IN THE SHADOW OF FREEDOM

Harris takes a wide-ranging look at the state of racial injustice in the United States in this nonfiction debut.

The author, a novelist and a co-founder of Black Catholic Messenger, relates the 2023 story of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old Black man with an extensive history of arrests and mental illness who was panhandling New York City subway passengers for money when a white man named Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold and killed him. “I could have been Jordan Neely,” Harris writes, reflecting that she, too, had experienced periods of homelessness and had suffered a mental breakdown. This personal resonance runs through her book, which looks at the systemic oppression of Black people throughout United States history, detailing the collapse of Reconstruction, the rise of the Jim Crow South, and the prevalence of what’s referred to here as “neoslavery” in the present day. The author examines racial disparities in the death penalty, incarceration rates (per a 2013 ACLU report, 65.4% of U.S. prisoners serving life sentences without parole for nonviolent offenses are Black, and the likelihood of lifetime incarceration for Black men is 4 times higher than for white men in the same age bracket), racial profiling, overpolicing, and “extrajudicial” police murders. She notes that millions of Black students live in poor neighborhoods where schools resemble prisons and are “more often armed with cops than counselors, psychologists, or nurses.” The text is extensively sourced and annotated, with many studies being both cited and quoted at length, but it’s Harris’ personal and passionate voice that creates the book’s strongest impression. Racial issues are scathingly addressed, but almost equally sharp is the author’s analysis of the U.S. prison system, which incarcerates 2 million people (larger in absolute numbers and by population percentage than any other country in history); she notes that 75% of people held in jails are there simply because they can’t pay bail. The cumulative effect of the work is powerfully sobering.

An extensively researched and vividly personal overview of the inequities faced by Black people in America.