The illegal killing of George Floyd led to Black Lives Matter protests around the world and energised the call for discrimination to be addressed in society. In this chapter we explore evidence of mental health inequalities in those from BAME communities and acknowledge that some groups in society, who may or may not identify as BAME, such as asylum seekers travellers and the LGBTQ+ community, also face discrimination. We mention the theory of intersectionality, racial gaslighting and the detrimental impact of austerity on health outcomes. Readers are reminded of the historical reports into the deaths of Michael Martin, Joseph Watts and David ‘Rocky’ Bennett and of the 2002 Sainsburys Centre review which identified a ‘circle of fear’. The finding of the independent review of the MHA and the recently published rapid review of ethnic health disparities by the NHS Race and Health Observatory are highlighted. NHS England and NHS Improvement’s Advancing Mental Health Equalities Strategy, the RCPsych equality action plan, and The Patient and Carers Race Equalities Framework (PCREF) are explained. Stereotyping of black males and the disproportionate use of force (including tasers), is discussed and the authors call for the implementation of mandatory training covering the nature of discrimination.

Social factors affecting pregnancy include poverty, deprivation, ethnicity and refugee status. Drug and alcohol misuse, poor nutrition and obesity also have harmful effects. Reports in the 1930s included information on social circumstances of the women who died but early CEMD Reports contained virtually none. In 1977 the Labour government commissioned an enquiry by Sir Douglas Black into social determinants of health but in 1980 the Black Report was all but suppressed by the new Conservative government. In the 1990s further reports appeared at a time when the future of the CEMD was in doubt because of its focus on clinical care. In 1994-6 the scope of the Enquiries broadened. The Reports stopped blaming women and focussed on barriers to accessing care. Shockingly the Enquiries revealed that mortality rates were much higher in deprived areas and among ethnic minorities, particularly Black women. The data stimulated a raft of well-meaning NHS initiatives but the lofty policy declarations remained disconnected from reality. In 2016-18 three quarters of women who died had pre-existing medical or mental health conditions and 90% were in some measure socially vulnerable.

Alighting briefly once again on Weill’s Symphony No. 2 from the book’s opening, and then turning to consider Florence Price’s Symphony in E minor as a closing case study, Chapter 6 pivots between the early 1930s and the present day to consider the legacies and twentieth-century historiography of the symphonies in the book – their absences and recoveries – and the remarkable persistence of the symphonic genre in the mechanisms of how cultural and political agency is conferred to the present day. The poor reception of Weill’s New York premiere in 1934 comes under examination in light of the discussion in the intervening chapters, raising the question of why, for that time and place, Weill was the wrong kind of symphonist. Then, the chapter addresses the contemporary revival of Price’s symphony in the early 2020s, and it suggests the capacity of symphonies from the tumultuous years around 1933 to invigorate a differently dynamic symphonic landscape and a differently dynamic landscape of selfhood.

This chapter explores the crises of the Roman and American republics. Understanding these crises requires that we view politics as an arena of identity contestation rather than simply interest articulation. What changes in both Rome and the United States is that participants came to see each other as Strangers, no longer sharing the same background assumptions, the same sense of the past, nor the same anticipation of the future. Borne of distrust, norms of getting things down turned into norms of obstruction. This had implications for how politics was experienced. The changes in these norms not only disabled these institutions, making them unable to actualize a future, but also made possible alterations in the political framework that might have been inconceivable before. In particular, one sees the elevation of individuals who offered solutions by promising to bypass those ineffective and unresponsive institutions. That is, as institutions and processes become distant abstractions that no longer answer to fundamental questions of the future of the community, the individual becomes the tangible personification of politics, answering these questions in a singular voice.

To demonstrate the principles of democratic policing in action, this chapter looks at seven cases of policing that incorporates them: (1) Not arresting Black Lives Matter protesters who block traffic during rush hour; (2) Reducing the car stops a police department makes as a way to decrease the negative consequences of this type of enforcement for a community; (3) Sanctuary city policies that explicitly limit police department cooperation with federal immigration enforcement officials; (4) A decision not to voucher condoms as evidence when making prostitution arrests; (5) Not arresting suspects for prostitution when there is cause to believe the suspects are being trafficked into doing so; (6) Not arresting individuals in possession of personal-use quantities of unprescribed addiction treatment medication; (7) Advocating for the redesign of smartphones to deter theft.

The court trials of the Scottsboro Nine, young African Americans falsely accused of raping two young white women, galvanized a generation and helped precipitate Hughes’s leftward shift. In 1931, he published Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse, collecting an eponymous play and the poems “The Town of Scottsboro,” “Justice,” “Scottsboro,” and “Christ in Alabama” alongside images by Prentiss Taylor. Its themes – the lethal policing of a racially and economically vulnerable group – no less than the conflicts among different factions surrounding the trial, seem tailor-made to contemporary concerns. This chapter reads Hughes and Taylor together to shift the focus from the prospect of death to imprisonment itself as unjust. Then it asks what it means that its poems circulate as memes, absent their original context, to protest the seemingly endless instances of judicial and extrajudicial, state-sanctioned murder. If the question of a grievable death has taken on renewed urgency since 2014, Hughes’s Scottsboro writing urges readers to reconsider what we collectively recognize as death.

This chapter examines the link between rights and responsibilities, duties and obligations. If people are assumed to have rights, these can be seen as implying certain corresponding obligations, on the part of both the state and individuals, to ensure that those rights are protected and realised. These need to be examined in some detail, as they have significant implications for a social work practice that assumes a human rights perspective. We will first examine the idea of the responsibilities of the state, or of some other civic body, which result from the acknowledgment and affirmation of human rights. In keeping with some of the ideas in this chapter about advocacy and expectations of social workers to work for social change, the case study will examine a 2020 global campaign that captured the attention of activists, the media and others concerned about racial inequality in the criminal justice system: the Black Lives Matter movement. Its implications will be described and discussed in the case study at the end of the chapter.

The Prologue discusses the fall of the statue of General Louis Faidherbe in Saint-Louis, Senegal. The statue was placed in the main square of Saint-Louis in 1886 but was toppled in 2017. Although the perpetrators of this act of iconoclasm were unknown, the toppling of the statue was acclaimed by some of the town’s population. The mayor of Saint-Louis nonetheless restored the statue to its former position, defending the colonial heritage of a city that owes its existence to the French empire. However, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the statue of Faidherbe once again became the subject of heated debates in the national media. Considered by some as the founder of modern Senegal, others denounce Faidherbe as a perpetrator of colonial violence. The Prologue examines how the legacy of this key figure in the history of colonialism is assessed today. Considering the question of responsibility as key to this debate, the Prologue questions the usefulness of the categories of perpetrators and victims in the history of colonialism. Following Michael Rothberg, it studies the decolonization of heritage using his concept of implicated subjects.

The fact that legislators are more likely to represent protests, particularly protests done by disadvantaged groups, demonstrates the agency of low-resource groups. Is requiring such demanding and inegalitarian participation sustainable? Does the fact legislators’ unequal representation favors disadvantaged groups, perhaps only, after protest mean that the United States is a functioning democratic republic? Does legislators’ support of costlier protest improve democratic representation, or does it only provide symbolic representation?

The concluding chapter engages events like the Boston Massacre and Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri, to answer these questions. The chapter also discusses Representative William Clay Jr.’s attempts to represent the BLM protesters in his district and activist Cory Bush’s eventually successful challenge for Clay’s seat. Finally, it evaluates collective action’s influence on policing legislation.

These examples illuminate protesters’ resource disparities and social movements’ influence. They highlight the time horizon of protest influence on legislative behavior, and they help assess legislators’ motivations to respond to protest demands.

Postmodernism came to the fore towards the end of the twentieth century. A key dynamic too was globalization. As the world became smaller, its global scope became more apparent and with it the idea of indigeneity – of being indigenous to some part of it. Following the rise of globalization, in a way, its antithesis became apparent, and this sparked a renewed interest in nationalism.

