Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

by Marc Lamont Hill, Todd Brewster (Foreword by)

Overview

One of America’s leading intellectual voices presents a powerful, thought-provoking analysis of the string of deaths of unarmed citizens like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray—finding deeper meaning and important insights on the intersection of race and class in America today.

The wave of protests following the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and other unarmed citizens marked a pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle in America, destined to be ranked with Selma and Little Rock, Birmingham and Watts on the timeline of the national struggle for freedom.

In Nobody, scholar and CNN political commentator Marc Lamont Hill thoughtfully broadens the conversations around the moment to offer a compelling analysis of race, class, and social worth. As Hill skillfully demonstrates, Brown’s death brought to light a growing crisis in America: the existence of a group of citizens who are made exploitable and disposable by the machinery of racism, unregulated capitalism, and more. The “Nobody” class.

Hill recounts the details of tragedies like Brown’s death and draws upon first-hand reporting and careful historical analysis to show how the “Nobody” class has emerged over time and how forces in America have worked to preserve and exploit this group in ways that are both humiliating and harmful.

Timely and provocative, Nobody is a compelling must-read for anyone wanting to better understand the race and class issues that continue to leave their mark on our country today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501124945
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	07/26/2016
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Marc Lamont Hill is an award-winning journalist and host of BET News, as well as a political contributor to CNN. He is a Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Morehouse College. Prior to that, he held positions at Columbia University and Temple University. He lives in Atlanta and New York City.

Todd Brewster has served as Don E. Ackerman Director of Oral History at the United States Military Academy, West Point, and is a longtime journalist who has worked as an editor for Time and Life and as senior producer for ABC News. He has written for Vanity Fair, Time, Life, The Huffington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, and is the coauthor with the late Peter Jennings of the bestselling books The Century, The Century for Young People, and In Search of America. He lives with his wife and two sons in Ridgefield, Connecticut. He is also the author of Lincoln’s Gamble.

Read an Excerpt

Nobody

This is a book about what it means to be Nobody in twenty-first-century America.

To be Nobody is to be vulnerable. In the most basic sense, all of us are vulnerable; to be human is to be susceptible to misfortune, violence, illness, and death. The role of government, however, is to offer forms of protection that enhance our lives and shield our bodies from foreseeable and preventable dangers. Unfortunately, for many citizens—particularly those marked as poor, Black, Brown, immigrant, queer, or trans—State power has only increased their vulnerability, making their lives more rather than less unsafe.

To be Nobody is to be subject to State violence. In recent years, thousands of Americans have died at the hands of law enforcement, a reality made even more shameful when we consider how many of these victims were young, poor, mentally ill, Black, or unarmed. The cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York City; Kathryn Johnston in Atlanta; Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida; Freddie Gray in Baltimore; and Sandra Bland in Hempstead, Texas, have forced a stubborn nation to come to terms with the realities of police corruption, brutality, and deeply entrenched racism. While media coverage and global activism have turned these individuals into household names, they are not, sadly, exceptional. Instead, they represent the countless Americans who die daily, and unnecessarily, at the hands of those who are paid to protect and serve them.

To be Nobody is to also confront systemic forms of State violence. Long before he was standing in front of the barrel of Darren Wilson’s gun, Michael Brown was the victim of broken schools and evaporated labor markets. Prior to being choked to death by Daniel Pantaleo, Eric Garner lived in a community terrorized by policing practices that transform neighborhoods into occupied territories and citizens into enemy combatants. Sandra Bland’s tragic death sequence did not begin with a negligent jailer or an unreasonable cop but with a criminal justice system that has consistently neglected the emotional, physical, and psychological well-being of Black women and girls. For the vulnerable, it is the violence of the ordinary, the terrorism of the quotidian, the injustice of the everyday, that produces the most profound and intractable social misery.

To be Nobody is to be abandoned by the State. For decades now, we have witnessed a radical transformation in the role and function of government in America. An obsession with free-market logic and culture has led the political class to craft policies that promote private interests over the public good. As a result, our schools, our criminal justice system, our military, our police departments, our public policy, and virtually every other entity engineered to protect life and enhance prosperity have been at least partially relocated to the private sector. At the same time, the private sector has kept its natural commitment to maximizing profits rather than investing in people. This arrangement has left the nation’s vulnerable wedged between the Scylla of negligent government and the Charybdis of corporate greed, trapped in a historically unprecedented state of precarity.

To be Nobody is to be considered disposable. In New Orleans, we saw the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina followed by a grossly unnatural government response, one that killed thousands of vulnerable citizens and consigned many more to refugee status. In Flint, Michigan, we are witnessing this young century’s most profound illustration of civic evil, an entire city collectively punished with lead-poisoned water for the crime of being poor, Black, and politically disempowered. Every day, the nation’s homeless, mentally ill, drug addicted, and poor are pushed out of institutions of support and relocated to jails and prisons. These conditions reflect a prevailing belief that the vulnerable are unworthy of investment, protection, or even the most fundamental provisions of the social contract. As a result, they can be erased, abandoned, and even left to die.

Without question, Nobodyness is largely indebted to race, as White supremacy is foundational to the American democratic experiment. The belief that White lives are worth more than others—what Princeton University scholar Eddie Glaude calls the “value gap”—continues to color every aspect of our public and private lives.1 This belief likewise compromises the lives of vulnerable White citizens, many of whom support political movements and policies that close ranks around Whiteness rather than ones that enhance their own social and economic interests.

While Nobodyness is strongly tethered to race, it cannot be divorced from other forms of social injustice. Instead, it must be understood through the lens of “intersectionality,” the ways that multiple forms of oppression operate simultaneously against the vulnerable.2 It would be impossible to examine the 2015 killing of Mya Hall by National Security Agency police without understanding how sexism and transphobia conspire with structural racism to endanger Black trans bodies. We cannot make sense of Sandra Bland’s tragic death without recognizing the impact of gender and poverty in shaping the current carceral state. To understand the complexity of oppression, we must avoid simple solutions and singular answers.

Despite the centrality of race within American life, Nobodyness cannot be understood without an equally thorough analysis of class. Unlike other forms of difference, class creates the material conditions and relations through which racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are produced, sustained, and lived. This does not mean that all forms of injustice are due to class antagonism, nor does it mean that all forms of domination can be automatically fixed through universal class struggle. Rather, it means that we cannot begin to address the various forms of oppression experienced by America’s vulnerable without radically changing a system that defends class at all costs.

This book is my attempt to tell the stories of those marked as Nobody. Based on extensive research, as well as my time on the ground—in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York City, Atlanta, Hempstead, Flint, and Sanford—I want to show how the high-profile and controversial cases of State violence that we’ve witnessed over the past few years are but a symptom of a deeper American problem. Underneath each case is a more fundamental set of economic conditions, political arrangements, and power relations that transforms everyday citizens into casualties of an increasingly intense war on the vulnerable. It is my hope that this book offers an analysis that spotlights the humanity of these “Nobodies” and inspires principled action.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Preface xvii

I Nobody 1

II Broken 31

III Bargained 67

IV Armed 93

V Caged 123

VI Emergency 157

VII Somebody 181

Acknowledgments 185

Notes 189

Index 241

Editorial Reviews

With each death…Hill delves beyond the specifics of the situation and into the long histories that led to it. The effect is horrifying and spellbinding…Hill's firm grasp of history ensures each piece of his argument is seen for the evidence it is…Hill's book is a worthy and necessary addition to the contemporary canon of civil rights literature. He delivers what feels like a dispatch from a war. Nobody is a cleareyed look at the actors on both sides of the battlefield, and explains how we came to this.

The New York Times Book Review - Bijan Stephen

08/29/2016
Hill, a journalist and a professor of African-American studies at Morehouse College, places recent incidents of police violence against African-Americans in their historical and geographical contexts. The outrage over constant tragedy gathers momentum as what might once have been local matters become highly publicized events. Places such as Ferguson, Mo., Sanford, Fla., and Hempstead, Tex., and victims such as Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Kathryn Johnston, have become familiar nationwide through media exposure. Hill critiques the intended and unintended consequences of various policies: the expanding discretionary power, performance requirements, and militarization of the police; mass incarceration, often the consequence of mandatory minimum sentences or indeterminate sentencing leading to the wide use of plea bargaining; the disproportionate imposition of public-nuisance laws, and "broken windows" and stop-and-frisk policies, on African-Americans; and the outgrowth of state-sponsored exploitation of African-Americans for economic gain, evidenced by privatized prisons, the bail bond business, the use of fines in funding local police department budgets, and housing practices that created ghettos of poverty. Hill's work is valuable in rendering individual lives with empathy but without sanctification as he assesses the historical, sociological, and statistical milieu of these casualties in a lucid, highly readable book. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Picking up the baton that James Baldwin left behind, Nobody gives urgent voice to the generation of the descendants of the poor, unacknowledged people Baldwin captured so vividly in his 1985 classic, The Evidence of Things Not Seen.

ESSENCE Magazine

[Hill] challenges us to join a new generation of activists prepared to organize, agitate and act (against the backdrop of state sanctioned violence, economic injustice, social misery, and appeals to fragmentation and fear) on the eminently reasonable proposition that our “nobodies” will not have a fair shot at becoming “somebodies” until we reduce the unconscionably high – and growing – gap between America’s “have-gots” and our “have-nots.

Florida Courier - Dr. Glenn C. Altschuler

Marc Lamont Hill has written the book we desperately needed. No mere chronicle of recent anti-Black violence, Nobody digs deeper, revealing how the killing fields of urban America were tilled by seven decades of Jim Crow and four decades of neoliberalism, turning the very people who brought the prospect of genuine justice, democracy, and citizenship to America into a disposable nation of ‘nobodies.’ But as Hill reminds us, precarity is not death, the market is not God, and an equitable, just future is in ‘nobody’s’ hands.

