A hard-hitting exploration of how state policy displaces and isolates Black communities and how collective resistance creates spaces for working-class people of color to identify the true cause of conflict as capitalism and white supremacy
Marginalized communities often become understandably preoccupied with a city’s structured attempt to deem them disposable, making it difficult to see people experiencing the same suffering as potential comrades in struggle. Enemies are manufactured as the result of continued displacement, hyper-segregation, and dispossession. Under these impossible circumstances people are often quicker to punch each other before they identify the enemy as white supremacy and capitalism, creating a society where conflict is engineered.
Examining the long fight of Black people in Chicago to claim their humanity and thrive in a city while facing school closings, the destruction of public housing and oppressive law enforcement, Stovall argues that marginalized communities face unique structural challenges while being blamed for interpersonal conflict and labeled “violent” and deemed disposable. With a novel approach to the question of how state-sanctioned violence and abandonment impacts low-income communities, Engineered Conflict uses examples from Chicago’s recent history to shed light on the politics of disposability through housing instability, criminalization, and school closures. Looking at all three phenomena together allows readers to see how state policies designate some neighborhoods as unviable, where disinvestment furthers a rationale to contain members of these communities.
Looking at the many ways Black communities have resisted state violence and the work of local organizations to address marginalization, Engineered Conflict calls for a powerful movement against the displacement, disinvestment, and disposability of Chicago’s Black population.
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"Both battleground and blueprint, David Stovall maps the calculated violence of the intersections of school closings, public housing demolitions, and police terror to reveal not isolated crises, but a coordinated assault on Black life. With an unmatched attention to rigorous detail coupled with aching love, Stovall mourns what’s been stolen while honoring the ongoing tradition of fierce resistance, Black fugitivity. Timely, urgent, and unflinching, the book pulses with truth and testimony: of loss, of lineage, of uprising."
—Erica R. Meiners, coauthor of Abolition. Feminism. Now. and coeditor of How to End Family Policing
"You can feel the love on every page of Engineered Conflict, David Omotoso Stovall’s remarkable new book. His love for humanity, and specifically for Black people, is palpable—he embraces the creativity and durability, the courage and stamina, the human spirit and soul. His love for Chicago—his home, his community, his safe-space, and his battlefield—is also recognizable. But this is no shallow hookup nor fairy-tale romance; this is an intimacy based on lived experience, driven by compassion and attachment, and edged with sadness and outrage. Stovall keeps a keen eye on the many ingenious ways Black people have survived and thrived under unspeakable assault as he explores the systems designed and manufactured by the powerful to make selective humanization seem natural, mass incarceration necessary, injustice expected, and white supremacy inevitable. Stovall brings his whole self to this work, leaving nothing on the shelf; here is a community organizer, an activist, an eminent scholar, an engaged (and enraged) intellectual. This is an urgent book, an illuminating and necessary beacon for these world-shaking times, and David Stovall is the perfect messenger." —Bill Ayers, author of Demand the Impossible
"Engineered Conflict is essential reading for anyone working to understand the impact of urban neoliberalism on Black communities and the strategies for resisting it." —Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing
Other books of interest
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Black Lives Matter at School
by Jesse Hagopian and Denisha Jones -
High Rise Stories
Edited by Audrey Petty -
Lifting As They Climbed
by Mariame Kaba and Essence McDowell -
To Washington Park, With Love
by Rose Blouin -
I Didn't Come Here to Lie