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How should we think about the Black Lives Matter movement, now that three years have passed since the worldwide George Floyd protests? In sympathetic circles, the question does not usually inspire a direct answer, but, rather, a seemingly endless set of caveats and follow-up questions. What constitutes success? What changes could possibly be expected in such a short period of time? Are we talking about actual policies or are we talking about changed minds? I’ve engaged in this type of back-and-forth on several occasions during the past few years, and, though I believe the protests were, on balance, a force for good in this country, I wonder whether all this chin-scratching suggests a lack of conviction. Why don’t we have a clearer answer?
In his new book, “After Black Lives Matter,” the political scientist Cedric Johnson blows right past the sort of hemming and hawing that has become de rigueur in today’s conversations about the George Floyd protests. Johnson chooses, instead, to level a provocative and expansive critique from the left of the loose collection of protest actions, organizations, and ideological movements—whether prison abolition or calls to defund the police—that make up what we now call Black Lives Matter. He agrees that unchecked police power is a societal ill that should inspire vigorous dissent. His problem is more with the “Black Lives Matter” part—not the assertion, itself, which should be self-evident, but, rather, how the shaping of the slogan and its main beneficiaries (Johnson believes these are mostly corporate entities) promoted a totalizing and obscurantist vision of race and power.
Much like Barbara Fields and Adolph Reed, two Black scholars cited in the book, Johnson is a socialist, and his argument is “inspired and informed by the left-wing of antipolicing struggles,” which he takes great care to distinguish from what he sees as the more corporatized and popular vision of Black Lives Matter, and the naïvete of the police-abolition movement. He does not dismiss the pernicious impact that racism has upon the lives of people in this country, but he does not see much potential in a movement that focusses on race alone, nor does he believe that it accurately assesses the problem with policing. He writes:
The police, in other words, enact violence against all poor people, because, in a capitalist country like the United States, the police serve primarily to reproduce “the market economy, processes of real estate development in central cities and the management of surplus populations.” Poor rural whites, Black people who live in the inner cities, Latinos in depressed agricultural districts, and Native Americans across the country can all be tagged as surplus, and Johnson argues that this condition has a much more direct and meaningful impact on how they are policed than race does. He also believes that the focus on race serves bourgeois interests, because it reduces the question of inequality in this country to skin color; this, in turn, obviates any discussion about how an improvement in basic living standards—health care, housing, child care, and education—could make communities safer. If all you have to do is expunge the racism in the hearts of police officers, or, perhaps, just reduce the number of racist patrol officers on the streets, you don’t have to do much about poverty. Or, at the very least, you can pretend that class conflict and racialized police brutality are two separate issues, when, in fact, they are the same thing.
“After Black Lives Matter” should be commended both for the clarity of its message and the bravery of its convictions. Even among scholars on the left who are critical of identity politics, there’s a wide range of responses to popular works such as “The 1619 Project”or Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist series, which seem to focus on race above all other things. Some, like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, level a more capacious critique of identity politics, even in its most crass and capitalistic forms: though Táíwò may object to the approach and analyses of so-called identitarians, he still sees them as his teammates. Others, like Fields and Reed, are far more dismissive. Johnson certainly falls in this second camp. He rails against “wokelords,” who are keen to shame and confront anyone who may offer up a critique of identity politics; he believes that modern racial-justice discourse “prompts liberal solutions, such as implicit bias training, body cameras, hiring more black police officers and administrators,” which, in turn, “erects unnecessary barriers between would-be allies.”
Johnson argues that, although Black Lives Matter may have dressed itself up in revolutionary clothing, it ultimately still followed the differential logic of a corporate diversity training: one group of people is asked to acknowledge another and fixate on points of difference. “BLM discourse truncates the policing problem as one of endemic antiblackness, and cuts off potential constituencies,” he writes, “treating other communities who have suffered police abuse and citizens who are deeply committed to achieving social justice as merely allies, junior partners rather than political equals and comrades.”
What emerges from “After Black Lives Matter” is a type of pragmatism, one that looks to build solidarity across racial lines. White people, especially poor white people, are also killed by the police, as are poor Latinos and poor Asians. Any change—whether revolutionary, legislative, or reformative—will require a critical mass of people who feel that their own interests are at stake in an anti-policing movement. Black Lives Matter, Johnson argues, may have been effective in getting people out on the streets because of its manipulation of digital platforms, but it also had wide appeal because it did not truly challenge the capitalist, neoliberal order. The reason so many corporations, for example, were so quick to offer funds for Black creators or anti-racism efforts wasn’t that they felt intimidated by what was happening in the streets, but because they saw a shift in how the country felt about race and quickly moved to adjust their optics without touching the underlying exploitative practices. In the summer of 2020, oil companies, multinational banks, the C.I.A., the N.F.L. all came out with commitments to Black Lives Matter. Johnson sees this as “an instance of ideological convergence—between the militant racial liberalism of Black Lives Matter and the operational racial liberalism of the investor class.” A truly transformative movement, then, would be broad and inclusive in its messaging, and also radical in its critique and democratic in its methods.
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