ABSTRACT
In September 2014, just one month after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, the author began teaching American history in a medium-security prison in Pacific, Missouri. The prison is about an hour’s drive from Ferguson along highways that snake through affluent, largely white suburbs and past rural towns that are little more than gas stations and strip malls. The students came from throughout the state, one from Chicago and another from rural Virginia, and many were raised in St. Louis all seemed familiar with Ferguson. African Americans living in or driving through Ferguson entered an authoritarian regime where minor infractions of traffic rules or housing code violations could land them in jail for weeks or months. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, calls the Haitian revolution “unthinkable.” The slave insurrection in late eighteenth-century San Domingue was, Trouillot writes, outside the realm of possibility in the writings of French thinkers and Haitian planter.
