“Invisible and Too Visible: Black, Justice and the Police”

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Using Robert E. Park’s quotation: “Prejudice is a function of visibility,” as its framework, this Round Table examines the intersection of the Black Experience, its elusive search for justice, and the role of the police in the Black community. The first paper uses Critical Race Theory to explore episodes of conflict in urban areas. It critiques the failed recommendations of presidential commissions to offer viable solutions to ameliorate Black community and police violence. The historical and institutional patterns and strategies of Race Riots from Chicago (1919) and Tulsa (1921) to Baltimore, St. Paul, and others in 2016, are dissected. Speaker two analyzes the future of racial justice and the police in the context of Trump’s ‘law and order’ platform. Both modern police policies of ‘Broken Windows’ and ‘Stop and Frisk’ are regressive measures from an earlier period. The controversial 1973 movie, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” frames a discussion of Armed Black Militancy during the civil rights era. The third paper situates the non-violence of the 1960s in the larger context of the Black Liberation Army, the Black Panthers, and the 1965 Watts Rebellion. The final speaker investigates institutionalized state violence on the local, national and international stage. Merging contemporary uses of media and technology with traditional historical narratives, the role of the Weberian institutional complex is scrutinized as a part of both ‘the military industrial complex’ and the emergence of ‘the private prison enterprise.’

Sub Unit

• 101st Annual Meeting and Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Chair

• Alphine Wade Jefferson, Randolph-Macon College

Discussants

• Lenneal Joseph Henderson, The College of William and Mary

• Michael Fischbach, Randolph-Macon College

• Delores Jones-Brown, City University of New York

• ASALH Audience, .