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Racial Impurity and Dangerous Bodies

Pollution and the Criminalization of Blackness in US Society
  • ISBN-13: 9781506420493
  • Publisher: AUGSBURG FORTRESS PUBLISHERS
    Imprint: FORTRESS PRESS
  • By Rima Vesely-Flad
  • Price: AUD $73.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/08/2017
  • Format: Paperback (229.00mm X 152.00mm) 272 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Christian theology [HRCM]
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Rima L. Vesely-Flad examines the religious and philosophical constructs of the black body in U.S. society, examining racialized ideas about purity and pollution as they have developed historically and as they are institutionalized today in racially disproportionate policing and mass incarceration. These systems work, she argues, to keeps threatening elements of society in a constant state of harassment and tension so that they are unable to pollute the morals of mainstream society. Policing establishes racialized boundaries between communities deemed "dangerous" and communities deemed "pure" and, along with prisons and reentry policies, sequesters and restrains the pollution of convicted "criminals," thus perpetuating the image of the threatening black male criminal. Vesely-Flad shows how the anti-Stop and Frisk and the Black Lives Matter movements have confronted these systems by exposing unquestioned assumptions about blackness and criminality. They hold the potential to reverse the construal of "pollution" and invasion in America's urban cores if they extend their challenge to mass imprisonment and the barriers to reentry of convicted felons.
Rima L. Vesely-Flad is professor and chair of religious studies and director of peace and justice studies at Warren Wilson College. She holds a PhD in social ethics from Union Theological Seminary and was the founder of Interfaith Coalition of Advocates for Reentry and Employment (ICARE) in New York State.
Introduction1. A Theory of Moral Pollution2. Constructions of Character and Criminality in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. Penal Systems3. Institutionalizing Pollution Boundaries: Contemporary Policing, Imprisonment, and Reentry Systems4. Policing Polluted Bodies in Polluted Spaces: Stop-and-Frisk in New York City, 1993-20135. Confronting Pollution: Protest as the Performance of Purity in the Black Lives Matter Movement6. Seeing Jesus in Michael Brown: New Theological Constructions of Blackness7. Conclusion: Reconstructing the Image of the Polluted Black BodyIndex
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