A Guide to Understanding the History of Police Violence in the U.S.

In order to understand police brutality, we have to increase our holistic awareness and understanding of the systems that allow policy brutality to exist in the first place. In other words, we cannot effectively understand modern-day police violence without understanding the deeply rooted racial history in our country.

Like many institutionalized concepts, this is a tangled web that goes back to the arrival of the first African slaves in America in 1619 (and in all honesty, before that as well, but that is beyond the scope of this particular list of resources).

So in order to understand “police brutality” as we know it, we must also consider the origins of race, the systemic oppression of all BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), and the countless ways that these groups of people have been persistently and unapologetically silenced, marginalized, disenfranchised, and abused for centuries.

Please realize that change cannot be achieved in a single article, nor is this guide by any means meant to be an exhaustive list of resources (in fact, there are thousands of articles, videos, books, podcasts and activists out there).

Still, I hope that this guide can act as a starting point for your personal journey to self-awareness about these concepts, and understanding the powerful forces that have set the stage for police violence in the 21st century. As you read through it, you will find the guide divided into “sections” with resources listed in each to help provide context and education. Again, these were curated by myself as the author of this post based on my own education and research, and is not meant to be an exhaustive list of resources in any category.

I. Understand that Race is a CONCEPT that was deliberately created

Video — Race: The Power of Illusion [California Newsreel]

https://www.racepowerofanillusion.org/clips/

→ All episodes in this series are informative, but I’d recommend Episode #2, “The Story We Tell.” This can be rented for $2.99 on Vimeo.

→ Episode Description: “uncovers the roots of the race concept in North America, the 19th century science that legitimated it, and how it came to be held so fiercely in the western imagination. The episode is an eye-opening tale of how race served to rationalize, even justify, American social inequalities as “natural.”

Article — The Road Not Taken [Lerone Bennett]

https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/essays/bennettroad.html

→ Admittedly this is a bit of a dense read, but Bennett does an unparalleled job at dissecting America’s choice to create race and employ slavery in order to further her economic gains and exploring what he refers to as the “first great fork in the making of black America [in the 1600s].”

Interactive Digital Display / Articles — The 1619 Project [NYT]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html

→ Description taken from Intro:

Screenshot of the goal of the New York Times 1619 project

II. How America Keeps Black Americans Down (AKA institutional & systemic racism)

Book — Stamped From The Beginning [Ibram X. Kendi]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25898216-stamped-from-the-beginning

→ This book could also fall into Part I of this document, as the author explains how racist ideas were created in order to rationalize the country’s disparities in health, wealth, housing, etc. An excerpt from the book: “In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti–Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history.”

Book — The New Jim Crow [Michelle Alexander]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6792458-the-new-jim-crow

→ Folx, get ready to have your minds blown because this is the stuff we aren’t taught in history class. Michelle Alexander’s book walks you through how slavery in the US hasn’t actually disappeared; it has just morphed into the mass incarceration of Black men and Latino men, justified in part by the “war on drugs.” A must-read to understand the highly racialized goal of mass incarceration.

Book — How Racism Takes Place [George Lipsitz]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10801220-how-racism-takes-place

→ I recommend placing particular emphasis on Chapter 2, “The Black Spatial Imaginary” (the “spatial imagining” is a concept that Lipsitz is very well-known for)

→ Note: This book is a little bit “dry” but again – a very important study of how segregation still takes place today. If you don’t read, at least look up what the white/black spatial imaginary means.

Book — The Color of Law [Richard Rothstein]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32191706-the-color-of-law

→ I personally think that racist urban planning and segregated public housing policies are often far too overlooked as a root product and cause of racial discrimination and injustice within the US. This book chronicles the beginning of segregation in the 1920s to the patterns of residential discrimination and segregation throughout the following decades and which sadly still linger today.

Film — 13th [Netflix]

https://www.netflix.com/title/80091741 (or just search Netflix for it)

→ Film description: “Filmmaker Ava DuVernay explores the history of racial inequality in the United States, focusing on the fact that the nation’s prisons are disproportionately filled with African-Americans.” Arguably, this film could fit into any one of the categories within this document because it’s an excellent way to better understand the set-up and history of race, mass incarceration and police brutality.

Independent Study: Terms and People to Research & Understand

Black Codes, vagrancy laws, broken windows policing, social segregation, residential segregation, 13th amendment loophole, colonization (and the call for decolonization), white/black spatial imaginary, Black Panthers (and prominent members; Fred Hampton, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton)

III. Racializing Crime, Policing + Mass Incarceration

Book — Are Prisons Obsolete? [Angela Davis]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108428.Are_Prisons_Obsolete

→ This is foundational reading for the work toward abolition of the police and prison industrial complex (the “PIC” as you might hear it). I would say this is a “MUST” read if you want to learn more about this movement and contextualize the work within socioeconomic-political structures.

Article — Is Prison Necessary? [Ruth Wilson Gilmore interview]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html

→ If you aren’t already familiar with the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, then you better start now, as she’s the mother of prison abolition.

→ Excerpt from the article: “Instead of asking whether anyone should be locked up or go free, why don’t we think about why we solve problems by repeating the kind of behavior that brought us the problem in the first place?” She [Ruth Wilson Gilmore] was asking them to consider why, as a society, we would choose to model cruelty and vengeance.”

