The police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 triggered a wave of protests like no other in history. Millions took to the streets in over forty US cities and across the globe in a multiracial, militant, and mobile uprising, calling not only for justice for all Black victims but for vast and visionary changes to police and social structures.
How did we get here? Conducting a historical autopsy, Robin Kelley approaches the lives and deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and so many others as a portal to the racist histories that strangled them and their communities. From the slave patrols and lynch law of the Deep South to segregated housing, the war on drugs, slum clearance, predatory lending, and extraction of wealth, Kelley draws a direct line from the "blood at the root"-the racial terror at the heart of the American social and economic order-to the latest casualties of that terror.
This is also the story of Black resistance, of decades of organizing, political education, and movement building. The protesters who came out swinging, calling to defund the police, are part of a long line of combatants fighting to emancipate, democratize, and lay to rest the America as we know it so that a new world may be born.
'Dazzling, definitive, and devastating. A sorrowful triumph' Naomi Klein
By the 'leading Black historian of the age,' a searing history of state violence and the fight for racial justice
Breonna Taylor, Timothy Thomas, Rekia Boyd, Jonathan Sanders, 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 neighbourhoods into killing fields, sites of resource extraction, and extensions of the prison system.
In Making a Killing, Robin D. G. Kelley approaches the stories of the casualties of this war as a portal to the capitalist system that strangled them and their communities and financed the unprecedented growth of police departments. From slave patrols and lynch law to the militarization of ICE, Kelley reconstructs the racist terror at the heart of the American social and economic order as well as the intergenerational journey of families who lost loved ones to premature death while navigating a system that prioritizes property over Black life.
Yet this is also the story of the counterwar. Kelley examines 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 its victims but genuine social transformation, these movements hold out the possibility that we may lay to rest the world we know, so that a new one may be born.
