An Interview with Dr. Heather Ann Thompson

Perilous Chronicle

This week, we have a very special interview with Dr. Heather Ann Thompson, historian at the University of Michigan, and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy and Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City.

Perilous Researchers Ryan Fatica and Duncan Tarr spoke with Dr. Thompson about the wave of unrest sweeping the country in jails, prisons and detention centers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In late April, Dr. Thompson made this prescient statement in an interview with Jacobin: “I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but these are unstable times. You cannot shut down the US economy for this long, with income inequality at the highest rate it has been since the Gilded Age, without expecting some social unrest. I don’t doubt that people will protest, and they will have every right to do so. But I worry about the repression.” Just one month later, multiple American cities were on fire as people reacted to the murder of George Floyd and the systematic racism and out of control police violence it represented.

The interview was recorded days before the murder of George Floyd so Dr. Thompson, a scholar of popular uprisings, does not reflect directly upon the movement that has since emerged and which is currently reshaping the world, but much of our conversation about the wave of prison rebellion that immediately preceded the George Floyd Uprisings is applicable to our current task of analyzing our present moment.