Racial Justice Film Series

Behind the Fog is the first in-depth, comprehensive examination of the United States' Cold War radiological weapons program. The book examines controversial military-sponsored studies and field trials using radioactive "simulants" that exposed American civilians to radiation and other hazardous substances without their knowledge or consent during the Cold War. Although Western biological and chemical weapons programs have been analyzed by a number of scholars, Behind the Fog is a strong departure from the rest in that the United States radiological weapons program has been generally unknown to the public. Martino-Taylor documents the coordinated efforts of a small group of military scientists who advanced a four-pronged secret program of human-subject radiation studies that targeted unsuspecting Americans for Cold War military purposes. Officials enabled such projects to advance through the layering of secrecy, by embedding classified studies in other studies, and through outright deception. Agency and academic partnerships advanced, supported, and concealed the studies from the public at large who ultimately served as unwitting test subjects. Martino-Taylor's comprehensive research illuminates a dark chapter of government secrecy, the military-industrial-academic complex, and large-scale organizational deviance in American history. In its critical approach, Behind the Fog effectively examines the mechanisms that allow large-scale elite deviance to take place in modern society.

Clean and White offers a history of environmental racism in the United States focusing on constructions of race and hygiene When Joe Biden attempted to compliment Barack Obama by calling him "clean and articulate," he unwittingly tapped into one of the most destructive racial stereotypes in American history. This book tells the history of the corrosive idea that whites are clean and those who are not white are dirty. From the age of Thomas Jefferson to the Memphis Public Workers strike of 1968 through the present day, ideas about race and waste have shaped where people have lived, where people have worked, and how American society's wastes have been managed. In the wake of the civil war, as the nation encountered emancipation, mass immigration, and the growth of an urbanized society, Americans began to conflate the ideas of race and waste. Certain immigrant groups took on waste management labor, such as Jews and scrap metal recycling, fostering connections between the socially marginalized and refuse. Ethnic "purity" was tied to pure cleanliness, and hygiene became a central aspect of white identity. Carl A. Zimring here draws on historical evidence from statesmen, scholars, sanitarians, novelists, activists, advertisements, and the United States Census of Population to reveal changing constructions of environmental racism. The material consequences of these attitudes endured and expanded through the twentieth century, shaping waste management systems and environmental inequalities that endure into the twenty-first century. Today, the bigoted idea that non-whites are "dirty" remains deeply ingrained in the national psyche, continuing to shape social and environmental inequalities in the age of Obama.

West Baltimore, Fayette and Monroe: the corner. On this forgotten intersection, the American dream has crumbled to a nightmare. Here, the full price of the drug culture is being paid--yet, surprisingly, it can also be a place of hope, caring, and love. This extraordinary book tells the searing true story of one year in the life of an inner-city neighborhood. Written by David Simon, the award-winning author of Homicide, and Edward Burns, a former police detective, it follows a handful of people who must struggle mightily just to survive--let alone escape--the drug market that fuels their world. At the center of the narrative is fifteen-year-old DeAndre McCullough. DeAndre's parents, Gary and Fran, were once poised, against all odds, to pull themselves up and out of West Baltimore. But when they themselves stumble and then succumb to the corner's temptations, DeAndre's future hangs in the balance. Smart and streetwise, he is both drawn to and wary of the drug trade that flourishes beyond his rowhouse steps. Can he rise above his parents' addiction, or will he, too, become a casualty of the corner? In telling the story of DeAndre and his broken family, Simon and Burns open up the complex world of the corner and its unforgettable characters. It's a place of predators and their prey, of slingers and touts, of stickup boys and shooting gallery nurses, of ambivalent police, helpless users, and innocent bystanders. But it is also, incredibly, a place of fragile hope. Fat Curt, an aging drug tout, remembers the corner as a kinder place, and tries to protect his customers from weak or dangerous product. R.C., a troubled teenager, finds refuge from his chaotic life within the basketball court's magic boundaries. Ella, a longtime resident, runs the recreation center for the corner's children, shielding them as best she can from what lies outside the playground's chain-link fence. Amid so much desperation, decency still flickers, poignantly, across the corner's blasted landscape. More vividly than any recent book, The Corner captures an America of which many of us are only dimly aware. Through the prism of just one desolate crossroads, Simon and Burns offer chilling assessments of why law enforcement policies, moral crusades, and the welfare system have done so little for our inner cities. Deeply moving and unflinchingly real, The Corner will forever alter our view of the so-called war on drugs, even as it compels us to look deep into the hearts and minds of all those who live in America's abandoned places.

Understanding the explosive protests over police killings and the legacy of racism Following the high-profile deaths of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, both cities erupted in protest over the unjustified homicides of unarmed black males at the hands of police officers. These local tragedies--and the protests surrounding them--assumed national significance, igniting fierce debate about the fairness and efficacy of the American criminal justice system. Yet, outside the gaze of mainstream attention, how do local residents and protestors in Ferguson and Baltimore understand their own experiences with race, place, and policing? In Hands Up, Don't Shoot, Jennifer Cobbina draws on in-depth interviews with nearly two hundred residents of Ferguson and Baltimore, conducted within two months of the deaths of Brown and Gray. She examines how protestors in both cities understood their experiences with the police, how those experiences influenced their perceptions of policing, what galvanized Black Lives Matter as a social movement, and how policing tactics during demonstrations influenced subsequent mobilization decisions among protesters. Ultimately, she humanizes people's deep and abiding anger, underscoring how a movement emerged to denounce both racial biases by police and the broader economic and social system that has stacked the deck against young black civilians. Hands Up, Don't Shoot is a remarkably current, on-the-ground assessment of the powerful, protestor-driven movement around race, justice, and policing in America.

Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form." Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy--and often sheer folly--of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history. Mapping Decline is the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps--rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records--illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.