Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, & the War on Black Life

Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life with Robin DG Kelley

My talk summarizes my forthcoming book, which reveals the hidden relationship between policing and gendered racial capitalism, and collective organized resistance. Taking as my starting point Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s oft-quoted definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” I reconstruct the lives and life-worlds of selected victims of state violence in order to uncover the policies and processes that rendered them vulnerable to premature death in the first place. These outcomes are the source of chaos and disorder, and the role of the police is ostensibly to retore and maintain order. But the only order police maintain is the social order of class rule—of gendered racial capitalism. The police don’t just take lives; they make life and living less viable for the communities they occupy. Making a Killing demonstrates how police, in tandem with other state and corporate entities, are engines of capital accumulation, government revenue, gentrification, the municipal bond market, the tech and private security industry—in a phrase, the profits of death.


Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Freedom Scholar Award. His books include the award-winning, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class; Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press 1997); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times.

His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, New York Times, American Historical Review, American Quarterly, African Studies Review, Social Text, Metropolis, Journal of American History, New Labor Forum, and The Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor.