Explore The Writings of
Donald Marvin Jones

Books by Donald Marvin Jones

Donald Marvin Jones is Professor of Law at the University of Miami. He is a prominent author, public intellectual who has gained an international reputation by thinking critically and deeply about the dangerous intersection of race and law. Professor Jones is the author of four books – Race, Sex and Suspicion: The Myth of the Black Male (Praeger 2005); Fear of a Hip-Hop Planet: America’s New Dilemma (2013); and Dangerous Spaces: Beyond the Racial Profile (Praeger 2016) and his latest, The Presumption (Bloomsbury, May 30, 2024).

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The Presumption

This powerful book on racism in the United States argues that a threatening narrative originating in slavery continues to link Black people to inferiority, dangerousness, and crime, causing them to be presumed guilty by society and U.S. legal systems.

Why are Black people stopped, arrested, and shot by police at such a high rate? Why are they portrayed in the media as gangbangers and urban thugs? D. Marvin Jones writes that the problem of race lies in the way Blackness has been inextricably knotted together in our culture with presumptions. In the era of segregation this was a presumption of inferiority, but in our era, it is primarily a presumption of dangerousness or criminality.

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Fear of a Hip-Hop Planet

Is Gangsta Rap just black noise? Or does it play the same role for urban youth that CNN plays in mainstream America? This provocative set of essays tells us how Gangsta Rap is a creative “report” about an urban crisis, our new American dilemma, and why we need to listen.

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Dangerous Spaces

Dangerous Spaces: Beyond the Racial Profile demonstrates how society has constructed a set of threat narratives in which certain widespread problems―immigration, drugs, gangs, and terrorism, for example―have been racialized and explains the historical and social origins of these racializing threat narratives. The book identifies how these narratives have led directly to relentless profiling that results in arrest, deportation, massive surveillance, or even death for members of suspect populations.

Readers will come to understand how the problem of profiling is not merely a problem of institutional bias and individual decision-making, but also a deeply rooted cultural issue stemming from the processes of meaning-making and identity construction.

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Race, Sex, and Suspicion

Exploring the basic conflict between the legal equality that black men possess as U.S. citizens and their social isolation stemming from white America’s perceptions of them as culturally alien, the author sets out to provoke, stimulate, and change the negative images and stereotypes that indicate a fundamental defect in the mainframe of American culture. As the author states, the purpose of this book is not to defend the black male, but to deconstruct him and to libertate him from the negative images and stereotypes that have stultified his existence. Largely through the victories of the Civil Rights movement, everyone in the United States is―formally―equal. Yet there remains a basic conflict between that legal equality and the social isolation of black men that stems from white America’s perceptions of them as, by nature, culturally alien.

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Endorsements

Jonathan Simon, Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Juctice Law, at USC Berkeley

"One of our most acute observers of race and the war on crime in urban America turns his insight to the new frontiers of fear and social control in an America still at war with itself."

Kevin D. Brown, Mitchell Willoughby Professor of Law, Joseph F. Rice School of Law, Columbia S.C.

The Presumption from the renowned Professor D. Marvin Jones is a must read for anyone who is trying to understand mass incarceration of Black men. He adroitly lays out how the presumption of the dangerousness or criminality of Black men is rooted in America’s history of racial oppression. It has functioned in narratives and images to normalize police policies and practices that have long produced over policing of Black men. While one would expect that that presumption would function when Black men are accused of a crime, Professor Jones also shows how it works with Black men are the victims. Thereby attenuating the ability of the justice system to conceptualize them as victims of criminal activity as well.

Thomas Mesereau, Esquire - Internationally Renowned Trial Lawyer

"Presumptions of guilt, dangerousness and menace have haunted the black community since America was founded. These inhumane assumptions continue to infect every aspect of American justice causing untold suffering, marginalization and death. No one understands this toxicity better than Professor Donald M. Jones. In an original work like no other, Professor Jones dives deeply into the psychological, historical and legal elements of these deadly presumptions. The analysis is brilliant, original, sober and clear. Lawyers, law students, academics journalists, activists, college students and anyone concerned about injustice will benefit from the preeminent expert on this subject, Professor Donald M. Jones."

F. Michael Higgenbotham, Laurence M. Katz Professor of Law - University of Baltimore, USA, and author of Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America

"There is an old saying that “the eye cannot see what the mind does not comprehend.” In The Presumption, Professor Jones helps even those with the most skeptical vision recognize through historical documentation, persuasive reasoning, and powerful examples how Black identity has been criminalized-both historically, during slavery and the Jim Crow period, and today-in police practices, media biases, and social interaction. Perceptive, thoughtful, and timely, The Presumption should be required reading for anyone concerned about reducing racial discrimination in America today.” ―Michael Higginbotham