LOCKING UP OUR OWN: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN BLACK AMERICA

done more, quite a bit more, to highlight that his book is not first and foremost about black agency and social responsibility.As we have already said and want to emphasize again here, Forman unequivocally states that his book means to take seriously the structural conditions under which black decisionmakers promulgated policy and governed.However, Forman’s near-exclusive focus on what these actors did, with scant attention to the conditions under which they acted, leaves readers with the daunting challenge of articulating those structural factors for themselves.10 Second, Forman’s analysis does not engage with or evidence a normative sensibility about intersectionality.11 Which is to say, for the most part, throughout Forman’s book, men figure as the racial subjects of the war on drugs and mass incarceration.The centralization of men in this way elides the particularities of black women’s experiences across sexual orientation and gender/sexual identity.Significantly, in naming this intersectional shortfall we are not simply advancing an argument about inclusion and exclusion -that is, that excluding black women from the analysis further obscures their experiences under “the new Jim Crow” 12 and compounds the difficulty advocates continue to have including black women’s voices in antiracist contestations of criminal justice.Our point is rather that, as black feminists such as Professors Kimberlé Crenshaw, Priscilla Ocen, and Andrea Ritchie have noted, 13 an engagement of black women’s experiences with policing, state violence, and ————————————————————-10 See Darren Lenard Hutchinson, Who Locked Us Up? Examining the Social Meaning of Black Punitiveness, 127 YALE L.J. (forthcoming 2018) (reviewing JAMES FORMAN JR., LOCKING UP OUR OWN ( 2017)) (expressing concern that readers might interpret Forman’s argument as a critique of or challenge to antiracist contestations of the criminal justice system).