For those struggling to understand and explain ongoing events in Ferguson and elsewhere, here are some works for thinking with. If you’d like to suggest others, please get in touch.

Angela Davis, interviewed in The Guardian – “There is an unbroken line of police violence in the US that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery…”.

Ian Shaw’s “A History of Militarized U.S. Policing” (2014) is a critical look at the development of the “social war” in which “entire segments of society have been abandoned, oppressed, and enrolled”.

Rinaldo Walcott’s “After Ferguson: Defend the Dead” (2014) thinks through the (im)possibility of black life in North America’s “long and unbroken state of emergency”.

Sylvia Wynter’s “No Humans Involved” (1992) is an “open letter to my colleagues” penned in the wake of the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles, considering how some in the U.S. come to be “classified and thereby treated differently…“.