Donald Marvin Jones
University of Miami Law Professor, Best-Selling Author, Recognized Legal Expert, Keynote Speaker, Consultant
constitutional law expert
Testimonials About Donald Marvin Jones
Donald Jones is a powerful and prophetic voice in the Age of Obama. He courageously and compassionately keeps our focus on social injustice and structural racism in America.
Dr. Cornel West
Professor, Princeton University
Prof. Donald Marvin Jones brings originality, daunting perspective, and a wise, careful touch to the perennial topic of race. For years, I have turned to Professor Jones. In my efforts to understand and present racial sensitivity and issues in my courtroom presentations, I read and reread his works constantly. Without his assistance, I could never have been so successful in humanizing minority clients whom the criminal justice system routinely devalues and objectifies.
Thomas Mesereau
Trial Lawyer- Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby
Donald Marvin Jones, 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.
Professor Jonathan Simon
Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law Director, USC Berkeley
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By Donald Marvin Jones
The Presumption
Race and Injustice in the United States
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.
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, Laurence M. Katz Professor of Law, University of Baltimore, USA, and author of Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America
More Books By D. Marvin Jones
Dangerous Spaces
Beyond the Racial Profile
Fear of a Hip-Hop Planet
America’s New Dilemma
Race, Sex, and Suspicion
The Myth of the Black Male