Black Evidence
A History and a Warning
3 March 2026
Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, Singapore and Malaysia, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
Description
A fierce exposé of the resistance to believing Black people and its devastating effects throughout American history.
From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment.
In Black Evidence, political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament.
Through a curation of critical moments across four centuries, Smith invites us to review the evidence that has been obscured, distorted, and denied. She rigorously investigates the practices that turn Black witnesses into liars in the court room, Black patients into superbodies that don’t feel pain in health care settings, Black people into subhumans in scientific experiments, and Black children into superpredators. She reveals what happens when Black voices are subject to exclusion—their communities are terrorized, their memories are refuted, and their resistance is pathologized.
Written with compassion and tempered optimism, Black Evidence prescribes a cure and encourages readers to practice the skills needed to build a truly multiracial democracy: confront our past, acknowledge the damage of inequality in our present, and listen to the voices of those who experience the problems we wish to solve for an equitable future.
Reviews
"Anyone seeking to understand our predicaments must read Candis Watts Smith’s magnificent Black Evidence, whose eloquent storytelling and impeccable research illuminate how we got here—and offer crucial lessons for our escape. Here is our beautiful, terrible, and complicated past and present, told in all their sparkling complexity. This is history that explodes indoctrination and offers a vision of democracy that calls us toward belonging." — Timothy B. Tyson, author of The Blood of Emmett Till
"In Black Evidence, Candis Watts Smith delivers a blistering indictment of America’s enduring refusal to believe Black people. With razor-sharp insight and electrifying prose, Smith exposes how this deep-rooted distrust has warped justice, disregarded Black humanity, and further eroded an already fragile democracy. Yet this is not a book of despair. Smith highlights moments when people have truly reckoned with Black testimony, reminding us that doing so is not only possible but essential." — Ruha Benjamin, author of Imagination: A Manifesto
"Candis Watts Smith delivers both a powerful testimony and an incisive corrective. By tracing how Black truth has long been denied, she exposes not only the foundations of racial inequality in America, but also the deepest fault lines in American democracy. A searing indictment of the failure of America to sit with uncomfortable truths, if you look away from Black Evidence, you’ll be failing to reckon with the lessons Black history wants to teach us all." — Blair LM Kelley, author of Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class
"Black Evidence is a searing account of the failure of the United States to reckon with its past and take seriously the testimonies of Black Americans. The wisdom Candis Watts Smith distills in this illuminating book is desperately needed in these turbulent times." — Keisha N. Blain, author of Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights
Ebook
9781324036289
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£22.50
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