What Would You Do If…:Locked Down Tight in the Ghetto, the System Behind It and Why We Need a Revolution!

What Would You Do If…:Locked Down Tight in the Ghetto, the System Behind It and Why We Need a Revolution!

Alice Goffman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has produced one of the most remarkable books in a long time on what’s happening to Black people in the US, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.
Goffman’s pathbreaking book was released just this month. This is one of her first radio interviews.

The author spent six years living in an African American neighborhood in Philadelphia, where people are trapped in a web of high-tech surveillance, police violence, and mass incarceration. 2.5 million people behind bars have made the US the world’s largest jailer. But there are also 7 million people on probation or parole, subjected to conditions that author Michelle Alexander called the New Jim Crow.
On the Run brings you into the middle of the lives of the people impacted by this situation — a whole section of people who have been turned into hunted fugitives in their own neighborhoods. She lets us watch as the pleasures of summer evening stoop sitting are shattered by the arrival of a car-full of cops looking to serve a warrant. She recounts being awoken by a police raid — or seeing a friend arrested for attending the birth of his child by the cops who lie in wait at the hospitals where Black people go.

Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, discusses the conditions facing Black People today, how they developed, what’s behind them and what’s the solution.


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