarized U.S. policing arose collectively out of postwar liberalism: though its precise manifestation has varied regionally, all U.S. policing relies on a rationale of “security” as a pretext for regulating the behavior of poor people and communities of color that were the intended recipients of social reforms since the 1960s. Out of this has arisen everything from punitive “tough-on-crime” policies—historically popular across the political spectrum—to “preemptive” policing initiatives such as Broken Windows and Stop and Frisk.

Unfortunately, our collective notion of what would constitute ideal police reform has its roots in this same context of postwar liberalism, in which private responsibility and collective securitization remain the ultimate goods that are sought. Since World War II, liberals have emphasized regulating individual behavior to correct the inequalities that police often reinforce—the sanctity of Black communities contingent on the ability of the police to “restore peace.”

In the specific case of Minneapolis, for example, the failure to curtail police brutality—despite numerous waves of well-intentioned liberal reform efforts beginning as early as the 1920s—derives precisely from the limitations of those who sought transformative racial justice, not because of the efforts of reactionaries to undermine those reforms. At many points in the postwar history of Minneapolis, police reform efforts were led by the very progressives who had helped militarize the MPD in the first place.

This was in no small part a result of progressive ideological commitments about the origins of racist policing. Believing that racist policing was mainly caused by what we’d now call implicit bias, Minneapolis progressives sought to remake the psychology of white police officers, compelling cops to interrogate their biases—all while encouraging greater presences of police officers in Black communities and while downplaying systemic and overt racism. Minneapolis progressives thus approached police reform with the premise that policing could be made more effective, more precise—and that better, not less, policing was essential to racial justice and improved race relations.

This legacy still overshadows police reform in Minneapolis, and the recounting of this history that follows—of how so many good-faith efforts failed catastrophically—should leave us deeply skeptical about the enterprise of police reform in its entirety. If Minneapolis and the nation are to escape the shadow of failed decades of police reform, they must reckon with this history. And they likely need to jettison the rubric of police reform and seek out more promising ways of conceptualizing the path toward racial justice and a society free from violence.

At many points in the postwar history of Minneapolis, police reform efforts were led by the very progressives who had also helped militarize the MPD.

Historically, Minneapolis was a very white city: during the Civil War, its Black residents totaled fewer than 300. By 1940 the city’s population was still less than 1 percent Black, and most were segregated in Northeast Minneapolis, confined by racial covenants placed on real estate. The percentage of the city that was Black remained below 5 percent into the 1970s, at which time it began increasing dramatically during the same period that saw whites abandoning urban centers nationwide. The city is now nearly 20 percent Black.

Despite its relatively small number of Black residents, in the 1920s Minnesota became a Midwestern hub of the Ku Klux Klan. The 1920 lynching of three Black men in Duluth spurred the passage of a state anti-lynching law in 1921 (led by Black activist and women’s rights advocate Nellie Griswold Francis), but it also stoked recruitment efforts for the Klan. The state became home to fifty-one chapters of the KKK, with ten in Minneapolis alone. Klan parades enveloped streets in Minnesota on weekends and Labor Days. Minneapolis Klan chapters counted a number of police officers as members—a fact which certainly continued to be true even after police affiliation with the Klan was officially forbidden by 1923.

Despite this, the same era saw some of the first efforts to professionalize the MPD and address issues of racial bias within the force. In 1929 the MPD hosted its first training session for police, which sought to make police “the foremost experts on crime prevention in the community.” However, professionalization as the route to police reform obscured the racial contours of policing in the city. As Black residents sought to integrate the city’s neighborhoods, incidents of indiscriminate police violence made headlines in Black newspapers, including the assault of 2 Black men and one Black woman by two drunk off-duty police detectives in July 1937. The beatings launched an investigation by the Minneapolis NAACP and the demand for the officers “to be immediately dismissed from the force,” but at least one of the accused detectives, Arthur Uglem, remained an MPD detective years beyond the event.

In Minneapolis, as in many parts of the North and Midwest, World War II would bring greater employment to Blacks, with African American workers integrating industries—for example, the Minneapolis garment industry. The war also ignited progressives’ attention to racial inequality in U.S. cities. Near the war’s conclusion, Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal published his era-defining text, An American Dilemma (1944), which argued that racism was an aberration within democracy and a betrayed of U.S. ideals. For U.S. democracy to be actualized in global terms, racial inequality would have to be vanquished at home.

