The Uvalde Shooting and the History of U.S. Gun Violence with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a writer, historian and activist, possibly best known for her 2014 classic book, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.” She argues that the context behind the Second Amendment is that the newly-independent United States needed “well-regulated militias” of white men to “kill Indians and take their land,” or to form slave patrols that would hunt down Black people fleeing their captivity. It was out of these slave patrols that the first police departments were formed. Hip hop artist Lowkey conducts this interview.

Poster for film, "The Prison Within"

Film Review: Radical Alternatives Left Out of ‘The Prison Within’

Although “The Prison Within” makes a few fleeting mentions of expanding treatment and mitigation programs in the United States to keep traumatized people from going to prison in the first place, restorative justice is presented inside the narrow construct of reforming prisons to make them “better.” That all makes sense when the discussion is not intended to be about replacing prisons with humane and truly restorative systems.