Making a Killing

Capitalism, Cops and the War on Black Life

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Breonna Taylor, Timothy Thomas, Rekia Boyd, Jonathan Sanders, Jordan Neely, and Michael Brown were casualties of war. Whether we call it a war on crime, a war on militants, or a war on drugs, law enforcement at every level has made Black neighbourhoods into killing fields, sites of resource extraction, and extensions of the prison system.

In Making a Killing, Robin D. G. Kelley approaches the stories of the casualties of this war as a portal to the capitalist system that strangled them and their communities and financed the unprecedented growth of police departments. From slave patrols and lynch law to the militarization of ICE, Kelley reconstructs the racist terror at the heart of the American social and economic order as well as the intergenerational journey of families who lost loved ones to premature death while navigating a system that prioritizes property over Black life.

Yet this is also the story of the counterwar. Kelley examines the legacy of collective Black resistance – the movements, tactics, thinkers, and leaders – that has long been a catalyst for change and the tip of the spear in a broader fight against rising fascism. Demanding not only justice for its victims but genuine social transformation, these movements hold out the possibility that we may lay to rest the world we know, so that a new one may be born.

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

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

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

About Robin D. G. Kelley

Robin D. G. Kelley is the author of the award-winning biography Thelonious Monk; Race Rebels; Freedom Dreams; and numerous other acclaimed books on radical social movements, labour, music, Black intellectuals and the African diaspora. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Hammer & Hope, Boston Review, and many other publications. A Guggenheim fellow and Freedom Scholar award recipient, Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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