Chapter 9 focuses on various theorists who make up the Anti-Free Speech Movement, starting with philosopher Herbert Marcuse. They suggest that the First Amendment has been interpreted too broadly to allow protection for speech they believe is intolerable, and that this should be reversed. The chapter examines those who have espoused critical race theory to develop arguments for suppressing hate speech, and feminists who advocate suppressing sexually oriented speech. The connection between these various theorists is that they argue that the First Amendment has gone too far, yet they vigorously deny that they support censorship. In doing so, they adopt the rhetoric and tactics designed by Anthony Comstock, Fredric Wertham, and Newton Minow before them. The chapter concludes that the purpose of the First Amendment is to block government from having the type of power these theorists advocate, and suggests that one way to preserve free speech is to use this list of characteristics as a means of identifying censors.

The Epilogue examines the state of free speech during the COVID-19 pandemic at a time when American politics is polarized and the state of public discourse is in shambles. Both sides claim victimhood and argue that the other side should be suppressed, illustrating the adage “free speech for me but not for thee.” Both sides even justify violence in support of their respective causes. But events of the past year reveal the danger of abandoning neutral principles when it comes to protecting speech. Lowering the legal barrier for what constitutes incitement may allow the prosecution of Donald Trump, but it would also put Black Lives Matter activists at risk. Safety can best be found in avoiding the mindset of the censor.

The second section foregrounds methodological approaches to twenty-first century fiction, starting with Candice Jenkins’s examination of Afro-Futurism and Afro-Pessimism as conceptual frameworks within which contemporary African American fiction has represented the past and present during “the Black Lives Matter era.” Discerning an inherently speculative quality to the two separate bodies of thought, Jenkins argues they share a “a certain radicalism–one inclined towards both building and destroying worlds.” This speculative radicality infuses the work of a remarkably broad range of writers, including N. K. Jemisin, Jesmyn Ward, Colson Whitehead, with the generatively imagined restructured societies derived not from utopianism, but the negative affects of intractable historical racism.

This chapter tracks what happened when America’s virus crisis became heavily politicized, even weaponized. Moreover, the pandemic was politicized not only at home but abroad, specifically regarding Sino-American relations, which deteriorated significantly from what they had been for four decades previous. At home were two obvious casualties. The first was the truth. The president’s proclivity outrageously to lie, now also about Covid-19, and his enablers’ proclivity no matter what to protect him, became increasingly costly. Now the cost was not only public trust but people’s lives. The second casualty to be chronicled was the comity of the American body politic. The growing divisiveness was symbolized by the wearing, or the not wearing, of masks which came to be emblematic of what here is called the politics of the pandemic.

Reconsidering Douglass’s legacy at the beginning of the twenty-first century reveals his contested iconicity. In the 1960s, Angela Davis read Douglass as a model for Black liberation, and fifty years later, Christopher Lebron posited him as a historical antecedent for the contemporary activism of Black Lives Matter. These activists themselves have shown how they work with and through historical ancestors, and the revival of Douglass’s North Star as a digital paper and hub encapsulates the trajectories of Black scholar-activism in which he has been placed. However, Douglass’s complex life and his multifaceted writings have made him the target of very different intellectual and political co-optations. Most notably and surprisingly, perhaps, he has become a favorite of conservatives and the political right. In such interpretations, Douglass emerges as a model Republican (Smith) and a classic libertarian self-made man (Sandefur). Laying claim to Douglass in the age of social media has blurred the lines between activism, polics, and scholarship.

The prologue spotlights twenty-first-century uses of both the founding era and the biblical past to introduce the book’s central contention that biblical and constitutional debates over slavery cultivated a sense of historical distance in antebellum America. The prologue points to examples of how contemporary Americans both ignore and highlight historical distance in making political use of the founding era and the biblical past. It suggests that in both the antebellum era and in the twenty-first century, politics has shaped American approaches to these pasts and their corrsponding texts – the Bible and the Constitution. At the same time, the prologue maintains that the idea of the past as distant, which has become a common assumption in our period, only began to emerge in the antebellum era. To highlight the continuities and differences between antebellum and twenty-first century thought, the prologue references phrases such as “black lives matter” and “make America great again,” even as it points towards its central focus on the antebellum developments that shed light on the meanings of such phrases.