We suggest that there is newness in the operation of anti-Black violence in our present, but this newness does not lie in the fact of exceptional or militarized police force. We highlight shifts in the social order that policing actively supports, that are assembled through the geo-political economies of urban space.

Drawing out both the causal and structural links that conjoin the underdevelopment of Black neighborhoods and the captivity of incarceration, Spatializing Blackness argues that even before Black men enter the prison system they are already inhabiting the prison-like environments and carceral politics of the prison industrial complex in their everyday lives.

We Will Shoot Back builds upon an important and growing body of scholarship that challenges a narrow conceptualization of civil rights activism, countering the dominant interpretation of the southern Black freedom struggles as an overwhelmingly peaceful and non-violent response to the violence of white supremacy.

Almost a month after the local Ferguson Police Department killed Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, members of the Ferguson community demand justice. While the situation in Ferguson is complex, we nonetheless want to draw attention to the ways the violent death of Michael Brown and the subsequent community uprising is indicative of the work that violence accomplishes within our present neoliberal and racialized condition in the United States.

Nelson’s interest lies in the Party’s development of strategies to facilitate a shift in medical authority over and within African American communities. The book thus focuses on the varied aspects of the Party’s health activism, which ranged from the assembly of ‘activist-run no-cost or low-cost clinics’ (2013: 18) and educational outreach to the building of genetic screening programmes and legal challenges to racialised violence research.