First Strike

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

• ContentsIntroduction: The Problematic History between Schools and Prisons1. The Problem of Black Genius: Black Cultural Enclosures2. In the Belly of the Beast: Ideological Expansion3. Land of Smoke and Mirrors: The Meaning of Punishment and Control4. Troubled Man: Limitations of the Masculinity Solution5. By All Means Possible: The Historical Struggle over Black EducationConclusion: Reading the Past and Listening to the PresentAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

"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