Midcentury’s attempts to reform the MPD emerged from this context. Lyndon B. Johnson’s future vice-president, Hubert Humphrey—then a young, relentlessly energetic left-liberal—would lead the charge to overhaul the department. Elected mayor in 1945, Humphrey was acutely aware of Minneapolis’s history of racism and actively pursued policies to rectify past injustices.

Humphrey also saw civil rights—and particularly police reform��could be a coalition-building issue for moderates against the state’s more radical left, which was calling for more dramatic forms of racial redress. The creation of a Minneapolis Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to report issues of discrimination in employment; a “Mayor’s Council on Human Relations” to document public acts of prejudice against Black people; and other anti-racist measures sought to outflank the left by drawing voters to Humphrey’s coalition.

Humphrey’s ambition was tempered, however, by the limits of his office. Mayoral powers in Minneapolis were—and remain—restricted; power lies mainly with the city council. The mayor has no budgetary authority and has little say in governmental appointees. Still he did have important control over one appointee: the police chief. For Humphrey, “the quality of law enforcement is as good or bad as [the mayor] decides,” he would write in his memoir. Shortly after taking office, he appointed Ed Ryan, known for his hostility to MPD corruption, as chief of police.

As mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey assumed that the solution to policing reform lay in more efficient bureaucracy, not less policing. Indeed, Humphrey enlarged the size of the MPD, in part to guarantee more complete coverage of Black neighborhoods.

Under Humphrey’s orders, Ryan sought to rid the department of racism. Ryan supervised a series of training seminars for MPD officers so that they could “be prepared for any disturbances resulting from racial prejudices.” Some of these seminars, held in 1946, were led by Joseph Kluchesky, a former Milwaukee police chief and pioneer in anti-bias training. Kluchesky encouraged officers to give anti-racism talks at elementary schools and in general recommended greater police liaising with Black community ambassadors—clergy and other members of the Black middle class—who together could work toward a vision of “impartial law enforcement.” The seminars thus put the partial onus for improved policing on African Americans themselves, and suggested that the solution must include Blacks being willing to welcome greater police surveillance in their communities. As historian Will Tchakirides has argued, Kluchesky’s seminars “emphasized fixing Black behavior ahead of addressing the economic underpinnings of racial inequality.”

Humphrey’s police reform efforts assumed that the solution lay in more efficient bureaucracy, not less policing. Indeed, Humphrey enlarged the size of the MPD force, in part to guarantee more complete coverage of Black neighborhoods. Convinced of his faith that racism could be educated out of the body politic, Humphrey’s attitudes reflected Myrdal’s view of racialized policing and racial “discrimination to be an anomaly, something practiced by a few bad people.” Humphrey’s approach to police reform thus encapsulated a project of racial uplift through a preponderance of police: mandating greater communication between police officers and the public, and ingratiating police officers into the community to rectify inner biases that manifested in police assaults.

Police reform also took on the broader aims of Cold War liberalism—an effort to ensure personal beliefs did not hamper the country’s teleological march toward its democratic providence. In a pamphlet distributed to all members of the MPD, Kluchesky argued that it was the “Nazi technique to pit race against race,” and it was the responsibility of all police officers to reject such methods and “to preserve for posterity the splendid heritage of democracy.” Police reform in Cold War Minneapolis thus entailed a mission of aligning policing with an idealized image of U.S. democracy.

The overt antiracism of the Humphrey administration—the mayor’s principled dedication to extirpate racial discrimination from the minds of Minnesotans, the passage of the Minneapolis FEPC, attempts to eliminate racial covenants in housing—left many with the impression of Minneapolis as an enlightened city.

Yet despite this hype, police brutality regularly resurfaced within the MPD. After the police beating of Black Minneapolis resident Raymond Wells by two MPD officers on May 19, 1963, Mayor Arthur Naftalin—a liberal progressive like his mentor, Humphrey—called for a larger role for the Mayor’s Council on Human Relations, where he hoped civic leaders could “broaden . . . our discussions” of race. But Naftalin rejected the idea that racism ran rampant in the MPD. While the beating of Wells was “unfortunate and deeply distressing,” it was “essentially an isolated incident,” he reasoned. The mayor had no intention of drastically shaking up the MPD’s structure.

