Making a Killing

As our foremost popular historian, Robin D. G. Kelley uses every one of his prodigious intellectual tools to perform a new kind of autopsy, one that spans oceans, generations and centuries, while boldly transgressing all disciplinary boundaries. In his skillful and loving hands, every snuffed-out Black life opens up vivid and suppressed worlds. The results are dazzling, definitive, and devastating. A sorrowful triumph – Naomi Klein
Robin Kelley is the preeminent historian of black popular culture writing today – Cornel West
Through this masterful book of black radical history and philosophy, I can look past the dreariness of our unfree world with the binoculars of the imaginary – Ibram X Kendi
Making a Killing is the deepest account we have of how policing, racial capitalism, and the war on Black life became a single integrated system. Robin Kelley gives Black women, disabled people, and the unhoused the analytical center they have long deserved, and grounds his abolitionist vision in places where it is already being built — Jackson, Lincoln Detox, Sweet Water Foundation, and the freedom schools of Ferguson. It’s a work of mourning as much as analysis, and an indispensable one – Michelle Alexander
Name after name, story after devastating story, body after dispossessed body, and one inspiring Black rebellion after another, from Cincinnati to Chicago to St. Louis across time. Your heart will race your fingers as they turn the pages of Robin D.G. Kelley’s capacious, unreserved telling of Black American grief and resistance to the relentless war of US government on Black life. Making a Killing is asking us if we still understand the love in revolution. Making a Killing fortifies our collective memory, our souls and bones, until the life we make stops killing other life – Fady Joudah
Unsparing in its analysis, unwavering in its truth-telling, Making a Killing is the book that only Robin D. G. Kelley could have written. This brilliant chronicle simultaneously renders the moral urgency of the current moment and illuminates the tortured history that led us here in the first place – Jelani Cobb
Robin D.G. Kelley is a deeply beloved chronicler, guide, and inspiration for generations of change makers, rooting readers in the critical role of racial capitalism in constructing, perpetuating, and exonerating structures of state violence, and grounding organizers in histories, cultures, and possibilities of resistance. Kelley’s characteristically powerful storytelling, expansive historical context, rigorous analysis, and incisive insights make this book an essential read for anyone chasing freedom dreams in a time of rising fascism. An instant addition to the canon of social movement histories necessary to build liberatory futures – Andrea J. Ritchie
Making a Killing is a sweeping history of Black life, premature death, and resistance in the United States. Robin D. G. Kelley traces the forces—from poverty, segregation, and gentrification to environmental racism and mass incarceration—that make Black lives vulnerable. Yet this is also a history of resistance, where grief becomes action and memory becomes struggle. Powerful and unsparing, yet grounded in the possibility of collective liberation, Making a Killing asks us to confront the “blood at the root” of American society—and imagine what it would take to build a world where Black life can truly flourish. Read this unflinching, urgent, and deeply human book – Mariame Kaba
Making a Killing is a monumental, uncompromising autopsy of the war on Black life that exposes how deeply state violence is rooted in American racial capitalism. With extraordinary historical depth and moral clarity, Robin D. G. Kelley tells the stories of those cut down by police, dispossession, and organized abandonment, while recovering at every turn the generations who rebelled and built radical abolitionist practices of safety, care, and freedom. At a moment of intensifying militarized policing, authoritarianism, and attacks on the most vulnerable, this brilliant and urgent book gives us the histories of struggle we need to imagine — and build — a more liveable world – Dorothy Roberts
The most exemplary works of history provide us the tools to understand the contemporary world we inhabit, all the while providing roadmaps to explain how we arrived. Making a Killing, is an extraordinary work of history and insight, exposing the relationship between police violence, social disorder and quotidian unfairness that defines Black working class life in the United States. It is a captivating book that places the lives of ordinary Black people at its center, both as victims and combatants in the long history of American police’s war on Black life. Exhaustively researched and exquisitely written, this is the absolute best book written on the meaning of police violence in American life – Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Robin D. G. Kelley is the author of the definitive biography Thelonious Monk, which received the PEN Open Book Award. The recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he resides.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.