Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Racialized mass incarceration is not just cell blocks brimming with black bodies. It's a pervasive and deep-seated way of talking and thinking about morality, law, and politics in matters of blame and punishment; it's a punitive impulse and retributive urge that runs so strong and deep in most Americans that taming it will take a revolution in consciousness. Through radical critiques of conventional morality, conventional legal theory, and conventional politics in criminal justice matters, this book fuels this revolution. Drawing on the phenomenon moral philosophers call moral luck, Armour's book humanizes these most otherized, monsterized criminals by challenging the widespread belief that there is a deep and wide moral gulf between "them" and law-abiding, noncriminal, nonviolent "us." Legally, his book roots out where bias lives in the black letter law and adjudication of just deserts; that is, it shows how murderers and other morally condemnable criminals are not merely "found" in criminal trials like discoverable facts of nature, but rather they are socially constructed, often by racially biased prosecutors, judges, and jurors. And politically, Armour both examines and exemplifies the way a transgressive word or symbol, like the troublesome and disreputable N-word itself, can, when wielded with care and precision by critical black writers and artists, signal a sharp rejection of respectability politics, promote political solidarity with the most reviled black criminals, and spark a revolution in consciousness about racialized mass incarceration.
Synopsis
"A MUST-READ FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN UNDERSTANDING AND DISMANTLING MASS INCARCERATION." --Chesa Boudin, District Attorney of San Francisco America's criminal justice system is among the deadliest and most racist in the world and it disproportionally targets Black Americans, who are also disproportionately poor, hungry, houseless, jobless, sick, and poorly educated. By every metric of misery, this nation does not act like Black Lives Matter. In order to break out of the trap of racialized mass incarceration and relentless racial oppression, we, as a society, need to rethink our basic assumptions about blame and punishment, words and symbols, social perceptions and judgements, morality, politics, and the power of the performing arts. N*gga Theory interrogates conventional assumptions and frames a transformational new way of thinking about law, language, moral judgements, politics, and transgressive art--especially profane genres like gangsta rap--and exposes where racial bias lives in the administration of justice and every day life. Professor Jody Armour (Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism) calls for bold action: electing progressive prosecutors, defunding or dismantling the police, abolition of the prison industrial complex. But only after eradicating the anti-black bias buried in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans and baked into our legal system will we be able to say that Black Lives Matter in America.