Book — Locking Up Our Own [James Forman Jr.]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34846249-locking-up-our-own

→ Excerpt from the Goodreads description: “Locking Up Our Own enriches our understanding of why our society became so punitive and offers important lessons to anyone concerned about the future of race and the criminal justice system in this country.”

Book — Policing the Planet [Jordan Camp & Christina Heatherton (editors — the actual book is made up of essays from individual activists and thought leaders)]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26109017-policing-the-planet

→ This entire book is fantastic, but of particular interest are essays 13: “Beyond Bratton” (Ruth Gilmore and Craig Gilmore) and 17: How Liberals Legitimate Broken Windows (Murakawa)

Book — Blood In the Water The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy [Heather Ann Thompson]

Picture of the Blood in the Water book cover

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28007898-blood-in-the-water

→ This is a long book, but trust me when I say that it is worth every minute, every word, every sentence. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s description that sums it up very nicely: “Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century, exploring every aspect of the uprising and its legacy from the perspectives of all of those involved in this forty-five-year fight for justice: the prisoners, the state officials, the lawyers on both sides, the state troopers and corrections officers, and the families of the slain men.” Highly recommend reading.

Book — Pushout [Monique W. Morris]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25159334-pushout

→ This book focuses on how we criminalize Black girls in school, but it’s an important book that explores the wider idea of the “school-to-prison pipeline” as well. A critical reminder that we must not overlook the racism geared toward all BIPOC, including children and students.

IV. The Path Forward

Book — Me and White Supremacy [Layla F. Saad]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46002342-me-and-white-supremacy

→ My assumption is that if you’re interested in this “guide” then you’ve already heard of Layla F. Saad’s widely renowned book, Me and White Supremacy. This book outlines a 28-day plan designed to challenge your own beliefs and assumptions about race, and to consider the ways in which you ~~may have been~~ probably have been complicit in perpetuating racist words, thoughts and actions. A great way to actually “do the work.”

Book — How to Be An Antiracist [Ibram X. Kendi]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40265832-how-to-be-an-antiracist

→ Another seminal book in antiracism, Kendi takes you on a journey from awareness to playing an active part in building an antiracist (not just “not racist”) society. Highly recommended for those still being introduced to the concept of racism in modern-day America and anxious to learn what to do to help reduce racial disparities in the US.

Book — White Fragility [Robin DiAngelo]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43708708-white-fragility

→ From the Goodreads description: “Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and by behaviors including argumentation and silence.” The author identifies how “white fragility” develops and how we can overcome it to have more constructive conversations about racism.

Article — The Case For Reparations [Ta-Nehisi Coates]

Picture of the Atlantic article by Ta-Nehisi Coates about reparations

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ (audio version of article also available)

→ Many people may not be familiar with the concept of “reparations.” I know that until a few years ago, I wasn’t. My goal of this guide hasn’t been to educate out of my own words, because these are not my stories to tell. But since this is likely to be an unfamiliar topic for most, I will give a little more of my own context.

Reparations can be defined as “the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.” As the definition implies, this could have personal, political and legal applications.

Reparations have been doled out (inadequately, in most scholar and activist’s opinion) for many oppressed groups in America, such as Native Americans, Holocaust survivors and Japanese people (following WWII), but Black Americans have never been repaid for state-sanctioned violence (source).

After the Civil War in 1865, an attempt was made at this in the form of Special Field Order 15, or more commonly known as “40 Acres and a Mule.” Unfortunately, before this plan was fully implemented, President Andrew Johnson reversed this order and reassigned the 400,000 acres of land back to the former Confederate owners.

The implications of this have reverberated over the past 150 years, as white people were free to accumulate wealth while Black Americans were left with nothing.

When the Civil War ended, Black Americans had a few main priorities: To reunite with their family members, to own land, to get an education, and to fight for political rights. These may sound like simple tasks, but I’m sure most of you realize that indeed, they were not. Even reuniting with family members was difficult due to complete lack of documentation and record-keeping of Black Americans (remember, blacks were considered “property” up until then, and thus a sense of identity was not documented or celebrated).

So when the land was also taken and those original reparations were not given, what happened? Well, sharecropping was one thing. Perhaps you remember this term from history class, perhaps not. But essentially sharecropping forced black families to CONTINUE to farm and work on white people’s lands in exchange for a “share” of the crops that were harvested each year. In many cases this was their only option for food and survival, because they had no lands of their own.

Sharecropping itself was a twisted and heavily manipulated system though. Blacks essentially were “free” slaves at this point, working all year to plant and harvest crops for white landowners. The idea was that at the end of each season, they’d be able to collect; however, in most cases landowners took advantage of the uneducated position of blacks and charged them unnecessarily for things, “taxed” them, and stole earnings.

The result was that many black families ended up working for free, and in many cases, actually ended up OWING MONEY to white landowners and somehow accruing DEBT that could rarely be repaid.

Thus the cycle of slavery continued, yet by another name.

Additionally, I already linked to this “source” above, but please read this article for more information and historical context about reparations: https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/bigideas/why-we-need-reparations-for-black-americans/