Kristin Henning has spent over two decades representing Black teens in the court system. If there’s one thing her experience has taught her, it’s that racist policing infects the lives of our youth before they’re even old enough to learn their A-B-C’s. Black children  endure more cops at their schools, more patrols in their neighborhoods, and higher surveillance in community areas. Her new book, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, lays out how this constant oppression has socialized generations of Black teens to think their mere existence is somehow a crime, and how it hurts healthy development. Joining her is fellow author and prosecutor Paul Butler, and MahoganyBooks host and co-owner Derrick Young. Catch it all right here on the Front Row on February 16th at 7pm!

About the Book: A brilliant analysis of the foundations of racist policing in America: the day-to-day brutalities, largely hidden from public view, endured by Black youth growing up under constant police surveillance and the persistent threat of physical and psychological abuse

Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience rep­resenting Black youth in Washington, D.C.’s juve­nile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America’s irrational, manufactured fears of these young peo­ple and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children.

Henning explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police, and she details the long-term consequences of rac­ism that they experience at the hands of the police and their vigilante surrogates. She makes clear that unlike White youth, who are afforded the freedom to test boundaries, experiment with sex and drugs, and figure out who they are and who they want to be, Black youth are seen as a threat to White Amer­ica and are denied healthy adolescent development. She examines the criminalization of Black adoles­cent play and sexuality, and of Black fashion, hair, and music. She limns the effects of police presence in schools and the depth of police-induced trauma in Black adolescents.

Especially in the wake of the recent unprece­dented, worldwide outrage at racial injustice and inequality, The Rage of Innocence is an essential book for our moment.

About the Author: Kristin Henning has been representing children accused of crime in Washington, DC for more than twenty-five years and is a nationally recognized trainer and consultant on the intersection of race, adolescence, and policing. Henning now serves as the Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law and was previously the Lead Attorney of the Juvenile Unit at the D.C. Public Defender Service. She is also the Director of the Mid-Atlantic Juvenile Defender Center and worked closely with the National Juvenile Defender Center (NJDC) to develop a national training curriculum for youth defenders, along other tools and programs to challenge racial inequities in the juvenile legal system. Henning is the recipient of many awards, including the 2021 Leadership Prize from the Juvenile Law Center and the 2013 Robert E. Shepherd Jr. Award for Excellence in Juvenile Defense from NJDC. She has written numerous articles and essays advocating for reform in the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Her essay “Boys to Men: The Role of Policing in the Socialization of Black Boys” appears in Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment. She is a coeditor of the anthology Rights, Race, and Reform: 50 Years of Child Advocacy in the Juvenile Justice System.

About Paul Butler: A former federal prosecutor, Paul Butler provides legal commentary for CNN, MSNBC, and NPR and has been featured on 60 Minutes and profiled in the Washington Post. A law professor at Georgetown University and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2017-18, he is the author of Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice, winner of the Harry Chapin Media Award, and Chokehold: Policing Black Men (both from The New Press). He has published numerous op-eds and book reviews, including in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Washington, D.C.

About MahoganyBooks:  Derrick and Ramunda Young are owners/founders of the award-winning MahoganyBooks in Washington, DC where they focus on books for, by and about people of the African Diaspora. The couple have been featured in Oprah Magazine, TIME Magazine, Essence, Washington Post, Steve Harvey TV and Wall Street Journal among others.  Learn more at mahoganybooks.com.

Kristin Henning & Paul Butler Discuss The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth