Policing The Black Community: Consequences And Activism
“It’s inevitable raising a young Black man,” reflected author Jabari Asim on raising black sons and the risks of police altercations. “We talk a lot about how to inhabit these bodies” he added in a discussion of his essay collection, We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival.
The United States has grappled with a tension in race and policing since the time of slavery—beyond the arrests of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement to today’s myriad cases of police brutality and resulting activism of the
Black Lives Matter movement. In a 2020
New York Times column, professor George Yancy also pointed to echoes of the past in the racial struggles of today, referencing the history of Georgia’s lynchings reflected in the violent death on February 23, 2020 of Ahmaud Arbery, who went for a jog in Glynn County, Ga and was shot and killed by two white men.
This series of book talks, academic lectures and panel discussions on the Black experience in America considers how the Black community is policed in the United States and solutions to the systemic racism that informs the violence, as well as suggestions for reform of the institutions that are failing African Americans.
In light of the bipartisan support and passage, three experts on race and public policy lead a conversation in the Meeting House on the present state and the future of criminal justice reform and mass incarceration.
Historian Jared Ross Hardesty focuses on 17th century New England, when enslaved people—both indigenous peoples and kidnapped Africans—comprised about 4 percent of the population. He shares the individual stories of enslaved people, bringing their experiences to life. He also explores the importance of slavery to the colonization of the region and to agriculture and industry, New England’s deep connections to Caribbean plantation societies, and the significance of emancipation movements in the era of the American Revolution.
**About the event site**
In the eighteenth century, the [Royall House and Slave Quarters](http://royallhouse.org/) was home to the largest slaveholding family in Massachusetts and the enslaved Africans who made their lavish way of life possible. Today, the Royall House and Slave Quarters is a museum whose architecture, household items, archaeological artifacts, and programs bear witness to intertwined stories of wealth and bondage, set against the backdrop of America’s quest for independence.
Angela Davis, through her activism and scholarship over many decades, has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator—both at the university level and in the larger public sphere—has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. Her lecture is titled, "Frameworks for Radical Feminism in the 21st Century.”
This lecture is part of the Boston Public Library lecture series, "Notable Women."
In eight wide-ranging essays, collected in _We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival_, Jabari Asim explores such topics as the twisted legacy of jokes and falsehoods in black life; the importance of black fathers and community; the significance of black writers and stories; and the beauty and pain of the black body. What emerges is a rich portrait of a community and culture that has resisted, survived, and flourished despite centuries of racism, violence, and trauma. These thought-provoking essays present a different side of American history, one that doesn’t depend on a narrative steeped in oppression but rather reveals black voices telling their own stories. Asim is an author, poet and playwright. For this discussion he is joined in conversation by _Boston Globe_ columnist Adrian Walker. Image: Book Cover
The United States leads the world in the rate of incarceration - the number of people in prisons in the US has more than quadrupled over the last forty years. Racial disparities are a hallmark of incarceration today, families are torn apart, and communities disrupted by the school to prison pipeline. The opportunities for education and true rehabilitation for those returning to their communities are few and far between. The Massachusetts legislature is creating reform for our state right at this moment. Hear from four Lenny Zakim Fund grantees who are working for that reform.
Author, organizer, and police misconduct attorney Andrea J. Ritchie sits with Georgetown law professor Paul Butler to discuss her book, _Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color._ Ritchie details the racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement violence experienced by women of color. Through the personal stories of Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Dajerria Becton, Monica Jones, and Mya Hall, Ritchie looks at the twin epidemics of police violence and mass incarceration, documents the evolution of movements centering women’s experiences of policing and demands a radical rethinking of how we view safety. Paul Butler is the author of _Chokehold: Policing Black Men._ Photo by[ The All-Nite Images/Flickr.](https://www.flickr.com/photos/7278633@N04/ "")
The police shooting of an unarmed young black man in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 sparked riots and the beginning of a national conversation on race and policing. Much of the ensuing discussion has focused on the persistence of racial disparities and the extraordinarily high rate at which American police kill civilians (an average of roughly three per day). Malcolm Sparrow, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School and is a former British police detective, argues that other factors in the development of police theory and practice over the last twenty-five years have also played a major role in contributing to these tragedies and to a great many other cases involving excessive police force and community alienation. Sparrow shows how the core ideas of community and problem-solving policing have failed to thrive. In many police departments these foundational ideas have been reduced to mere rhetoric. The result is heavy reliance on narrow quantitative metrics, where police define how well they are doing by tallying up traffic tickets issued (Ferguson), or arrests made for petty crimes (in New York). (Photo: [Tobin B./Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/tobanblack/3762525969 ""))
In light of increasingly intense, racially charged events in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere across the country, Trinity Church in the City of Boston is elevating race relations as a point for public discussion. To spotlight what Trinity Church’s Rector, the Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd, calls “the urgent issue of our time,” Trinity is sponsoring the inaugural Anne B. Bonnyman Symposium – “We Still Have a Dream: End Racism” – on Sun., Jan. 18, 2015. Free and open to the public, the symposium will be held at Trinity Church, Copley Square. Moderator: The Honorable **Barbara Dortch-Okara**
