Voting Like Your Life Depends On It

With Professor Elizabeth Hinton

In our last interview before the election, I spoke with Professor Elizabeth Hinton, whose work has been instrumental in shaping my understanding of inequality and urban violence. Professor Hinton highlights how leaders of both political parties have long known “what’s required to meaningfully address the problems of poverty and racism,” but time after time have opted for more politically palatable short-term solutions. The result? Continued over-policing and stratification.

In Professor Hinton’s mind, Kamala Harris doesn’t offer the kind of structural transformation we need, but in a choice between her and Donald Trump—well, let’s just say Professor Hinton advises voting “like your life depends on it.”

Elizabeth Hinton is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale. Professor Hinton’s writing has appeared in Science, Nature, The American Historical Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Boston Review, The Nation, and more. She’s the author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, and America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s.

A condensed, edited transcript of our conversation is below. You can also listen to the interview on the Skipped History podcast:

Playing my airhorns

Ben: Your work documents how, when it comes to crime, policymakers tend to treat symptoms of problems, not the root causes. Can you elaborate on that a little bit, please?

EH: Sure. It’s not as if policymakers don’t know what’s required to meaningfully address the problems of poverty and racism. They’ve long known that it requires massive investment at the scale we invest in wars, policing, and incarceration. I go back to the Kerner Commission all the time—

Ben: —a presidential commission established by LBJ in 1967 to investigate the causes of violence in cities during the ‘60s.

EH: Yes. Not only did the Kerner Commission recognize that Black poverty and American inequality are the product of white racism, but they also said we were going to continue to have political violence—“rioting,” as they said—unless we mobilize the public and private sectors to create jobs for people; unless we overhaul and transform and pump resources into low-income urban public schools; until we provide decent housing for people.

In the Nixon administration, they said, well, we know that we really need a job program and we have to build better housing, but those are long-term things, and we don't have the political will to do that. So in the short term, police, police, police, and prisons. They projected prison populations based on anticipated growth in Black youth populations and unemployment rates. Instead of creating jobs, they built prisons. 

Why? Because of the white supremacist logic and racial hierarchies that have defined the United States historically.

Ben: When you synthesize U.S. history like that, I want to play a DJ airhorn sound effect. 

And just to go back to LBJ for a moment, you write, “Obsessed with ‘riots,’” LBJ and other liberals “embraced the expansion of American law enforcement... as the best strategies to handle ‘race relations.’ A short-term solution became the long-term reality.”

EH: I think that’s so important. Since the mid-1960s, policymakers have thrown hundreds of billions of dollars into policing without solving the issues they’re supposedly meant to be addressing. We still have extremely high rates of gun violence—in the same communities that are over-policed and under-protected.

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Learn more from Professor Hinton about investment in the War on Crime instead of the War on Poverty below:

The "cycle of over-policing and rebellion" with Professor Elizabeth Hinton

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So we’ve tried policing, incarceration, and locking people up. Now, more than a half-century later, we need a new set of investments. That’s what “defund the police” was really about.

Ben: I appreciate how you’re diplomatically presenting the case as we tried one thing, it's time to try another, but that’s a little like saying we've tried ripping out people's appendixes with our hands. Maybe let's use the surgical method now— 

EH: —when you knew that the surgical method was the better way to go from the beginning, but you went with your hands anyway.

But I can't change what’s happened. Let's at least try going back to what we originally knew worked.

Ben: I’ve thought about your work a lot since Eric Adams was elected mayor of New York. What do you think about the scandals in his administration and his policifying of New York government?

EH: So, one, it’s really disappointing to see the continued investment into heavy-handed, militarized policing and omnipresent surveillance as a way to “control crime”; the return of stop and frisk and essentially the harassment of low-income people across the five boroughs.

Policymakers often promote “diversity” in police departments by hiring Black cops or appointing Black police chiefs, but again, that doesn’t address the root issue. Policing in low-income communities is not about public safety as it is in wealthier areas; it’s about identifying suspects, arresting them, and feeding the cycle that leads to incarceration.

For Adams to support these policies as a Black man, knowing that Black and brown people suffer the consequences, is especially troubling. It’s indicative of someone who may not have the public’s best interests in mind and is instead driven by personal or political motives. That trend is common across government—we saw it in the Trump administration—so it’s not unique to Black officials. It’s just that Black elected officials face more scrutiny and are more likely to get caught.

