Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor in Chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

My guest today is Professor Kristen Henning of Georgetown University

Law Center, where she directs the university's Juvenile Justice Clinics. She's the author of

the book, The Rage of Innocence, How America Criminalizes Black Youth, available from

Pentheion Books.

Professor Henning, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

So I think that there has been a lot of national attention paid to the shootings of young black men and women by police in the United States.

And when there are fatal shootings like that of Tamir Rice, for example, they do get

national news coverage. But, and you write about those cases in your book, but you also draw our attention to the fact that separate from the cases of deadly violence by police, there is a whole everyday regime of surveillance and violence that young black men, boys and girls grow up in.

And so I wonder if we could start with you just sort of laying out in general terms the

territory here in terms of what the things that, you know, we have,

we talk about the shootings, but what are the other aspects of life for young, for black

youth that you really want to draw attention to by writing and publishing this book. Yes. Thank you so

much for that question because it so often gets missed in the hubbub of the conversation about

extreme examples of violence. But in a city like Washington, D.C., and it's not just D.C., it's throughout the country,

there are pockets of communities where black and brown children have grown up under the constant surveillance of police officers.

So I talk about, for example, my clients who share stories of literally coming outside of

their homes and seeing police officers parked on a street corner, parked in the

nearby recreation center. They encounter police officers when they enter a convenience store,

they might encounter them on the way out. Police officers stop them and ask them, where are you going?

Where are you coming from? They get asked, can you lift your shirt? The police officer will ask a

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