In the aftermath of the 1967 uprising, Mayor Arthur Naftalin, a liberal progressive, said the idea that police brutality had anything to do with the riot was “preposterous” and said roving gangs of Black youths had exacerbated the riot.

Nonetheless, calls for change were overwhelming among Minneapolis activists, which led to the creation of the first Minneapolis Civilian Review Board soon after Wells’s beating. But the review board disbanded after only a few months over legal concerns, leaving Black residents once again without recourse if they wanted to file a complaint against police.

The 1967 Minneapolis riot tested Naftalin’s conclusion that racism did not pervade the MPD. Accusations of police brutality following a parade on Plymouth Avenue led to violence between Blacks and police on July 19, which brought more police into Northeast Minneapolis armed with shotguns. Violence then escalated to a three-day riot that led to looting, arson, and Naftalin calling up the National Guard to quell tensions. The head of the Minneapolis police union, Charles Stenvig, also wanted to deploy massive numbers of officers to the Northside, looking to take “a harder line against black militants” who he felt were responsible for the riots. But Stenvig was restrained by Naftalin, who discouraged the use of overwhelming police force. As police looked to suppress the riots, chants of “We want Black Power” echoed through the streets. The riot eventually faded out by July 23, leaving property damage but no deaths in its wake.

In the aftermath of the 1967 uprising, Naftalin said the idea that police brutality had anything to do with the riot was “preposterous” and said roving gangs of Black youths had exacerbated the riot. Naftalin would go on to create a Hennepin County grand jury (consisting of all whites) that found “no police brutality” during the riot. In fact, it recommended increasing the police force, putting more patrols into the streets to “re-establish the rapport between the people and the authorities.” The jury also blamed the Northside Black community center The Way for encouraging “hoodlums.” Even when proffering ideas on what city government could do to prevent future riots, white elites leaned into the stereotype that the economic disenfranchisement of Blacks had its roots in a culture of poverty and fractured, fatherless families.

Black residents took matters into their own hands following the grand jury’s report. In 1968, Black leaders from The Way formed Soul Force, which, along with the American Indian Movement (AIM), enlisted Black and Native men to patrol Northside streets to intervene between “potential law-breakers and law-enforcers.” The AIM/Soul Force (or “Soul Patrol”) collaboration had shattering success in preventing arrests—which coincided with expanded welfare and criminal justices services offered by The Way—before being disbanded in 1975, partly due to harassment from MPD officers.

Naftalin declined to run for mayor in 1969. He was replaced by Stenvig, leader of the police union during the 1967 riot, who ran on a George Wallace–style platform of “law and order.” Stenvig would be mayor 1969–1973 and then again 1976–1977. During his time in office, Stenvig demonized welfare recipients, castigated taxes and government spending, touted increased prison sentences for criminals, and solidified renewed and enduring ties between the MPD and the mayor’s office.

Stenvig also helped lay the groundwork for the militarization of the MPD we now see. By 1980 the MPD had overstaffed its police force beyond its own expectations and aggressively supported vice squads against LGBTQ residents, raiding bathhouses and arresting gay men en masse. Throughout MPD maintained its reputation for corruption.

Despite so many reform efforts over the decades, nothing ever really changed.

Don Fraser (another Humphrey mentee, known for reforming the Democratic Party and tackling human rights issues as a Minnesota congressman in the 1970s) hoped to, once again, change this reputation. Fraser assumed the mayoralty in 1980 and held the office for fourteen years. Like Humphrey and Naftalin, he aimed to reform the MPD by imposing external oversight of its conduct. He created a police review board in the early 1980s that was entrusted with the mission of fielding complaints of police brutality. But the review board had no enforcement power, and the police chief was under no obligation to heed its demands. Despite his rhetoric of reform, Fraser supervised the MPD’s “aggressive operation” of drug raids as part of the escalating War on Drugs. The MPD became increasingly dependent on SWAT teams and saw increased arrest rates. The force earned a reputation of being “damn brutal,” according to its own police chief. MPD leadership also made “fighting the crack-cocaine trade a priority,” leading to the deaths of many innocent victims, including an African American elderly couple mistaken for drug traders.

