Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity
Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity

Author: Edward J. Escobar

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0520920783

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In June 1943, the city of Los Angeles was wrenched apart by the worst rioting it had seen to that point in the twentieth century. Incited by sensational newspaper stories and the growing public hysteria over allegations of widespread Mexican American juvenile crime, scores of American servicemen, joined by civilians and even police officers, roamed the streets of the city in search of young Mexican American men and boys wearing a distinctive style of dress called a Zoot Suit. Once found, the Zoot Suiters were stripped of their clothes, beaten, and left in the street. Over 600 Mexican American youths were arrested. The riots threw a harsh light upon the deteriorating relationship between the Los Angeles Mexican American community and the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1940s. In this study, Edward J. Escobar examines the history of the relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Mexican American community from the turn of the century to the era of the Zoot Suit Riots. Escobar shows the changes in the way police viewed Mexican Americans, increasingly characterizing them as a criminal element, and the corresponding assumption on the part of Mexican Americans that the police were a threat to their community. The broader implications of this relationship are, as Escobar demonstrates, the significance of the role of the police in suppressing labor unrest, the growing connection between ideas about race and criminality, changing public perceptions about Mexican Americans, and the rise of Mexican American political activism.

No Boundaries
No Boundaries

Author: Tom Diaz

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2011-01-25

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0472034685

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“Tom Diaz has worn out some shoe leather, much like a good detective, in gathering facts, not myths or urban legends. As a result he has produced an accurate and comprehensive look at a grave and present danger to our society.” —From the Foreword by Chris Swecker, former Assistant Director of the FBI and former head of the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Division No Boundaries is a disturbing account of what many consider the “next Mafia”—Latino crime gangs. Like the Mafia, these gangs operate an international network, consider violence a routine matter, and defy U.S. law enforcement at every level. Also, the gangs spawn kingpins such as the notorious Nelson Varela Martinez Comandari, who nearly became the first “Latin godfather” in the United States. Focusing on the Los Angeles–based Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the 18th Street Gang, and the Chicago-based Latin Kings, Tom Diaz describes how neighborhood gangs evolved into extremely brutal, sophisticated criminal enterprises and how local and federal authorities have struggled to suppress them. As he makes clear, the problem of transnational Latino gangs involves complex national and international issues, such as racial tensions, immigration policy, conflict in Latin America, and world economic pressures.

Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South
Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South

Author: Brandon T. Jett

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2021-07-07

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0807175544

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Throughout the Jim Crow era, southern police departments played a vital role in the maintenance of white supremacy. Police targeted African Americans through an array of actions, including violent interactions, unjust arrests, and the enforcement of segregation laws and customs. Scholars have devoted much attention to law enforcement’s use of aggression and brutality as a means of maintaining African American subordination. While these interpretations are vital to the broader understanding of police and minority relations, Black citizens have often come off as powerless in their encounters with law enforcement. Brandon T. Jett’s Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South, by contrast, reveals previously unrecognized efforts by African Americans to use, manage, and exploit policing. In the process, Jett exposes a much more complex relationship, suggesting that while violence or the threat of violence shaped police and minority relations, it did not define all interactions. Black residents of southern cities repeatedly complained about violent policing strategies and law enforcement’s seeming lack of interest in crimes committed against African Americans. These criticisms notwithstanding, Blacks also voiced a desire for the police to become more involved in their communities to reduce the seemingly intractable problem of crime, much of which resulted from racial discrimination and other structural factors related to Jim Crow. Although the actions of the police were problematic, African Americans nonetheless believed that law enforcement could play a role in reducing crime in their communities. During the first half of the twentieth century, Black citizens repeatedly demanded better policing and engaged in behaviors designed to extract services from law enforcement officers in Black neighborhoods as part of a broader strategy to make their communities safer. By examining the myriad ways in which African Americans influenced the police to serve the interests of the Black community, Jett adds a new layer to our understanding of race relations in the urban South in the Jim Crow era and contributes to current debates around the relationship between the police and minorities in the United States.

The Case for Identity Politics
The Case for Identity Politics

Author: Christopher T. Stout

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 0813944996

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Following the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the presidential election of 2016, many prominent scholars and political pundits argued that a successful Democratic Party in the future must abandon identity politics. While these calls for Democrats to distance themselves from such strategies have received much attention, there is scant academic work that empirically tests whether nonracial campaigns provide an advantage to Democrats today. As Christopher Stout explains, those who argue for deracialized appeals to voters may not be considering how several high-profile police shootings and acquittals, increasing evidence of growing racial health and economic disparities, retrenchments on voting rights, and the growth of racial hate groups have made race a more salient issue now than in the recent past. Moreover, they fail to account for how demographic changes in the United States have made racial and ethnic minorities a more influential voting bloc. The Case for Identity Politics finds that racial appeals are an effective form of outreach for Democratic candidates and enhance, rather than detract from, their electability in our current political climate.

Making Rights Real
Making Rights Real

Author: Charles R. Epp

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-02-15

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0226211665

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It’s a common complaint: the United States is overrun by rules and procedures that shackle professional judgment, have no valid purpose, and serve only to appease courts and lawyers. Charles R. Epp argues, however, that few Americans would want to return to an era without these legalistic policies, which in the 1970s helped bring recalcitrant bureaucracies into line with a growing national commitment to civil rights and individual dignity. Focusing on three disparate policy areas—workplace sexual harassment, playground safety, and police brutality in both the United States and the United Kingdom—Epp explains how activists and professionals used legal liability, lawsuit-generated publicity, and innovative managerial ideas to pursue the implementation of new rights. Together, these strategies resulted in frameworks designed to make institutions accountable through intricate rules, employee training, and managerial oversight. Explaining how these practices became ubiquitous across bureaucratic organizations, Epp casts today’s legalistic state in an entirely new light.

