Engineered Conflict

David Omotoso Stovall is a professor in the departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation and the Politics of Interruption.

• Introduction: Engineering Conflict in the ‘New’ ChicagoChapter 1: Schools as Sites of Displacement and DispossessionChapter 2: Plans That Did Not TransformChapter 3: This Is Not a Gang Problem—It’s a White Supremacy ProblemChapter 4: When It All Comes TogetherChapter 5: Black Fugitive FuturesEpilogue NotesBibliography List of AbbreviationsIndex

"A hard-hitting exploration of how state policy displaces and isolates Black communities and how collective resistance creates spaces for working-class people of color to identify the true cause of conflict as capitalism and white supremacy. Looking at the many ways Black communities have resisted state violence and the work of local organizations to address marginalization, Engineered Conflict calls for a powerful movement against the displacement, disinvestment, and disposability of Chicago’s Black population." —Chicago Review of Books“A book we’ve sorely needed. Drawing together historical and political analysis, experience from his deep embeddedness in Chicago’s neighborhoods, and theoretical acumen, Stovall illuminates many forces of structural violence that our communities intuitively understand as interrelated. Engineered Conflict offers new language for seeing the tangled ties that bind school privatization, organized abandonment, and the carceral state. And with his trademark energy and clarity, Stovall leads us toward an abolitionist vision, guided by tales of the sites where that vision has come to life.”—Eve L. Ewing, author of Original Sins, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, and 1919“You can feel the love on every page of Engineered Conflict, David Omotoso Stovall’s remarkable new book. His love for humanity, and specifically for Black people, is palpable—he embraces the creativity and durability, the courage and stamina, the human spirit and soul. His love for Chicago—his home, his community, his safe-space, and his battlefield—is also recognizable. But this is no shallow hookup nor fairy-tale romance; this is an intimacy based on lived experience, driven by compassion and attachment, and edged with sadness and outrage. Stovall keeps a keen eye on the many ingenious ways Black people have survived and thrived under unspeakable assault as he explores the systems designed and manufactured by the powerful to make selective humanization seem natural, mass incarceration necessary, injustice expected, and white supremacy inevitable. Stovall brings his whole self to this work, leaving nothing on the shelf; here is a community organizer, an activist, an eminent scholar, an engaged (and enraged) intellectual. This is an urgent book, an illuminating and necessary beacon for these world-shaking times, and David Stovall is the perfect messenger.”—Bill Ayers, author of Demand the Impossible“Both battleground and blueprint, David Stovall maps the calculated violence of the intersections of school closings, public housing demolitions, and police terror to reveal not isolated crises, but a coordinated assault on Black life. With an unmatched attention to rigorous detail coupled with aching love, Stovall mourns what’s been stolen while honoring the ongoing tradition of fierce resistance, Black fugitivity. Timely, urgent, and unflinching, the book pulses with truth and testimony: of loss, of lineage, of uprising.”—Erica R. Meiners, coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now. and coeditor of How to End Family Policing“Engineered Conflict is essential reading for anyone working to understand the impact of urban neoliberalism on Black communities and the strategies for resisting it.”—Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing“In Engineered Conflict, Stovall reveals that the disproportionate violence in Chicago’s Black communities is not random or pathological—it is designed through policy. From the CHA’s Plan for Transformation to CPS’s Renaissance 2010, he exposes how urban planning, disinvestment, and the politics of disposability have systematically destabilized Black neighborhoods. This is the definitive scholarly work on the structural roots of Chicago’s violence in the early twenty-first century.” —Lance Williams, PhD, Professor and author of King David and Boss Daley: The Black Disciples, Mayor Daley and Chicago on the Edge