On the night of July 18, 1964, three weeks after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, New York City police lieutenant Thomas Gilligan shot and killed James Powell, a fifteen-year-old black student, outside his high school in upper Manhattan. An altercation had ensued when Patrick Lynch, the white janitor of a nearby building, sprayed black high school students with a garden hose as they left the school. Lynch shouted racial epithets at the boys, and Powell and two other high school students chased him back to his building. Officer Gilligan arrived on the scene, pivoted, and shot Powell three...

The Great Migration, which began in 1916, brought half a million blacks north. The boll weevil had ruined the southern cotton harvest, wiped out white landowners, dried up credit, and forced black sharecroppers and tenant farmers into debt. The simultaneous decline of King Cotton and the advent of World War I freed blacks from coerced farm labor in the South. Puerto Ricans arrived around the same time. In 1917 the Jones Act had made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens eligible for both the draft and stateside migration to escape rural poverty. New York labor scouts (anxious to fill war-time shortages) scoured...

Until 2005 most French scholars insisted that racism was a distinctly American phenomenon. French workers, Michelle Lamont argued, “define the poor and black as ‘part of us,’ using the language of class solidarity.”¹ Although they reject North Africans, it is because they believe that Muslims “violate the principles of republicanism and are culturally incompatible with the French.”² Patrick Weil argued that with the notable exception of Vichy, France had a long republican tradition of recognizing only individuals and their relationships to the state, although admittedly this tradition did not extend to France’s colonial empire abroad.³ Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant...

Rudolph Giuliani opened his 1993 mayoral campaign (having lost the previous race, in 1989, to now-mayor David Dinkins) by addressing a mob of some ten thousand “raucous beer-drinking, overwhelmingly white police officers who had just finished a march on City Hall to protest a Dinkins-backed proposal for civilian oversight over police-misconduct complaints.”¹ Many officers spewed racial epithets and carried signs condemning Dinkins in grossly racial terms, including one that read, “Dump the washroom attendant.” Another depicted a cartoon version of Dinkins with large lips and an Afro. To cheers of “Rudy, Rudy Rudy,” Giuliani waved his arms violently and launched...

On October 27, 2005, in Clichy-sous-Bois, Siyakha Traoré, a twenty-threeyear-old man of Mauritanian descent, was on his way to the grocer to break his Ramadan fast when he saw Muhittin Altun, a friend of his younger brother, running wildly and howling, “Bouna, Zyad, Bouna, Zyad.” Smoke radiated from his body and his arms, and his legs and chest were severely burned. “What about Bouna and Zyad?” Siyakha asked (2006). Muhittin could only cry, “Bouna, Zyad,” and point toward an electric substation (transformateur éléctrique) while weeping hysterically. Siyakha phoned the fire department and dashed to the site with Muhittin. “Bouna, Zyad!”...

In 2002 Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor as the Republican Party candidate, although he later declared himself an independent. Bloomberg made Ray Kelly his police commissioner (the same position Kelly had occupied under David Dinkins). TheNew York Timeschristened Bloomberg “the Freedom Mayor,”¹ and Ray Kelly was chosen as the next mayor by 25 percent of those surveyed in a 2011 Quinnipiac poll, the highest percentage of any candidate.² But the NYPD continued to increase its reliance on racial profiling and stop-and-frisks. In 2009 a Rand study commissioned by the mayor concluded that blacks and Latinos were nine times...