Black Families and Resistance in Kansas, 1880–1905

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-91
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Final Section ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Border States ◽  
Black Resistance

Pioneering a new methodology, this chapter shows that whites targeted particular black families for disproportionate racist violence, justifying it through a complicit press that circulated defamatory stories designed to create negative reputations about them and through a criminal justice system that hounded them. It challenges the contemporary white-authored narrative by demonstrating that whites targeted these families not because of their “bad character” but because of their refusal to submit to white supremacy. Investigating sources centered on Kansas and its border states over several decades, this study demonstrates that historians may unearth more credible stories about these families and their experiences. In the final section, the chapter assesses the significance of this methodology for the scholarship on black resistance and border studies.

Convicted and Condemned

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keesha M. Middlemass
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Felony Conviction ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Understanding ◽  
The Way

Convicted and Condemned is a critical assessment of how a felony conviction operates as an integral part of prisoner reentry. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework and ethnographic data, the book advances knowledge about the connection among politics, racial animosity, history, public policies, and a felony conviction, which is rooted in historical notions of infamy and the political system of white supremacy. By applying social disability theory to the way a felony conviction functions outside of the criminal justice system, this book explores the evolution of a felony conviction, the common understanding of it, and the way it became shorthand for criminality and deviance specifically linked to black skin. On the basis of social practices, politicians took the common understanding of a felony conviction and extended its function beyond the boundaries of the criminal justice system so that a felony conviction is now embedded in policies that deny felons access to public housing, educational grants, and employment opportunities. Unique ethnographic and interview data reveal that because felons no longer can be physically exiled to faraway lands, a form of internal exile is performed when a felony conviction intersects with public policies, resulting in contemporary outlaws. The book argues that the punitive discourse around a felony conviction allows for the extension of the carceral state beyond the penitentiary to create socially disabled felons, and that the understanding of who and what a felon is shapes societal actions, reinforces the color line, and is a contributing factor undermining felons’ ability to reenter society successfully.

Toward an Abolitionist Practice of Psychology: Reimagining Psychology’s Relationship With the Criminal Justice System

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110157
Author(s):  
Hannah Klukoff ◽  
Haleh Kanani ◽  
Claire Gaglione ◽  
Apryl Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American Psychological Association ◽  
The United States ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
Clinical Practices ◽  
Mental Health Reforms

The social justice uprisings that have stemmed from several recent highly publicized murders of Black people by police have shed increasing light on the systems of oppression, inequity, and white supremacy that have been the backbone of the United States’ policing and criminal justice systems since their inception. The American Psychological Association, along with many professional organizations across the subfields of psychology, has released its statement outlining how psychology must contribute to the eradication of systemic racism and white supremacy. In this article, we address the need for psychology and its subfields to acknowledge our complicity in certain systems of oppression, such as our ties to law enforcement and the police, our support of mental health reforms that merely increase the scope of a punitive criminal justice system, and our complicity in the harm done by our current immigration policies. We argue that the best way, in fact the only way, for the profession to move toward an antiracist psychological practice is to embrace an abolitionist framework so that we may reimagine our relationships with historically oppressive institutions and rebuild our clinical practices to promote life-affirming interventions and liberation for individuals and communities.

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