EP #58: America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s with Elizabeth Hinton

Sunni and Lisa are joined by Yale Historian Elizabeth Hinton to
discuss  new book  AMERICA ON FIRE: The Untold History
of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s

Book description:

What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the
killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded
into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young
people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an
end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression
of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the
protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and
persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton
demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear
precursors—and any attempt to understand our current crisis
requires a reckoning with the recent past.





Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider
the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a
story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality.
Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different
history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967
and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the
persistence of structural racism and one of its primary
consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical
corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope
applied to events that can only be properly understood as
rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and
violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions
that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a
post–Jim Crow United States no longer holds.





Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born
in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in
reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson
launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces
into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing
surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov
cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized
exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to
uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller
American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to
Stockton, California.





The central lesson from these eruptions—that police violence
invariably leads to community violence—continues to escape
policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups
instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The
results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that
shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new
framework for understanding our nation’s enduring strife, America
on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless
police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of
dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive
system is finally remade on the principles of justice and
equality.