How ought to we take into consideration the Black Lives Matter motion, now that three years have handed because the worldwide George Floyd protests? In sympathetic circles, the query doesn’t normally encourage a direct reply, however, relatively, a seemingly infinite set of caveats and follow-up questions. What constitutes success? What adjustments may probably be anticipated in such a brief time period? Are we speaking about precise insurance policies or are we speaking about modified minds? I’ve engaged in this sort of back-and-forth on a number of events throughout the previous few years, and, although I consider the protests had been, on steadiness, a power for good on this nation, I wonder if all this chin-scratching suggests an absence of conviction. Why don’t we now have a clearer reply?
In his new guide, “After Black Lives Matter,” the political scientist Cedric Johnson blows proper previous the type of hemming and hawing that has develop into de rigueur in as we speak’s conversations concerning the George Floyd protests. Johnson chooses, as an alternative, to degree a provocative and expansive critique from the left of the unfastened assortment of protest actions, organizations, and ideological actions—whether or not jail abolition or calls to defund the police—that make up what we now name Black Lives Matter. He agrees that unchecked police energy is a societal unwell that ought to encourage vigorous dissent. His downside is extra with the “Black Lives Matter” half—not the assertion, itself, which ought to be self-evident, however, relatively, how the shaping of the slogan and its fundamental beneficiaries (Johnson believes these are principally company entities) promoted a totalizing and obscurantist imaginative and prescient of race and energy.
Very similar to Barbara Fields and Adolph Reed, two Black students cited within the guide, Johnson is a socialist, and his argument is “impressed and knowledgeable by the left-wing of antipolicing struggles,” which he takes nice care to differentiate from what he sees because the extra corporatized and well-liked imaginative and prescient of Black Lives Matter, and the naïvete of the police-abolition motion. He doesn’t dismiss the pernicious influence that racism has upon the lives of individuals on this nation, however he doesn’t see a lot potential in a motion that focusses on race alone, nor does he consider that it precisely assesses the issue with policing. He writes:
The police, in different phrases, enact violence in opposition to all poor individuals, as a result of, in a capitalist nation like the US, the police serve primarily to breed “the market economic system, processes of actual property improvement in central cities and the administration of surplus populations.” Poor rural whites, Black individuals who dwell within the internal cities, Latinos in depressed agricultural districts, and Native Individuals throughout the nation can all be tagged as surplus, and Johnson argues that this situation has a way more direct and significant influence on how they’re policed than race does. He additionally believes that the give attention to race serves bourgeois pursuits, as a result of it reduces the query of inequality on this nation to pores and skin shade; this, in flip, obviates any dialogue about how an enchancment in fundamental residing requirements—well being care, housing, little one care, and schooling—may make communities safer. If all you need to do is expunge the racism within the hearts of cops, or, maybe, simply scale back the variety of racist patrol officers on the streets, you don’t must do a lot about poverty. Or, on the very least, you possibly can faux that class battle and racialized police brutality are two separate points, when, in truth, they’re the identical factor.
“After Black Lives Matter” ought to be recommended each for the readability of its message and the bravery of its convictions. Even amongst students on the left who’re important of id politics, there’s a variety of responses to well-liked works akin to “The 1619 Undertaking”or Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist sequence, which appear to give attention to race above all different issues. Some, like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, degree a extra capacious critique of id politics, even in its most crass and capitalistic varieties: although Táíwò might object to the strategy and analyses of so-called identitarians, he nonetheless sees them as his teammates. Others, like Fields and Reed, are way more dismissive. Johnson actually falls on this second camp. He rails in opposition to “wokelords,” who’re eager to disgrace and confront anybody who might supply up a critique of id politics; he believes that fashionable racial-justice discourse “prompts liberal options, akin to implicit bias coaching, physique cameras, hiring extra black cops and directors,” which, in flip, “erects pointless obstacles between would-be allies.”
Johnson argues that, though Black Lives Matter might have dressed itself up in revolutionary clothes, it in the end nonetheless adopted the differential logic of a company variety coaching: one group of individuals is requested to acknowledge one other and fixate on factors of distinction. “BLM discourse truncates the policing downside as one in every of endemic antiblackness, and cuts off potential constituencies,” he writes, “treating different communities who’ve suffered police abuse and residents who’re deeply dedicated to attaining social justice as merely allies, junior companions relatively than political equals and comrades.”
What emerges from “After Black Lives Matter” is a sort of pragmatism, one that appears to construct solidarity throughout racial strains. White individuals, particularly poor white individuals, are additionally killed by the police, as are poor Latinos and poor Asians. Any change—whether or not revolutionary, legislative, or reformative—would require a important mass of people that really feel that their very own pursuits are at stake in an anti-policing motion. Black Lives Matter, Johnson argues, might have been efficient in getting individuals out on the streets due to its manipulation of digital platforms, but it surely additionally had broad enchantment as a result of it didn’t actually problem the capitalist, neoliberal order. The explanation so many companies, for instance, had been so fast to supply funds for Black creators or anti-racism efforts wasn’t that they felt intimidated by what was taking place within the streets, however as a result of they noticed a shift in how the nation felt about race and shortly moved to regulate their optics with out touching the underlying exploitative practices. In the summertime of 2020, oil firms, multinational banks, the C.I.A., the N.F.L. all got here out with commitments to Black Lives Matter. Johnson sees this as “an occasion of ideological convergence—between the militant racial liberalism of Black Lives Matter and the operational racial liberalism of the investor class.” A very transformative motion, then, can be broad and inclusive in its messaging, and likewise radical in its critique and democratic in its strategies.