"America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, yet nearly every empirical measure-wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation-reveals that racial inequality has barely improved since 1968, when Richard Nixon became our first zlaw and ordery president. Hayes contends our country has fractured in two: the Colony and the Nation. In the Nation, we venerate the law. In the Colony, we obsess over order, fear trumps civil...

Publisher's description: In recent years, America's criminal justice system has become the subject of an increasingly urgent debate. Critics have assailed the rise of mass incarceration, emphasizing its disproportionate impact on people of color. As [law professor] James Forman Jr. points out, however, the war on crime that began in the 1970s was supported by many African Americans in the nation's urban centers. In Locking Up Our Own, he seeks to...

In 1991, Anita Hill brought testimony and scandal into America's living rooms during televised Senate confirmation hearings in which she detailed the sexual harassment she had suffered at the hands of Clarence Thomas. The male Senate Judiciary Committee refused to take Hill seriously, and the veracity of Hill's claims were sullied in the mainstream media. Hill was defamed as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty," and Thomas was confirmed. The...