Ben: Totally. I’m cognizant of the heightened spotlight on Black politicians, and I had a feeling you’d complicate the narrative for us. 

Continuing in that vein, let’s talk about Kamala. There are many dynamics to her candidacy—race, gender, her background in policing and prosecution. How do you reconcile all these things?

EH: I’ve been extremely critical of Kamala Harris. It’s enraging to me that she allowed Black men to be put to death when she was attorney general with cases and evidence that were incredibly dubious. I do think her stance has softened in some ways, but I remain highly critical. I’m confident we’re not going to see the kind of structural transformation with her presidency that I think you and I both want to see, Ben.

But we may get closer. Certainly, we’re going to see the protection of reproductive rights. Certainly, we’re not going to see the all-out police state that Donald Trump has been talking about—rounding up migrants in an approach that it’s not hard to imagine extending to any “undesirable” people.

And I have to say, as the mother of a beautiful, brilliant, and powerful Black girl, Kamala’s candidacy means something. It might just be at the representational level and therefore aesthetic and limited, but when I was five years old, the idea that a powerful Black woman could run for president was out of the realm of possibility. So that symbolic aspect does matter for my daughter, and for me.

Ben: It seems like Kamala’s candidacy is inherently complex. On one hand, it’s revolutionary in and of itself, and as you’re saying, it has huge implications for safeguarding, say, women’s health.

On the other hand, she seems likely to perpetuate the short-term solution approach that we’ve been talking about and which is especially pervasive during electoral cycles—like, let's go hard on crime because we'll get southern voters; or let's get tough on immigration because we'll get Arizona voters. Let's not address the climate crisis because we don't want to anger the fossil fuel industry. Let's send weapons to Israel because we don't want to anger AIPAC. Let's not use the surgical method for appendicitis because a college-educated white woman in the suburbs of Pittsburgh might still think hands are a better idea. 

EH: All great points. I’ll counter by adding her candidacy reflects an important shift where, for the first time, I think the Democratic Party has had to be truly accountable to its Black women base. Black women leaders, from Donna Brazile down, made it clear Kamala was the option if Democrats wanted to win. That accountability, I think, should be a source of hope. 

But I’m not someone who’s like, wait, wait, wait. We can address inequality down the line. You know, that historic refrain to “wait”—that real change will come with time. I understand there’s a lot of political maneuvering to get things passed—we saw that with the struggle for Obamacare—but we should be thinking about more immediate relief. It’s not just about long-term solutions. We saw how the federal government mobilized resources quickly for COVID; they could do the same to address racial and economic inequality.  

Even if we take race out of it, increasing stratification in our country is a national emergency. We need to treat it as such and funnel enormous resources into communities through grassroots organizations that understand local needs, just as we did in the first year of LBJ’s War on Poverty. 

Ben: On the flip side, you write, “America will continue to see the fires of rebellion—perhaps by a new, more diverse generation of protesters—until the forces of inequality are finally abolished.”

EH: And that’s very much W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of history in Black Reconstruction, which is about abolition democracy—the idea that a broad, multiracial coalition can bring about a better world for people. I subscribe to that vision, which allows me to be somewhat optimistic (or try to be optimistic) in dark times. The history of this country is about the movement towards that goal.

Ben: So if you have one final thought for Skipped History readers heading to the polls, what would it be?

EH: Hmm. I’ll go with this: I saw an old Nixon campaign ad recently, where the slogan is “Vote like your whole life depended on it.” I feel like that’s what’s at stake this year. The future of our democracy; the future of our kids and what kind of world we want them to come of age in.

I'm very critical of this country. I think that we need a revolution in many respects in order to really live up to the ideals of 1776. I think we need to redefine how we're responsible to one another in a democracy. I want to see a more equitable tax structure.

But I do not want to live in a fascist country, which I believe is what we’re heading towards. I do not want to continue to see people’s rights taken away, especially women's reproductive choices.

Kamala Harris is not perfect, but in our two-party system (and we can discuss its problems another time), she’s essentially the choice we have. So I’d say vote like your life depends on it. I’m reappropriating Nixon’s language for the cause of abolition democracy.

Ben: Just because you said that, I have to do one thing... [plays air horns]

EH: Exactly.