Massive and unprecedented political uprisings in the wake of the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have led to more critical engagement with the idea, possibility, and promise of police abolition. In this webinar, The Politics of Race, Immigration, Class and Ethnicity (PRICE) Initiative brought together a panel of leading scholars and activists to engage in depth about race, freedom, and abolition.
Derecka Purnell is a human rights lawyer, writer, and organizer. She works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and training to community based organizations through an abolitionist framework. She helped build the Justice Project at Advancement Project’s National Office, co-created the COVID-19 Policing Project at the Community Resource Hub for Safety Accountability, and organized the founding steering committee for Law for Black Lives. She is currently a columnist at The Guardian and Deputy Director of Spirit of Justice Center at Union Theological Seminary.
Beth Richie is Professor of African American Studies and Criminology, Law and Justice at The University of Illinois at Chicago. The emphasis of Dr. Richie’s scholarly and activist work has been on the ways that race/ethnicity and social position affect women’s experience of violence and incarceration, focusing on the experiences of African American battered women and sexual assault survivors. She is the author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation and Compelled to Crime: the Gender Entrapment of Black Battered Women.
Alex Vitale is Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He has spent the last 30 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. Professor Vitale is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and The End of Policing. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Vice News, Fortune, and USA Today.
Moderator
Russell Rickford is an Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. He specializes in African-American political culture after World War II, the Black Radical Tradition, and transnational social movements. His most recent book, We are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination, received the 2016 Hooks Institute National Book Award and the 2017 OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award. He is the editor of Beyond Boundaries: The Manning Marable Reader. His other publications include Betty Shabazz: Surviving Malcolm X.