"A MUST-READ FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN UNDERSTANDING AND DISMANTLING MASS INCARCERATION." -Chesa Boudin, District Attorney of San Francisco America's criminal justice system is among the deadliest and most racist in the world and it disproportionately targets Black Americans, who are also disproportionately poor, hungry, houseless, jobless, sick, and poorly educated. By every metric of misery, this nation does not act like Black Lives Matter. In order to break out of the trap of racialized mass incarceration and relentless racial oppression, we, as a society, need to rethink our basic assumptions about blame and punishment, words and symbols, social perceptions and judgments, morality, politics, and the power of the performing arts. N*gga Theory interrogates conventional assumptions and frames a transformational new way of thinking about law, language, moral judgments, politics, and transgressive art-especially profane genres like gangsta rap-and exposes where racial bias lives in the administration of justice and everyday life. Professor Jody Armour (Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism) calls for bold action: electing progressive prosecutors, defunding or dismantling the police, abolition of the prison industrial complex. But only after eradicating the anti-black bias buried in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans and baked into our legal system will we be able to say that Black Lives Matter in America.

"Note on the title: This book is titled N*gga Theory because I do not want to encourage non-black people to say the word "nigga" out loud, and because I recognize that some black folk also feel uncomfortable publicly uttering the troublesome epithet. I address these concerns within. Nevertheless, this books is really titled Nigga Theory, which is what I've called my brand of Critical Race Theory for years in law review articles, lectures, documentaries, and on social media. - Jody Armour"--Preceding title page.