Robin D. G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA and author of Freedom D

An essential primer on the relationship between anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned violence, Nobody chronicles historical and social developments around race, class, gender and the role of the State in America which have served to develop, maintain, and expand an expendable underclass. In Hill’s book we see how repression breeds resistance, the very same dynamic that has led to an upsurge in the Black Freedom Movement that seeks justice for all of us.

Alicia Garza

Nobody provides a comprehensive look at the effects, where police are shooting unarmed minority citizens, and their drinking water is literally poisoned . . . . It will constantly energize you and never bore you.

The Intercept

Marc Lamont Hill proves once again why he is one of the leading voices on race in America. With its fresh insight and careful on-the-ground reporting, Nobody is a powerful call to action that gives a voice to our most vulnerable communities. As with anything Hill writes, this book is essential reading.

Neera Tanden

With Nobody, Hill marshals the full weight of multiple scholarly traditions to expose complex, ancient, and intersecting injustices of American racism. This is the book that respects Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, and all the other lost black women, men, girls, and boys by taking them seriously. This is the book we needed to understand how we got here and to understand what it means to be here. This is the definitive text. It will remain so for generations.

Melissa Harris-Perry

In our hyper-partisan era, Hill might not be able to persuade many readers who aren’t already on the political left. But “Nobody” is a sincere effort to do just that, and even those who disagree with him should concede that he’s the kind of social commentator — passionate but rarely hyperbolic, well-informed yet respectful of other points of view — whose ideas are worthy of our attention.

The Kansas City Star - Kevin Canfield

Marc Lamont Hill is the most courageous and progressive voice in 'Main Stream Media,’ whose new book, Nobody, is a subtle and persuasive historical and contemporary analysis of our state of emergency in America. He gives new meaning to the now popular idea of "intersectionality" with intellectual gusto and political urgency!

Cornel West

07/01/2016
Hill (The Classroom and the Cell) uses recent high-profile, violent incidents against marginalized persons to highlight societal problems. The victims, or "Nobodies," are considered by society to be disposable, but their oppression can be contextualized as part of a larger story of politics, economics, and power. Hill links the 2014 murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, to the history of housing and segregation in St. Louis, as well as the 2012 killings of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin in relation to Florida's Stand Your Ground law. The criminal justice system is extensively explored, and Hill argues that practices such as plea bargains, settlements, and mandatory minimums are detrimental to crime victims. Also analyzed is the state of policing, along with the U.S. prison system and the Flint, MI, water crisis. Accounts of racial violence victims Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray are used as case studies. This analysis closes on a hopeful note by detailing activist movements which strive to counteract the forces that turn the vulnerable into Nobodies. VERDICT A thought-provoking and important analysis of oppression, recommended for those seeking clarity on current events.—Rebekah Kati, Durham, NC

Library Journal

2016-06-22
An impassioned analysis of headline-making cases of police shootings and other acts of "state violence" against blacks and other minorities.Journalist and BET News host Hill (African-American Studies/Morehouse Coll.; co-author: Schooling Hip-hop: Expanding Hip-hop Based Education Across the Curriculum, 2013, etc.) argues that the deaths of Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray and others are instances of "an increasingly intense war on the vulnerable." The victims—"Nobodies"—are "Black, poor, trans, queer, or otherwise marked as disposable within the public imagination." America's obsession with "free market logic and culture" has devalued the public good and inspired policies that wreak havoc on the vulnerable. For example, the "broken windows" concept of policing, which encourages enforcement of laws against minor crimes, sometimes overcriminalizes harmless rule-breaking. During one such "quality of life" arrest for selling loose cigarettes, Eric Garner, an asthmatic New Yorker, who had been selling "loosies" on the street for years without police interference, was placed in a choke hold and died while repeatedly crying, "I can't breathe." In recounting the stories of such incidents, Hill offers valuable perspective and much to ponder: Bland, a young Texas driver who apparently failed to signal and had been impertinent to police before her arrest, was found hanging dead in her jail cell. Deemed a suicide, she had much to live for. Brown, fleeing from a convenience store robbery, was shot dead in the back in Ferguson, Missouri. He was hardly innocent, notes Hill, but "one should not need to be innocent to avoid execution." By the same token, the behavior of Walter Scott, a South Carolina motorist who resisted arrest and fled after being stopped for a broken taillight, did not warrant death by "excessive force." Hill's incisive thumbnail histories of the decaying communities of Ferguson and Flint, Michigan, where government actions led to a water crisis, lend credence to his sometimes-strident insistence that societal forces are stacked against our weakest members. Timely, controversial, and bound to stir already heated discussion.

Kirkus Reviews