Lee Lecture - When Black Lives Matter: The Ethics of Race, Crime and Punishment in America
25th May 2016, 5:00 pm
Professor Glenn Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics, Brown University.
How does racial inequality manifest itself in today's America? What does this mean for the future of American democracy? A huge gap between black and white Americans exists in asset holdings, educational attainment, imprisonment, employment, mortality and morbidity, etc. This circumstance poses profound challenges for the future of American democracy, especially in the areas of order maintenance and social control. A racially divided nation can also be judged by the identities of those it incarcerates. The prisoner population in the United States is staggeringly large, and overwhelmingly nonwhite. Recently, a powerful surge of protest and criticism has emerged -- largely from a community of black activists -- demanding changes and reforms in the policing and punishment of "black bodies." What are we to make of this? Taking crime, policing and punishment as my point of departure, I explore the nature of racial inequality in today’s America, and the threat this poses to the character of American democracy.