The Rage of Innocence by Kristin Henning

She examines the criminalization of Black adolescent play and sexuality, and of Black fashion, hair, and music. She makes clear that unlike White youth, who are afforded the freedom to test boundaries, experiment with sex and drugs, and figure out who they are and who they want to be, Black youth are seen as a threat to White America and are denied healthy adolescent development.

Henning explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police, and she details the long-term consequences of racism that they experience at the hands of the police and their vigilante surrogates. 'Storytelling that can make people understand the racial inequities of the legal system, and.restore the humanity this system has cruelly stripped from its victims.” - New York Times Book Reviewĭrawing upon twenty-five years of experience representing Black youth in Washington, D.C.’s juvenile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America’s irrational, manufactured fears of these young people and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children. The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth has been applauded by judges, lawmakers, public intellectuals, but in order for it to have full effect, it also needs to reach everyday people outside of the legal profession.A brilliant analysis of the foundations of racist policing in America: the day-to-day brutalities, largely hidden from public view, endured by Black youth growing up under constant police surveillance and the persistent threat of physical and psychological abuse She is also the Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law, where she and her law students represent youth accused of delinquency in Washington, DC. Kristin Henning spent her life trying to ensure that children whose families did not have the means to defend them against a criminal justice system steeped in bias had someone to speak up for them. As the Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown, she advocates for reform in the juvenile and criminal legal systems to fight the criminalization of Black adolescence. Kristin Henning is a nationally recognized legal scholar and activist in juvenile justice reform. Episode 65 -Kristin Henning, The Rage of Innocence

The Rage of Innocence by Kristin Henning