By the mid-1980s, with incidents of police brutality unabated and unaddressed, the Minneapolis Civil Rights Commission (MCRC) encouraged Congress to investigate the MPD. Though a congressional investigation never materialized, a reimagined Civilian Review Board would emerge in January 1990. But despite so many reform efforts over the decades, nothing ever really changed.

The serial failures of police reform efforts in Minneapolis are indicative of larger failures within contemporary liberalism, and of progressives to articulate a comprehensive vision of how cities could still be safe—indeed, safer—without militarized policing. In the case of Minneapolis, it is clear that decades of militarized policing have failed to generate prosperity for all. Minneapolis ranks last among metro areas in the country in Black homeownership and has one of the nation’s worst racial education gap between Blacks and whites. Minnesota as a whole is next to last among states for income inequality between whites and Blacks.

Minneapolis reformers can begin by rejecting the premise that policing as we know it can align with the principles of U.S. democracy—that policing can be perfected.

A liberal concept of police reform, however ambitious it might be conceived, cannot rectify these metrics of injustice. The city council’s current plans are disconnected from the racialized order that will be maintained even if an Office of Public Safety patrols Minneapolis’s streets.

Minneapolis reformers can begin by rejecting the premise that policing as we know it can align with the principles of U.S. democracy—that policing can be perfected. For decades it was thought that more interaction between Blacks and whites was the cure for police violence and that the greater “visibility” of police in Black communities would ease crime rates. This has proven false. Historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor uses the term “predatory inclusion” to describe postwar efforts to encourage Black homeownership. The concept also applies to the history of police reform in Minneapolis: the various movement to encourage Black cooperation with police have persistently allowed the MPD to deflect attention from its own criminality, and put the onus on Blacks to rectify systemic injustices that the police are inevitably tasked with enforcing.

Seventies-era experimental programs such as AIM/Soul Force offer a possible route to reimagining police in Minneapolis: community-based, they sought harm reduction and tension de-escalation, and prioritized disarming suspects with firearms. But community policing must take place alongside municipal and federal investments that echo Hubert Humphrey’s vision of a “Marshall Plan for the cities.” Only massive expenditures on comprehensive programs of employment, health care, housing, and infrastructure can succeed in depriving racialized policing of its rationale.

Today, we must emphatically reject the central conceit of police reform that acts of police brutality are aberrations, and that they can be addressed with more and better policing. Those interested in genuine change must refuse to accept reform as the way forward, and work to build a city that brings greater justice to the families of George Floyd and Daunte Wright, and to all of Minneapolis.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Liberal law and order, with regard to policing in particular, operates with a specific grammar of racism. It starts from the belief that racism is an idea, a misconception, an emotional misfire that is seemingly lodged in individual police officers who are afflicted by stereotypes and irrationalities. These “racist bad apple” officers are seen as elements that contaminate policing —which is otherwise believed to be acceptable. The project of liberal reform then becomes one of sealing off or minimizing those contaminants. This “decontamination” is pursued through administrative tinkering: more monitoring through body cameras (as if we need more evidence of gendered, transphobic, and racist police violence), more training (as if a two-day police seminar could train the racism out of someone), or hiring more police officers of color (with the presumption that they’re going to behave very differently from white officers).

Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, How liberals legitimate broken windows: an interview with Naomi Murakawa

[alanshemper]

6 April 2021

It’s just Andy and Tammy this week, with special guest Naomi Murakawa, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton and the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.

Naomi talks with us about her J-A roots in Oakland, how her dad’s career in the criminal-legal system got her thinking about carceral politics, why police reform has long been a trap, and the history of hate crimes legislation in the US. She shares her observations on Black Lives Matter, the emergence of abolitionist thinking, and the discourse around “anti-Asian violence.”

What can crime statistics tell us about the world? How do we stop ourselves from thinking like cops? Which groups are pushing Asian America in a more punitive direction? And how should “Asian American history 101” inform our analyses of recent violence?

For those interested in the intersection of the Asian American identity with issue of the criminal justice system, especially with respect to hate crimes, I highly recommend Time to Say Goodbye.

