Making a Killing - by Robin D G Kelley (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A sweeping history of the African American struggle against police brutality, exposing how state violence underpins the capitalist economy and tracing the long resistance movement in pursuit of racial justice and freedom for all

Rekia Boyd, Timothy Thomas, Jonathan Sanders, Breonna Taylor, Jordan Neely, and Michael Brown were casualties of war. Whether we call it a war on crime, a war on militants, or a war on drugs, law enforcement at every level has made Black neighborhoods across the country into killing fields and open-air prisons, stripping vulnerable people of equal rights, freedom of movement, and even protection from torture. In a smoldering indictment, Robin D. G. Kelley excavates the deep history of this war through the lives of the victims and their communities, drawing a direct line from today's fatalities to the "blood at the root"--the racial terror at the heart of America's system of exploitation and wealth accumulation.

It is a system, Kelley shows, that depends on racial and economic inequality and is maintained through not only tools of force but also tools of wealth extraction, from lynch law in Georgia to segregated housing in St. Louis to gentrification, predatory lending, civil forfeiture, and even today's militarization of ICE.

At the same time, Making a Killing is a history of the counterwar, the legacy of collective Black resistance--the movements, tactics, thinkers, and leaders--that has long been a catalyst for change and the tip of the spear in a broader fight against rising fascism. Demanding not only justice for Black victims but also vast and visionary social transformation, these movements, from Reconstruction to the present day, hold out the possibility that we may lay to rest the America we know so that a new world may be born.

Review Quotes

"Making a Killing is the deepest account we have of how policing, racial capitalism, and the war on Black life became a single integrated system. Robin Kelley gives Black women, disabled people, and the unhoused the analytical center they have long deserved and grounds his abolitionist vision in places where it is already being built--Jackson, Lincoln Detox, Sweet Water Foundation, and the freedom schools of Ferguson. It's a work of mourning as much as analysis, and an indispensable one."
--Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

"Making a Killing is a sweeping history of Black life and premature death in the United States. Yet this is also a history of unsparing resistance, where grief becomes action and memory becomes struggle. Powerful yet grounded in the possibility of collective liberation, Making a Killing asks us to confront the 'blood at the root' of American society--and imagine what it would take to build a world where Black life can truly flourish. Read this unflinching, urgent, and deeply human book."
--Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us

"As our foremost popular historian, Kelley uses every one of his prodigious intellectual tools to perform a new kind of autopsy, one that spans oceans, generations, and centuries, while boldly transgressing all disciplinary boundaries. In his skillful and loving hands, every snuffed-out Black life opens up vivid and suppressed worlds. The results are dazzling, definitive, and devastating. A sorrowful triumph."
--Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything

"Unsparing in its analysis, unwavering in its truth-telling, Making a Killing is the book that only Robin Kelley could have written. This brilliant chronicle simultaneously renders the moral urgency of the current moment and illuminates the tortured history that led us here in the first place."
--Jelani Cobb, author of Three or More is a Riot

"Making A Killing is about the profit-driven war against us all, and Robin D. G. Kelley honors and reframes Black victims of police violence as casualties of that war. One of the most important historians writing from the front lines, he shows how families, communities, and those who believe in freedom and justice have engaged in a counter war to survive and thrive. This is required reading for anyone looking to sharpen their understanding of capitalist violence in the United States."
--Derecka Purnell, author of Becoming Abolitionists

"Robin Kelley is a deeply beloved chronicler, guide, and inspiration for generations of change-makers. His powerful storytelling, expansive historical context, rigorous analysis, and incisive insights make this book an essential read for anyone chasing freedom dreams in a time of rising fascism. An instant addition to the canon of social movement histories necessary to build liberatory futures."
--Andrea J. Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women

"Making a Killing is an extraordinary work of history and insight, exposing the relationship between police violence, social disorder, and quotidian unfairness that defines Black working-class life in the United States. Exhaustively researched and exquisitely written, this is the best book written on the meaning of police violence in American life."
--Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

About the Author

Robin D. G. Kelley is the author of the award-winning biography Thelonious Monk; Race Rebels; Freedom Dreams; and numerous other acclaimed books on radical social movements, labor, music, Black intellectuals, and the African diaspora. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Hammer & Hope, Boston Review, and many other publications. A Guggenheim fellow and Freedom Scholar award recipient, Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History at the University of California, Los Angeles.