Policing, Violence, and Torture in Chicago
@ Newberry Library
60 W Walton St, Chicago, IL 60610
Opening Wednesday, October 2nd, from 6PM - 7:30PM
Join us for a Meet the Author event with Simon Balto and Laurence Ralph, who will converse about their recent work on police violence in Chicago.
Simon Balto is Assistant Professor of African-American History at the University of Iowa. His latest book, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power, focuses on the policing of African American neighborhoods in Chicago from 1919 to the 1970s. Balto demonstrates that punitive practices by and inadequate protection from the police were central to black Chicagoans’ lives long before the late-century “wars” on crime and drugs. By exploring the deeper origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass incarceration emerged as a fully formed machine of profoundly anti-black subjugation.
Laurence Ralph is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, as well as the Director of the Center on Transnational Policing. In The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence, Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, Ralph offers a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror.
After the talk, the authors will sign their books, which will be available for purchase in the Newberry’s Rosenberg Bookshop.
For more information, and to register, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/policing-violence-and-torture-in-chicago-tickets-67351172169
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Tags: Chicago, Laurence Ralph, Near North Side, Newberry Library, Policing Violence and Torture in Chicago, Simon Balto
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