Policing Black Lives, Revised and Expanded Edition
State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present
A comprehensive account of policing Black life in Canada and a vision for Black futures beyond surveillance and confinement.
About the book
The bestselling first edition of Policing Black Lives became a mainstay of bookshelves and classrooms across North America and Europe as the first comprehensive account of the state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. This revised and expanded edition updates the original text in the wake of global Black uprisings in 2020 and offers new insights on how to build liveable futures without policing.
Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, award-winning scholar and activist Robyn Maynard traces the afterlives of slavery across multiple institutions. Maynard sheds light on the state’s role in perpetuating colonial dispossession, racial profiling, police killings, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as the ubiquity of Black resistance.
The first new chapter meticulously documents how half a century of police reforms have served to undermine Black freedom struggles while expanding the scope and scale of policing in Canadian society. In the second, Maynard advances a compelling vision for making policing obsolete and building new forms of safety.
African Heritage & Black Diaspora Canadian Studies Crime & Law Race & Anti-Racism
What people are saying
Angela Y. Davis, author of Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture“Robyn Maynard’s meticulously-researched and compelling analysis of state violence challenges prevailing narratives of Canadian multiculturalism and inclusion by examining how structures of racism and ideologies of gender are complexly anchored in global histories of colonization and slavery. This book should be read not only by those who have a specific interest in Canadian histories and social justice movements but by anyone interested in the abolitionist and revolutionary potential of the Black Lives Matters movement more broadly.”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography“We are so fortunate to have this new edition! Robyn Maynard’s clear, compelling book is a must read for organizations, households, and anyone who fights for social justice.”
David Chariandy, author of Brother“Impassioned, capacious, and insistently grounded in the legacies of Black activism, the revised and expanded edition of Policing Black Lives offers a sweeping analysis of state violence across historical periods, linking this phenomenon with impoverishment, surveillance, colonial dispossession, and the failures of educational institutions. Robyn Maynard remains an essential voice for our time, urging us “to build futures that sustain rather than destroy life” and “to build worlds in which all of us are free.”
Afua Cooper, Halifax’s seventh Poet Laureate and the author of Black Matters“Timely, urgent, and cogent…brilliantly elucidates the grotesque anti-Black racist practices coming from the state, and other institutions imbued with power over Black people’s lives.”
Erik S. McDuffie, author of Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism“Robyn Maynard offers powerful lessons for making anti-blackness in Canada legible to activists, scholars, policy makers, and community members committed to building a future nation—and world—free of racism, heteropatriarchy, xenophobia, and exploitation.”
Author
Contents
- Introduction: On State Violence and Black Lives
- Chapter: 1 Devaluing Black Life Existence, Demonizing Black Bodies: Anti-Blackness from Slavery to Segregation
- Chapter: 2 The Black Side of the Mosaic: Slavery, Racial Capitalism and the Making of Contemporary Black Poverty
- Chapter: 3 Arrested (In)justice: From the Streets to the Prison
- Chapter: 4 Law Enforcement Violence Against Black Women: Naming Their Names, Telling Their Stories
- Chapter: 5 Misogynoir in Canada: Punitive State Practices and the Devaluation of Black Women and Gender-Oppressed People
- Chapter: 6 “Of Whom We Have Too Many”: Black Life and Border Regulation
- Chapter: 7 Destroying Black Families: Slavery’s Afterlife in the Child Welfare System
- Chapter: 8 The (Mis)Education of Black Youth: Anti-Blackness in the School System
- Chapter: 9 Against the Romance of Police Reform: Expanding Police Power while Undermining Black Liberation
- Chapter: 10 Futures Beyond Policing: Making Police Obsolete
- Conclusion: Imagining Black Futures
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