A hard-hitting exploration revealing how state-sanctioned violence displaces and isolates Black communities, and showing how community-based organizations are fighting back.
Under the impossible conditions of continuous displacement, hypersegregation, and dispossession, it can become difficult for members of a community to see each other as potential comrades. Instead of identifying the enemy as white supremacy or capitalism, they can turn against each other.
In Engineered Conflict, Stovall demonstrates how Black people have fought to thrive in Chicago despite overwhelming structural challenges. Using criminalization, school closures, and the destruction of public housing, the state designated some neighborhoods as unviable and then blamed the people living there for the interpersonal violence that followed.
Examining how state-sanctioned violence and abandonment impact low-income communities, Stovall draws on examples from Chicago's recent history to shed light on the politics of disposability-and calls for a powerful movement against the abandonment of Chicago's Black working-class population.
