Killing African Americans ― Police and Vigilante Violence As a Racial Control Mechanism

Killing African Americans examines the pervasive, disproportionate, and persistent police and vigilante killings of African Americans in the United States as a racial control mechanism that sustains the racial control system of systemic racism. Noel Cazenave’s well researched and conceptualized historical sociological study is one of the first books to focus exclusively on those killings and to treat them as political violence. Few issues have received as much conventional and social media attention in the United States over the past few years or have, for decades now, sparked so many protests and so often strained race relations to a near breaking point. Because of its timely and enduring relevance Killing African Americans will be of interest to students and scholars; Movement for Black Lives activists, politicians, public-policy analysts, concerned police officers and other criminal justice professionals, and anyone else eager to better understand this American nightmare and its solutions from a progressive and informed African American perspective.

Noel A. Cazenave is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut (UConn). He is also on the faculty of the Urban and Community Studies program of UConn’s Hartford campus and is a faculty affiliate with its Africana Studies Institute and its American Studies Program. His recent and current work is in the areas of: racism theory, U.S. poverty policy, political sociology, urban sociology, criminal justice, and the sociology of emotions. In addition to numerous journal articles, book chapters, and other publications, Professor Cazenave coauthored Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card against America’s Poor, which won five book awards, and has since then published Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community Action Programs, The Urban Racial State: Managing Race Relations in American Cities, and Conceptualizing Racism: Breaking the Chains of Racially Accommodative Language. His current book project is tentatively titled "The Courage to Be Kind."