William T Armaline

‘The biggest gang in Oakland’: re-thinking police legitimacy

Literature defining ‘police legitimacy’ lacks qualitative research on those populations most often targeted by law enforcement agencies, including people of color in urban areas. This same literature defines police legitimacy as something unquestionable and automatic. Exploration of this concept is limited to strategies to increase public ‘trust’ in police, and public compliance to their authority. We address these limitations in the available scholarship through an analysis of interviews with a diverse sample of Oakland (CA) residents on their experiences with the Oakland Police Department (OPD). Their narratives are presented in the historical context of controversy, budget problems, federal investigations, and racialized violence that help to define the relationship between OPD and Oakland communities. Those interviewed, universally observed OPD’s failure to address the most common crime problems in the city, while others, particularly people of color, found them to be a personal or public threat to safety. Their narratives fly in the face of the manifest functions of municipal police forces, are fully supported by the contemporary empirical history of the OPD, and suggest the illegitimate authority – including the monopoly on the use of force – of organizations like OPD in a democratic society.

Image Isn't Everything: Contemporary Systemic Racism and Antiracism in the Age of Obama

In order to be properly addressed or assessed, racism must be appropriately and consistently defined. We employ critical race theory to challenge the popular notion that the election of Barack Obama and other images of diversity signify racisms decline, end, or reversal. Further, we illustrate the utility and accuracy of critical race theory and the persistence of contemporary systemic racism through a brief analysis of the U.S. criminal justice system. In the interest of theoretically grounded antiracism, we suggest why and how activists, scholars, and mobilized communities might challenge and dismantle the U.S. War on Drugs and failed project of mass incarceration as devastating manifestations of contemporary systemic racism. We conclude with specific suggestions for both ourselves and our colleagues.

Public Education Against Neoliberal Capitalism: Illustrations and Opportunities

John Dewey conceptualized the classroom as a laboratory for building democratic societies. We might revisit such an approach to pedagogy and public education as we grapple with teaching in the face of overlapping threats to human survival. It is no longer “radical” from a scholarly perspective to suggest that a sustainable future for the human species will require alternatives to capitalism and the coercive state. How can our classrooms be repurposed as engines for social change? Can they be drivers of resistance and laboratories for alternatives? This chapter will explore such counter-hegemonic strategies, and argues for a markedly more public education. Beginning with the classroom as a pedagogical place, this chapter then widens the perspective to the local outside, to the regional, to the global

Dignity in adversity: human rights in troubled times

CCP’ (p. 189). Moreover, ‘grand political narratives have been replaced by lifestyle concerns when people think about class’ (pp. 189–90) in a way that seems to me to be very similar to the attitudes that were self-reported in the BBC’s Great British Class Survey conducted in 2013. Goodman has written a remarkably clear and highly readable book that is almost entirely free of jargon. In fact it is probably too jargon-free, since he seems determined to avoid any systematic discussion of class theories as they relate to Communist and former Communist societies. This is apparent as early as Chapter 1, where no explicit mention is made of Mao’s critique of class stratification in post-Stalinist Russia, which seems to have been a major influence on his thinking in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution. There are only a handful of references to the experiences of Eastern Europe. The term ‘state capitalism’ makes a brief appearance, in a reference to the work of Iván Szelényi (p. 152), but it is not discussed or even defined, and the term is missing from the index. There is no mention of the substantial literature on state capitalism produced by dissident Marxists that dates back to the early 1930s. Neither here nor in the other two references to Szelényi (pp. 150, 179) does Goodman consider the brief allusions to China in his major work, Making Capitalism without Capitalists or comment on the differences between the experience of the ex-Communist countries of Central Europe and post-1978 developments in China. Despite these missed opportunities, this is an important book that contributes much to our understanding of the social structure that underpins the world’s second-largest economy.