This course examines how the criminalization of Blackness operates through criminal justice and other institutions. It historicizes contemporary anti-Black state violence by tracing the logics of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the years following emancipation, and neo-colonial relations. The course employs an interdisciplinary approach to understand how anti-Blackness intersects with ethnicity, gender, sexuality, citizenship status, and class to construct notions of criminality,deviance, and punishment. We explore liberatory possibilities drawn from community-led acts of resistance and mobilization.