Black Evidence
A History and a Warning
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A fierce exposé of the resistance to believing Black people and its devastating effects throughout American history.
From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment.
In Black Evidence, political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament.
Through a curation of critical moments across four centuries, Smith invites us to review the evidence that has been obscured, distorted, and denied. She rigorously investigates the practices that turn Black witnesses into liars in the court room, Black patients into superbodies that don’t feel pain in health care settings, Black people into subhumans in scientific experiments, and Black children into superpredators. She reveals what happens when Black voices are subject to exclusion—their communities are terrorized, their memories are refuted, and their resistance is pathologized.
Written with compassion and tempered optimism, Black Evidence prescribes a cure and encourages readers to practice the skills needed to build a truly multiracial democracy: confront our past, acknowledge the damage of inequality in our present, and listen to the voices of those who experience the problems we wish to solve for an equitable future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this unflinching audit of American history, political scientist Watts Smith (Stay Woke) surveys the many ways that Black people's testimonies have been systematically ignored and excluded. Noting the cyclical nature of civil rights advancements and white supremacist backlashes, she suggests that the latter are often predicated on new methods of dismissing "Black evidence." To make her case, Watts Smiths spotlights numerous well-known contemporary examples of anti-Black brutality and inequity, showing how they connect to longer histories of the suppression of Black speech. For example, she situates the questioning of the credibility of Rachel Jeantel, a friend of Trayvon Martin, during her testimony in Martin's murder trial, within America's lengthy history of the exclusion of legal testimony by Black people, which she suggests has created a lasting "presumption of Black incompetence." She discusses the viral video of the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery alongside the history of gaslighting of Black witnesses to crimes—increasingly challenged today by video evidence. And she ties Black women's higher rates of maternal mortality, likely stemming from doctors' ongoing trivialization of Black patients' accounts of their own pain, to the legacy of eugenics and the "medicalizing" of Blackness. By astutely placing the past in conversation with the present, this compels readers to consider the way bleak, unaddressed histories continue to cause harm.