[kissingcullens]

Backlash: Crime and the Return of Law-and-Order Politics

Talk w/ Naomi Murakawa, author of “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America” at Socialism Conference 2021

[collapsedsquid]

To understand how these public safety advisors then advanced punitive modernization and the carceral state at home, we must return again to 1947. At the very moment the National Security Act took effect, another crucial document in the history of U.S. law enforcement emerged. The President’s Committee on Civil Rights had been investigating how law enforcement could safeguard civil rights, especially black civil rights, in the United States. The committee’s report to President Harry Truman, To Secure These Rights, advocated for what Mary Dudziak has labeled “cold war civil rights.” It was necessary to ameliorate racial inequality, this argument went, because the Soviet Union frequently invoked lynching and racial abuses to highlight U.S. hypocrisy.

Although the committee was unflinching in its assessment of how the fundamental civil right to the safety of one’s person had been violated frequently (Japanese, Mexicans, and African Americans, as well as members of minority religions, suffered the most), it also understood these problems of racial injustice to be the effect of white extrajudicial violence and “arbitrary” individual actions by cops, particularly in the South. Its solutions were thus focused on strengthening law enforcement and assuring its adherence to due process and administrative fairness. Similar to Kennan, the committee (and the generation of reformers it influenced) believed it was possible to use the tools of policing and prisons fairly, unlike in the Soviet Union.

Political scientist Naomi Murakawa has shown, however, that by framing the problem as arbitrary and as growing out of lawlessness, the committee effectively ruled out the systematic and legally enshrined character of racial abuse. What made it predictable, rather than arbitrary, was its consistent object: racially subjugated peoples. By diminishing the structural aspects of the abuse of minorities, liberal law enforcement reformers opened the door to a wider misunderstanding of what needed to be reformed. The response the committee endorsed—to enact procedural reforms and modernize law enforcement in the United States—rode the high tide of police professionalization initiatives that would crest in the following decades, and which called for a well-endowed, federally sanctioned anticrime apparatus. As historian Elizabeth Hinton and Murakawa have argued, this effort to reform law enforcement and codify its procedures actually made it more institutionally robust and less forgiving, contributing to the country’s march toward mass incarceration.

What is less understood, however, is the fundamental mismatch between what reformers and police chiefs imagined reform to look like. For liberal reformers, injustice looked like a lynch mob. For many police experts, steeped in Cold War ideology and trained in counterintelligence, it looked like the Soviet secret police. Mob rule had to be avoided, but so too did centralized authority over police objectives. Underlying reasons for what police did daily, and to whom, was not the concern of either party.

Command-level cops across the United States, after all, were quick to absorb the lessons and perspectives of public safety officers. In policing’s professional literatures, CIA officials published articles on topics such as policing in the Soviet Union, which emphasized the centralized governing hierarchy. The fact that Soviet police at the lowest level enacted the tyranny ordered at the top resonated with a generation of U.S. police reformers who had watched corrupt political machines in U.S. cities be dismantled. Police reformers thus demanded that police answer primarily to their own professional guidelines, free from political interference. In this way, the negative model of the authoritarian state was misleading: it may have prevented centralized dictatorial rule, but it left police power largely insulated. And so Cold War U.S. empire abroad found its replica in the War on Crime at home: to break the political syzygy of an authoritarian state apparatus in Sacramento or Saigon, in Wichita or Tokyo, police needed to be technically adept, flush with cash, and insulated from political machinations.

[...]

The War on Crime was a creature of federalism. Federal appropriations for upgrading police, courts, and prisons came embroidered with a commitment that no usurpation of local authority or discretion would result. Policing remained decentralized. Even when police killed unarmed people during unrest, causing public complaint, police were protected; outrage could be an orchestrated communist plot, the thinking went, intended to take control over law enforcement by undermining its autonomy. In this way, the reform effort preserved the petty despotism of the nightstick and localized tyranny of the police chief that was at the root of the racial crisis. By insulating police from federal oversight or control, while also affording them increased resources, particularly for capital-intensive repressive technologies, the War on Crime allowed the underlying structure of Jim Crow policing to persist.

[ellierreads]

Nonfiction Book List

A collection of nonfiction books by Black authors and/or related to intersectional race and gender studies, history, as well as other various topics. The list below is a compilation of various lists I have seen on Instagram, as well as research I’ve done on my own. I am sure I am missing important works, and am happy to add anything that is suggested. This list will be regularly added to and updated. 

