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Podcast: New Books in Politics and Polemics
Episode: Orisanmi Burton, "Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt" (U California Press, 2023)
Description: Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (University of California Press, 2023) boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond pr...