The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America
The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America

Author: Wilbur R. Miller

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2012-07-20

Total Pages: 2657

ISBN-13: 1412988780

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Several encyclopedias overview the contemporary system of criminal justice in America, but full understanding of current social problems and contemporary strategies to deal with them can come only with clear appreciation of the historical underpinnings of those problems. Thus, this five-volume work surveys the history and philosophy of crime, punishment, and criminal justice institutions in America from colonial times to the present. It covers the whole of the criminal justice system, from crimes, law enforcement and policing, to courts, corrections and human services. Among other things, this encyclopedia: explicates philosophical foundations underpinning our system of justice; charts changing patterns in criminal activity and subsequent effects on legal responses; identifies major periods in the development of our system of criminal justice; and explores in the first four volumes - supplemented by a fifth volume containing annotated primary documents - evolving debates and conflicts on how best to address issues of crime and punishment. Its signed entries in the first four volumes--supplemented by a fifth volume containing annotated primary documents--provide the historical context for students to better understand contemporary criminological debates and the contemporary shape of the U.S. system of law and justice.

Chicanx Utopias
Chicanx Utopias

Author: Luis Alvarez

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2022-02-22

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 147732450X

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2023 Honorable Mention Best History Book, International Latino Book Awards Broad and encompassing examination of Chicanx popular culture since World War II and the utopian visions it articulated Amid the rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and movements for civil rights and global justice in the post–World War II era, Chicanxs in film, music, television, and art weaponized culture to combat often oppressive economic and political conditions. They envisioned utopias that, even if never fully realized, reimagined the world and linked seemingly disparate people and places. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Chicanx popular culture forged a politics of the possible and gave rise to utopian dreams that sprang from everyday experiences. In Chicanx Utopias, Luis Alvarez offers a broad study of these utopian visions from the 1950s to the 2000s. Probing the film Salt of the Earth, brown-eyed soul music, sitcoms, poster art, and borderlands reggae music, he examines how Chicanx pop culture, capable of both liberation and exploitation, fostered interracial and transnational identities, engaged social movements, and produced varied utopian visions with divergent possibilities and limits. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the Zapatista movement, this book reveals how Chicanxs articulated pop cultural utopias to make sense of, challenge, and improve the worlds they inhabited.

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY DYNAMICS OF MULTICULTURALISM
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY DYNAMICS OF MULTICULTURALISM

Author: Martin Guevara Urbina

Publisher: Charles C Thomas Publisher

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0398080992

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In the twenty-first century few studies have delineated the U.S. multiculturalism story beyond black and white, to include the truths and realities of other Americans over time, resulting in highly skewed academic publications. While the white experience and, to a lesser extent, the black experience, has been well documented, the brown experience, for instance, has been neglected, minimized, or excluded from the pages of history. Clearly, there has been a great need for researchers to examine the multiple intertwining forces of historical and contemporary movements defining, shaping, and governing the everyday experience of America’s people. In the face of centuries of manipulation, exploitation, oppression, and sometimes brutal violence, blacks, browns, reds, yellows, and others are still here, fighting not only for ethnic and racial tolerance but also for equality, justice, respect, and human dignity. In fact, despite the long legacy of hate, violence, and oppression against America’s most disadvantaged communities, particularly undocumented people, the minority population will continue to grow and, with pressing demographic shifts, ethnic and racial minorities will soon become the new face of America. In delineating the dynamics of multiculturalism over the years, contributing authors illustrate that the United States is nowhere near a post-racial society, and thus we must prioritize equality, justice, and multiculturalism if the U.S. is in fact going to have a balanced system. Globally, the United States must actively engage in significant and positive social transformation in the new millennium, if the U.S. is going to be situated and reflective of a post-racial society in the twenty-first century. Twenty-First Century Dynamics of Multiculturalism will be of benefit to professionals in the fields of sociology, history, minority studies, Mexican American (Chicano) studies, ethnic (Latino) studies, law, political science, and also those concerned with sociolegal issues.

Beyond These Walls
Beyond These Walls

Author: Tony Platt

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2019-01-08

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1250085128

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“You should definitely read this book... What really struck me in reading Beyond These Walls was that Tony Platt had very seriously and carefully considered the contributions of social movements—feminist, queer, disability, and labor.” —Angela Davis Beyond These Walls is an ambitious and far-ranging exploration that tracks the legacy of crime and imprisonment in the United States, from the historical roots of the American criminal justice system to our modern state of over-incarceration, and offers a bold vision for a new future. Author Tony Platt, a recognized authority in the field of criminal justice, challenges the way we think about how and why millions of people are tracked, arrested, incarcerated, catalogued, and regulated in the United States. Beyond These Walls traces the disturbing history of punishment and social control, revealing how the criminal justice system attempts to enforce and justify inequalities associated with class, race, gender, and sexuality. Prisons and police departments are central to this process, but other institutions – from immigration and welfare to educational and public health agencies – are equally complicit. Platt argues that international and national politics shape perceptions of danger and determine the policies of local criminal justice agencies, while private policing and global corporations are deeply and undemocratically involved in the business of homeland security. Finally, Beyond These Walls demonstrates why efforts to reform criminal justice agencies have often expanded rather than contracted the net of social control. Drawing upon a long tradition of popular resistance, Platt concludes with a strategic vision of what it will take to achieve justice for all in this era of authoritarian disorder.

Racial Transformations
Racial Transformations

Author: Nicholas De Genova

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780822337164

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DIVA collection of essays that examine the intertwined racialization of Latinos and Asians in the United States ./div