Sun, January 11, 7pm – 8pm Wooden Shoe Books 704 South Street
The explosive rise in the U.S. incarceration rate in the second half of the twentieth century, and the racial transformation of the prison population from mostly white at mid-century to sixty-five percent black and Latino in the present day, is a trend that cannot easily be ignored. Many believe that this shift began with the “tough on crime” policies advocated by Republicans and southern Democrats beginning in the late 1960s, which sought longer prison sentences, more frequent use of the death penalty, and the explicit or implicit targeting of politically marginalized people. In The First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state-a system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos-was, in fact, rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early 1960s, not in the period after.
Animals in captivity or whose habitats are being destroyed live in a constant state of resistance. When their lives are threatened, they kick and bite and scream. When their homes are taken, they attempt to rebuild and regroup. When they are confined, they desperately grasp for an existence beyond captivity. Animals fight to live, to be wild, and to be free, and their fight is always urgent. If we are fighting in solidarity with animals, where is our urgency? What are we missing in our movement for animal liberation?
