When Jamie Amparo Alves got to know him, Serginho was a 29-year-old father of two who lived in a small one-bedroom house in a favela in São Paulo. His only possessions were a bed, a small refrigerator and a filthy stove. With his brief educational history, long criminal record and dark skin, Serginho had been unable to secure the kind of formal employment that would have allowed him to feed his daughters without sacrificing his dignity. So, he made do by breaking into the houses of the elite white families whose toilets his mother scrubbed for a living. In the middle of the night, he and his crew would wake their victims at gunpoint and force them to watch a group of young black men appropriate their most prized possessions. Alves argues that the choice to rob these families was strategic. By making real the worst fears of elite white paulistanos (São Paulo inhabitants), Serginho and his crew forced them to confront an unspoken historical truth that most Brazilians know but few whites openly acknowledge: that the wealth of elite white families comes from the spoils of an unjust political-economic system based on the exploitation of black women's labour and the extermination of black men.

Serghino's is one of several stories the author tells in The Anti-Black City. Alves asks: How do those living in the urban periphery of São Paulo create possibilities for black life in a context saturated by police terror and structural violence? To answer the question, he turns to young black men involved in the ‘world of crime’, black women who traverse the favela–prison pipeline and grieving mothers who have had to fight to reclaim the bodies of their slain children.

The answers, Alves finds, are not particularly hopeful. The mothers he follows from the morgue, to the police station, to one state bureaucratic agency after another, are subject to indignity and insult as they attempt to hold the state accountable for imperilling, incarcerating and exterminating their sons. While Alves convincingly argues that both their pain and their demands for justice are powerful expressions of anti-racist political protest, this form of political action nonetheless hinges on the ‘macabre certainty that raising a little black boy [in the periphery of São Paulo] is a fatal investment’ (p. 41). The politics of black women who refuse traditional roles of obedient daughter, suffering mother or loyal domestic servant by becoming involved in the city's illegal drug economy are likewise circumscribed by violence. Even when they successfully ‘insurge’ against patriarchy by forming autonomous, economically independent households, such women are terrorised by police officers on the streets and brutalised by abusive male kin at home (p. 140). And Serginho, whose criminal violence Alves reads as a form of insurgent politics that enables him to periodically transcend the structural barriers that exclude young black men like him from civic life, is shot and killed by the police while on route to a stick-up in a stolen car (p. 190).

The death and violence that saturate the narratives presented in The Anti-Black City support Alves’ claim that domination and brutality have been inscribed in the geography of São Paulo for centuries. In the colonial era, the institution of chattel slavery divided the city into rigid zones of belonging and exclusion based on race. Following abolition, discriminatory labour market practices worked to exclude back men and women from participation in the formal economy, while anti-black state policies of urban planning began to deliberately push black residents from the city centre to the margins, into zones of social suffering where state services and resources were absent, save the excessive presence of the police. Since the 1990s, racialised policing and prison expansion have become acute, converting the favelas of São Paulo into zones of black death and rage fuelled by police terror – what Alves calls a ‘necropolis’.

Alves’ necropolis is not a cemetery (as the word is defined in the dictionary), but ‘a Fanonian zone of nonbeing’ (p. 8) in which ‘symbolic, physical, and social death [are] indispensable to the reproduction of the biopolis, the zone of being’ (p. 41). In other words: there is no place for black lives in the city of São Paulo. Under the current necropolitical neoliberal order, the relatively bloodless anti-black policies that had historically excluded black men and women from civic and economic participation have taken a back seat to a politics of incarceration and extermination.

Alves offers a detailed description of this politics over the course of five chapters: Chapter 1 describes how police-linked death squads kill young black men in spectacular displays of violence, disposing of their bodies in deliberately unsettling ways. Then, the ‘state extends punishment beyond the mutilated bodies of its victims’ by rhetorically constructing the dead as criminals who deserved to die (p. 67). Chapter 2 examines how the so-called community policing that was intended to introduce a less deadly form of policing to peripheral urban communities has contributed to shoring up the idea that black youths – especially those who have become involved in the drug trade – are the quintessential enemy of public order. Chapter 3 looks into how the moral panic engendered by the idea of the young black drug dealer has fuelled a dramatic rise in incarceration since the 1990s, even as the city has seen a decline in its rate of violent crime. Chapter 4 seeks to critically examine how participation in organised criminality has become a ‘tragic’ outlet for black youth to counter racialised containment and police violence. Chapter 5 further examines black politics and agency by analysing the tactics of black political movements, especially those that draw on maternal grief to argue for the value of black lives in a context of black genocide.

By bringing his personal experience, academic training and political activism equally to bear in critiquing the racialised forms of governance that have led to the deliberate and systematic destruction of black life in São Paulo, Alves shows how scholars who are also committed activists might respond to police terror against black lives.