First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles

California is a state of immense contradictions. Home to colossal wealth and long portrayed as a bastion of opportunity, it also has one of the largest prison populations in the United States and consistently ranks on the bottom of education indexes. Taking a unique, multifaceted insider s perspective, "First Strike" delves into the root causes of its ever-expansive prison system and disastrous educational policy.Recentering analysis of Black masculinity beyond public rhetoric, "First Strike" critiques the trope of the school-to-prison pipeline and instead explores the realm of public school as a form of enclosure that has influenced the schooling (and denial of schooling) and imprisonment of Black people in California.

Table of Contents:
Contents Introduction: The Problematic History between Schools and Prisons 1. The Problem of Black Genius: Black Cultural Enclosures 2. In the Belly of the Beast: Ideological Expansion 3. Land of Smoke and Mirrors: The Meaning of Punishment and Control 4. Troubled Man: Limitations of the Masculinity Solution 5. By All Means Possible: The Historical Struggle over Black Education Conclusion: Reading the Past and Listening to the Present Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Damien M. Sojoyner is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.

Review :
"Damien M. Sojoyner fills a significant gap in literature by problematizing the school-to-prison pipeline, offering a more nuanced analytical frame than the one represented in most contemporary popular discourse. First Strike helps us understand what is happening to young people in under-resourced schools and the ways that their experience reflects an eroding commitment to education in favor of punishment."-Beth E. Richie, University of Illinois at Chicago "Sojoyner provides a masterful narrative of Black Los Angeles against the backdrop of mass incarceration and the criminalization of Black children. Scholars and educators should heed Sojoyner’s call to challenge the ‘school-to-prison’ discourse to the more historically grounded ‘enclosures.’"-Maisha T. Winn, Chancellor’s Leadership Professor, University of California, Davis "Sojoyner’s sweeping analysis of enclosures presents a compelling vision of what ethnography can accomplish in tandem with historical analysis."-PoLAR   "First Strike pushes anthropological analysis beyond the ethnographic by drawing upon history, policy, and social geography to build a theory of power that accounts for the force of the state as a reactionary response to the radical potential of Black liberation."-Anthropological Quarterly "First Strike contributes crucially to theories of black liberation vis-À-vis education, namely, literatures working to disrupt antiblack narratives of cultural failure within educational policy circles." -American Ethnologist