Ronald B. Neal in conversation with Justin Desmangles discussing Dr. Neal's new book Beyond Death and Jail: Anti-Blackness, Black Masculinity, and the Demonic Imagination.

Beyond Death and Jail: Anti-Blackness, Black Masculinity, and the Demonic Imagination calls for a complete reassessment and overhaul of ethical, political, and religious thinking with respect to anti-Blackness and Black masculinity in the United States. In light of the prison industrial complex and a decade of homicide (2012-2022) of Black men and Black boys which spawned the Movement for Black Lives, Ronald B. Neal calls attention to a crisis of imagination on the part of elite social activists and intellectuals. Neal questions more than four decades of academic theory concerned with justice which has and continues to inform the most popular expressions of Black American activism. Readers are asked to grapple with the dilemmas which plague Black men and Black boys as a starting point for a reinvigorated imagination including new theories of justice and new paradigms of action. Neal contends that we can do better in those efforts that seek to engage and overcome anti-Blackness in the United States. 

Ronald B. Neal is an Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions at Wake Forest University. He holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Democracy in 21st Century America: Race, Class, Religion, and Region (Mercer University Press, 2012). Professor Neal is a theorist of religion and culture whose primary area of teaching and research is African American Religious Studies. He also does teaching and research in other areas including world religions, religion and popular culture, religion and political culture, and gender studies in religion. He is currently writing a book on Black Masculinity, Myth, and the Western Imagination. 

Justin Desmangles is chairman of the Before Columbus Foundation, administrator of the American Book Award. 

Co-presented by the African American Center of the San Francisco Public Library and the Before Columbus Foundation.