Race & Anti-Racism

Diangeo, Robin - White Fragility

Eddo-Lodge, Renni - Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

Kendi, Ibrahim X. - How to Be Anti-Racist

Mahzarin, Banaji & Greenwald, Anthony - Blindspot

Oluo, Ijeoma - So you want to talk about race

Omi and Winant - Racial Formation in the United States

Rankine, Claudia - Citizen

Roberts, Dorothy - Killing the Black Body

Smith, Andrea - Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy

Sowell, Thomas - Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Waheema & Lubiano - The House that Race Built

Ward, Jesmyn - The Fire This Time

Prison Abolition & the Justice System

Alexander, Michelle - The New Jim Crow

Davis, Angela - Are Prisons Obsolete?

Murakawa, Naomi - The First Civil Right

Stefanic & Delgado - Critical Race Theory: An Introduction

Stevenson, Bryan - Just Mercy

Rothstein, Richard - The Color of Law  

Policing

Vitale, Alex S. - The End of Policing

Intersectional Feminism

Bambara, Toni Cade - The Black Woman, An Anthology

Carruthers, Charlene - Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

Cooper, Brittney - Eloquent Rage

Collins, Patricia Hill - Black Feminist Thought

Collins, Patricia Hill - Black Sexual Politics

Cottom, Tressie McMillan - THICK and Other Essays

Crenshaw, Kimberle - On Intersectionality

Davis, Angela - Women, Race, & Class

Davis, Dána-Ain - Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth

Gay, Roxane - Bad Feminist

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline - Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugivity

Hernandez, Ed. Daisy and Rehman, Bushra - Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism

hooks, bell - Ain’t I a Woman

hooks, bell - All About Love

hooks, bell - Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

Jenkins, Morgan - This Will Be My Undoing

Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. - They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

Kendall, Mikki - Hood Feminism

Lorde, Audre - Sister Outsider

Morales, Rosario - This Bridge Called My Back

Morgan, Joan - When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip Hop Feminist Breaks it Down

Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ - The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses

Shakur, Assata - Assata: An Autobiography

Simpson, Leanne Beta - As We Have Always Done

Williamson, Terrion L. - Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life

Wilson & Russell - Divided Sisters

Yamahtta-Taylor, Keeanga - How We Get Free

Masculinity

hooks, bell - The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

hooks, bell - We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity

History

Asante Jr., M.A. - It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation

Baldwin, James - The Fire Next Time

Berry, Daina Ramey & Gross, Kali Nicole - A Black Women’s History of the United States

Gates Jr., Henry Louis - Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

Blackmon, Douglas A. - Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Du Bois, W.E.B. - The Souls of Black Folk

Hartman, Saidiya - Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Hurston, Zora Neale - Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”

Johnson, E. Patrick - Black, Queer, Southern Women.: An Oral History

Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. - They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

Kendi, Ibram X. - Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Snorton, C. Riley - Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity

Taylor, Candacy A. - Overground Railroad: The Green Book & Roots of Black Travel in America

Washington, Harriet A. - Medical Apartheid

Wilkerson, Isabel - The Warmth of Other Suns

Zinn, Howard - A People’s History of the United States

Politics/Economy

Anderson, Carol - One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

Baptist, Edward E. - The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Psychology

Menakem, Resmaa - My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts

Tatum, Beverly Daniel - "Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity

Literary Criticism

Morrison, Toni - Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Education

hooks, bell - Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Science & Technology

Benjamin, Ruha - Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

Skloot, Rebecca - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Shetterly, Margot Lee - Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

Autobiography/Memoir

Angelou, Maya - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Bernard, Emily - Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine

Broom, Sarah M. - The Yellow House

Brown, Austin Channing - I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

Coates, Ta-Nehisi - The Beautiful Struggle

Coates, Ta-Nehisi - Between the World and Me

Hinton, Anthony Ray - The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

hooks, bell - Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood

Jones, Saeed - How We Fight For Our Lives

Khan-Kullors, Patrisse and Bandele, Asha - When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

Laymon, Kiese - Heavy: An American Memoir

Mock, Janet - Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

Noah, Trevor - Born a Crime

Obama, Barack - Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Obama, Michelle - Becoming

Shakur, Assata - Assata: An Autobiography

Welteroth, Elaine - More Than Enough

Wright, Richard - Black Boy

X, Malcolm - The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Comedy

Bell, W. Kamau - The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6' 4", African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama's Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian

Haddish, Tiffany - The Last Black Unicorn

Rae, Issa - The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl

Robinson, Phoebe - You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain