I think it’s important not to lose sight of what happened this past January. As time marches on, and the press moves on to the latest stories, I worry that many of us might misrecall the significance of that day, or forget about it altogether. Indeed, it’s quite easy to grow desensitized and reduce moments of import to a footnote of the Trump presidency after the daily affronts to our sense of decency that saturated our media diet the last four years. While those daily utterances of abject nonsense will surely fade from view, episodes like the border separations and the chaos that erupted in the halls of Congress six months ago should remain firmly rooted in living memory. I’ve saved the texts and emails my wife and I received from family and friends who reached out to check on us, as well as the various videos of those at the scene, because I believe that such things ought to be preserved.

I believe this not only because any act of domestic terrorism constitutes a bookmarkable chapter in our nation’s history, but because of the enduring relevance of what transpired. After all, the people responsible are still with us, and more importantly, so are the underlying motivations that saw hundreds of Americans storm the seat of U.S. democracy. Those motives don’t disappear the moment a new president is sworn in. The bulk of the rioters, almost exclusively white and male, acted in furtherance of a Lie premised ultimately, as we’ll see, on entrenched racism. Whether commitments to far-right conspiracies and causes will wane or accelerate in the years ahead, and how to combat them, are questions pertinent to social activists, our election security apparatus, and, perhaps especially, law enforcement and the U.S. military.
 

 
According to a recent study from the University of Chicago, and discussed at length above, the rioters were 93% white and 86% male. Hardly surprising, but then there’s this: the vast majority were middle-aged or older, gainfully employed, and married with kids (though for many of them that may have changed in the intervening months). This is inconsistent with what we have found when looking at the socioeconomic makeup of white nationalist and other far-right militia groups like Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and the Three Percenters, whose members tend to skew younger and match the jobless loner profile.

It’s important to note that although the study found extremist groups were in relatively short supply at the Capitol, it’s possible that the demonstrators who showed up shared an overlapping ideology with these factions despite no formal affiliation. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2020 Year in Hate and Extremism report found that many extremists are not formal members of any organization. They are usually radicalized via online platforms and in the process may interact with organized antigovernment groups without joining them. Consequently, we need to look beyond connections to leading extremist organizations in discerning ideologues capable of engaging in hate violence.

Another interesting finding is that more than half of the rioters hailed not from deep-red counties and districts, as we might expect, but from counties that Biden won in 2020. A lot of them in fact were Trump supporters who traveled from the bluest parts of America to participate in the riot. One final takeaway from the study was that these largely white men were more likely to call home places where the white population had experienced marked declines compared to the Hispanic and Black populations, which naturally includes those blue-heavy urban locales Biden shored up.

The director of the project, Richard Pape, traces the driving ideology of those present at the riot to the “Great Replacement” theory, the notion that the rights of white people are being superseded by the rights of minority groups as the latter’s numbers eclipse the former’s in Western democracies. It’s a theory that picked up steam initially in Europe, and was adopted shortly thereafter by neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups in the United States. The insurrectionists were also united in their belief the election was stolen, of course, but according to Pape and his colleagues, it was profound concerns over racial replacement that made the difference between the violent demonstrators who arrived in Washington and the passive observers who remained at home.

One plausible explanation for the participants’ counties of origin might be that in places where far-right voters are grossly outnumbered by their blue-leaning counterparts, the feeling of being hemmed in by the prevailing ideology better animates one to express their political frustrations in more raucous, even violent ways relative to their co-thinkers in deep-red localities. Thus while sympathy toward GR ideas exists in both red and blue enclaves, it’s the predominantly blue areas where the pro-Trump contingent is more likely to act on their core beliefs because the politics they so despise — and the minorities they resent — are more ubiquitous and harder to avoid. It was the sense of futility bred from the absence of solidarity in offline spaces, combined with the misinfo circulating in online spaces, that spurred them to action.

In order to assess the risk of further seditious efforts by the far-right that could materialize in ways both big and small, Dr. Pape shares a rather troubling poll his group conducted in tandem with the National Opinion Research Council. They asked 1,000 American adults whether they still believe the election was stolen and, additionally, whether they would be willing to personally participate in a violent protest. The results indicate that 4% of American adults, or 10 million people, respond ‘yes’ to both questions, with the strongest predictor being belief in the GR. Worse, we know that active or retired military, law enforcement, and government personnel make up a significant chunk of this figure, as more than 1 in 10 charged in the riot check at least one of those boxes.

In hindsight, the dramatic conflagration witnessed on January 6th of this year was possibly the only way for the Trump era to end: with deluded bands of costumed, antidemocratic, white nationalist radicals armed with bats and chemical spray laying waste to America’s foundational institutions, egged on by their beloved truth-trasher and Deluder-in-Chief. But there is a danger in dismissing what happened as just another disgraceful, mock-worthy day in an era chock full of them. Nothing about the last six months has abated interest in the conspiracist ideas that culminated in the antics back in January. The extremism harbored in the hearts and minds of everyday Americans will be with us for a long time to come, waiting for the right opportunity to strike out against the targets of that hatred.

And while it’s far from clear how best to deprogram those enamored with tenets of extremism, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the central role those beliefs played in the insurrection, and why they continue to pose a material threat to the preservation and strengthening of our democracy. If we focus only on the proximate convictions surrounding the 2020 election as opposed to the guiding force of racial resentment rampant in white society, we run the risk of thinking that the energy of far-right movements will dissipate as the events of January 6th recede further into the past. The election may be over, but the anarchy at the Capitol was always about much more than the fraudulent counting of ballots. It was fueled by an insidious strand of racial paranoia that’s festered among right-wing groups for decades. Those who would brush off the events of that day as mere ‘politics as usual’ underestimate both the scale of the threat before us and the degree to which nutty ideas can inspire mass violence.
 

Further reading:

• The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists
• These Are the Rioters Who Stormed the Nation’s Capitol
• Ronan Farrow: Who Were the Rioters on Jan. 6th?
• Off-Duty Police Officers Investigated, Charged With Participating In Capitol Riot
• Here Are The Police Officers And Other Public Employees Arrested In Connection To Capitol Riot
• Police Forces Dealing With Officers Involved in Capitol Riots
• ‘A nightmare scenario’: Extremists in police ranks spark growing concern after Capitol riot
• The warning signs before the Capitol riot
• FBI: U.S. Capitol Violence
• ‘I Alone Can Fix It’ book excerpt: The inside story of Trump’s defiance and inaction on Jan. 6

Image credits: Vox (feature); Jon Cherry/Getty Images

 
 
In a post commemorating the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death, Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, affirms some of the unsung heroes that played pivotal roles in securing justice for Floyd and his family over the past year. There’s 17 year-old Darnella Frazier, whose righteous indignation in choosing to record rather than walk past allowed the world to bear witness to an evil that may otherwise have gone unnoticed and unpunished. And there’s Christopher Martin, the 18 year-old cashier who took Floyd’s $20 bill on that fateful day, whose recent interviews painfully demonstrate the long arc of our extraordinarily broken justice system. We may never know or understand the full toll this atrocity has taken on the people close to it, but we can seek to honor the remarkable courage of those who showed up when it mattered most.

Upon reflecting on the statistics Huang presents on police accountability, it seems clear that the outcome of Derek Chauvin’s trial was far from certain, and if anything represents an extreme outlier in the history of such cases. Indeed, were it not for two key elements — his fellow officers coming forward and testifying against him, and a more diverse jury — Chauvin would likely have joined the 99% who walked free following similar episodes of police brutality.

When police kill a civilian, a series of obstacles stand in the way of achieving justice for the victim, from the messy procedural nightmare that is police investigating themselves to the laws in place that grant considerable discretion to on-duty officers in the use of force. Accountability in modern policing is a fleeting and scarcely observed phenomenon precisely because the system is inherently designed to give special protections to law enforcement (see the doctrine of Qualified Immunity for more on this). Even with footage uploaded to YouTube, replete with matching autopsy evidence, holding police officers legally liable for their misconduct is nearly impossible in most cases.

The people of Minnesota know this all too well. Four years before Floyd’s death, an officer from a different police department in Minneapolis was charged in the shooting of Philando Castile. Same city, different ending. Castile, a 32 year-old Black man, was shot at point-blank range five times in his car during a routine traffic stop. Video of the encounter taken by Castile’s girlfriend, who was also in the car, later showed that Castile actually had the wherewithal to inform the officer he had a gun in the car before reaching for his license and registration — a decision that in hindsight proved to be fatal.

That officer, Jeronimo Yanez, walked after his trial in 2017. Unlike Chavin’s trial, the officers in Yanez’s department, including the police chief, all testified on his behalf. And the resulting verdict was decided by eight jurors, just two of whom were Black, compared to the twelve jurors, four of whom were Black and two of whom identified as multiracial, in Chauvin’s trial.

That the Chauvin verdict came as such a surprise despite the many courageous young women and men who captured the carnage on video and shared their stories both in and out of court is a testament to the massive reforms needed to hold those within the orbit of law enforcement more consistently accountable. We shouldn’t have to count on officers breaking ranks or judges to press for diverse juries, when history shows us this almost never happens. To turn the Chauvin outcome from a vanishingly rare exception to the rule requires a top-down rethink of not just policing but our entire justice system. Ultimately we must remove the discrepant veil of protection around those serving in a public capacity and make it more difficult for law enforcement and other state officials to escape legal consequences for clear, egregious abuses of power.

Instead of teaching generations of young Black men how to navigate a society that doesn’t respect Black life and a policing culture that seems hell-bent on killing them year in and year out, we should be addressing the systemic factors that feed the cycle of racial injustice in America.

Excerpts:
 

“The events of that day and the rise of Black Lives Matter protests across the globe have been seared into our minds and the history books for decades to come – and that’s because of the remarkable courage of many people and the conviction of one.

The courage was demonstrated by Darnella and other witnesses who stepped forward to counter the excuses of the legal defense team. In addition to Darnella, who testified in the trial of the killer, others who showed great courage were Jena Scurry, a 911 dispatcher who reported her concerns about the treatment of Floyd; Alisha Oyler, who was working nearby and took video recordings; Donald Williams II, a mixed martial arts fighter who warned the police that they were killing Floyd; Judeah Reynolds, Darnella’s 9-year-old cousin who also witnessed the murder; Alyssa Funari, another 17-year-old girl who recorded the killing; Kaylynn Gilbert, also 17, who witnessed the murder; Genevieve Hansen, a firefighter who offered to render aid to Floyd and was rebuffed by the police officers; Christopher Belfrey, who videotaped the murder; and Christopher Martin, a 19-year-old store clerk who had reported Floyd’s use of a counterfeit bill and later observed the murder.

It’s especially notable that so many of the witnesses who came forward were young people, people who had reason to fear the consequences of their bravery. Many of these young women and men were Black – and all were familiar with the frequent stories of police harassment and violence against their community. These witnesses took the stand seeking justice for Floyd, regretting their inability to stop the murder and anxiously calling for accountability. Their courage should serve as an inspiration to all of us. What if each of us were given the chance to stand up to police brutality? Would we be as brave? As Dr. Martin Luther King noted, “we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Our country was well-served by these brave young people who spoke out to demand justice.”

[…]

“This story is also unusual because it resulted in a conviction. According to Mapping Police Violence, 7,666 police officers killed someone in the U.S. between 2013 and 2019. Mapping Police Violence defines a police killing as “a case where a person dies as a result of being shot, beaten, restrained, intentionally hit by a police vehicle, pepper sprayed, tasered, or otherwise harmed by police officers, whether on-duty or off-duty.” Of the 7,666 cases, only 25 officers were convicted of a crime. In another 74 cases, the officers were charged with a crime but not convicted. In 99% of the cases, officers were not charged with any crime whatsoever.”

Further reading:

• One year after George Floyd’s death: Courage and conviction drive movement
• ‘I allowed myself to feel guilty for a very long time’: the teenage cashier who took George Floyd’s $20 bill
• Derek Chauvin Verdict Brings a Rare Rebuke of Police Misconduct
• Derek Chauvin’s trial shows cracks in blue wall of silence
• Derek Chauvin trial testimony by police brass is unprecedented
• Police shootings: Trials, convictions are rare for officers
• From Berlin to Syria, street artists are honouring George Floyd
• In Germany, George Floyd’s Death Sparks Protests — And Artwork That Honors His Life
• ‘My emotions were so raw’: The people creating art to remember George Floyd

Feature image credit: Flickr / Lorrie Shaull

 
 
A story out of Evanston, Illinois has garnered national attention. The city has voted to pay a sum of $400,000 to qualifying Black residents. Naturally, this has set off a firestorm of controversy within the local community and across the country. I fully expect to see a slack-jawed Tucker Carlson segment in the coming days. Reparations as an idea has never been popular among Americans, on either side of the political aisle. But advocates hope that the Chicago suburb’s pioneering efforts will help the concept pick up political currency and serve as a blueprint for other cities and states across the US.

For those who may not be familiar with the conversation on reparations, there’s no better place to start than with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay, The Case for Reparations. He begins with the premise that racist policies of the past created a race-based wealth disparity that compounded with each new generation. A key point he makes in the piece is that even if we could somehow make all current policies and culture race-neutral, the effects of the past would still leave us with the problem of racial inequality. Thus changing current policy without addressing past inequities is inadequate. One way to do this is to pay reparations to the inheritors of historical injustice.

A lot of the anti-reparations rhetoric that gets passed around today is grounded in incredulity (and latent or undisguised racism of course, but we’ll ignore that more obvious motivator for now). ‘How would something like this even work?’ ‘Who would qualify’? ‘When would it end’? In fact, this is not the Rubik’s cube type of dilemma many make it out to be. Smart people have been working on this issue for years and have drafted a number of formal proposals at the state and local levels. It also wouldn’t be the first time the US government paid out reparations to its citizens.

Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln signed into law an act that ended slavery in the District of Columbia and promised federal compensation to slaveowners, who weren’t so much asking skeptical questions as making strong demands for their change in fortune. With the Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862, the government paid former slaveholders up to $300 (equivalent to $8,000 in 2019) for each slave released to compensate them for their “lost property.” Southern slaveowners at the time ridiculed the impracticality of such a plan, but in the end virtually all of the appropriated funding in the act was paid out. Similar legislation was defeated in Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri in the years leading up to 1865.

Later, during Reconstruction, the government promised 40 acres and a mule to all freed Black men. Unlike the straight cash payments provided to white slaveowners, this one never came to pass. The policy was reversed by Andrew Johnson, with the promise made to the freed Blacks of the South never fulfilled. (Who else never learned about this in grade school?) Thus when the question at issue was the protection of slaveowners’ ‘property’ rights, legislators saw fit to provide restitution. But when the recipients of the compensation turned to freed Blacks — the victims of an immoral institution — the government reneged on its promise. The US government has always deemed people of color unworthy of participating in the American dream or sharing in its vast wealth.

This may seem like ancient history but this had long-term effects on the Black population, as property ownership was one of the key factors in the white population becoming relatively well off and without said land generations of Black people lived in poverty working for white farmers. The USDA concluded in a 1997 study that the reversal of this policy led to steep declines in Black agriculture. These effects only compounded with redlining, a set of discriminatory lending policies that sprang from FDR’s New Deal.

Redlining was initially used by Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (a corporation founded and sponsored by the government as part of the New Deal) to determine which American neighborhoods were eligible or “suitable” for a loan. They mapped neighborhoods according to a color rating system, ranging from GREEN for the best rating to RED for the worst rating (i.e., no lending). Neighborhoods where *any Black people* — even just ONE Black person or family — lived often were marked in red, given the lowest rating, and thereby ruled ineligible for home or business loans. As Coates writes:

“Neither the percentage of Black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

“A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”

Over the next few decades, this practice not only systematically starved Black communities of economic resources — commonly referred to as the forced “ghettoization” of Black neighborhoods — it also created a strong financial incentive for white homogeneity that stretched across American suburbia. By artificially raising the value of white neighborhoods and white-owned property, it reinforced associations of blackness with poverty, which in turn fueled educational inequality, perpetuated de facto segregation through white self-segregation and “white flight,” drove up intergenerational wealth for whites, and stigmatized diverse neighborhoods, no matter how safe, friendly, or stable.

While redlining officially ended in 1977, its effects continue to be felt to this day. A 2018 report found that 74% of neighborhoods HOLC graded as high-risk or “hazardous” are low-to-moderate income neighborhoods today, while 64% of the neighborhoods graded “hazardous” are minority neighborhoods today. “It’s as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty,” said Jason Richardson, director of research at the NCRC. An earlier study from 2017 found that areas deemed high-risk by HOLC’s maps saw an increase in racial segregation over the next 30–35 years, as well as a long-run decline in home ownership, house values, and credit scores. Finally, a 2020 study in American Sociological Review found that HOLC practices led to substantial and persistent increases in racial residential segregation.

Several states and localities, including California, Amherst, Massachusetts, Asheville, North Carolina, Iowa City, Iowa, and Providence, Rhode Island, have considered reparations measures in recent years to right these historical wrongs. Evanston, Illinois looks like it will be the first to actually follow through with it. That a Chicago suburb would be the pilot city for a program like this is especially fitting given that Chicago suffered some of the harshest effects of redlining policies throughout the previous century.

Evanston’s implementation, however, comes with some pretty large asterisks attached. First, it’s not direct cash payments that Black residents, which make up 16% of Evanston’s population, will receive. Instead the funds are to be used specifically for mortgage-related payments, including down payments, or home repairs and improvements. Second, due to the plan’s stringent requirements, only about 20 people in the town are even eligible to receive the payments, which amount to $25,000 per resident.

Given these limitations, some critics on the left argue we shouldn’t consider these reparations at all but as more of a low-key Section 8 housing program that fewer than two dozen people will benefit from. It’s a fair point, though it’s important to keep in mind that this initial $400,000 tranche is part of the city’s pledge to spend a total of $10 million in reparations over the next decade. We don’t yet know what form later compensation efforts will take, and at any rate, it makes sense to focus on housing out of the gate due to the structural injuries suffered by the surrounding community over many decades.

While hardly an ideal version of what many activists championing reparations have in mind, this is clearly a first stab at something that was always going to be met with widespread cultural hostility. Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that a proposal with broader and less conditioned forms of compensation more in line with mainstream progressive advocacy would have been dead on arrival. The city council passed the measure with an 8-1 vote, but you can already see the rancorous pushback up and down the political spectrum. Black reparations ideas are hugely unpopular in the US: a Reuters poll last year found that only 20% of Americans support using “taxpayer money to pay damages to descendants of enslaved people in the United States,” including only a third of Democrats. And this was one month after the murder of George Floyd.

I personally view reparations for Black and indigenous communities as a necessary but not sufficient means of addressing the underlying systemic issues baked into the American social fabric. It’s less about addressing racism itself than elevating Black people in our nation to a more fair place. The remnants of slavery, Reconstruction era policy, and redlining still impact these communities and leave individuals more vulnerable as a result. Direct compensation, while a form of remedial justice, doesn’t strike at the root problems that vein through the institutions of American life.

We might draw an analogy here to the climate crisis. While scrubbing the air of carbon dioxide might help offset some of the planet-warming emissions for which we are responsible, it does nothing to blunt the emissions themselves. At the same time, when the damage is all around us, anything we can do to remedy present and future suffering should be on the table.

Although it’s obvious that we need to go beyond simply giving structurally disadvantaged groups money to deal with racism, I view Evanston’s initiative as a step in the right direction. We have to start somewhere, and in the US even the first step can prove an insurmountable challenge (see the tumultuous history of the single-payer healthcare debate for reference). Those who instinctively shoot down reparations as a concept must ask themselves what, specifically, they propose we do to remedy the race-based disparities evident in society today. After all, structural racism won’t be fixed overnight, and continuing to hold out for sweeping change overlooks the easier-to-implement policies that can be accomplished now. Waiting around for Congressional or other top-down measures, meanwhile, only perpetuates the standing inequities indefinitely, not unlike how delaying proximate or near-term actions on climate change snowballs the impacts to be felt down the road.

Truly upsetting the racial balance of power and prosperity in America will require broader and more radical reforms than can be found in this proposal. But to expect those reforms to come in the opening act is to place an undue burden on a small city like Evanston. That organizers and activists around the state managed to achieve this important milestone is noteworthy in itself. To be sure, we’ll need deeper economic development and autonomy for affected communities to help correct for centuries of past injustice, but housing assistance paid directly to Black residents is no small start.

Further reading and resources:

• As Evanston, Illinois approves reparations for Black residents, will the country follow?
• The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• What is Owed by Nikole Hannah-Jones
• The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations by HBS Professor Mihir Desai
• Redlining was banned 50 years ago. It’s still hurting minorities today.
• We Built This: Consequences of New Deal Era Intervention in America’s Racial Geography
• How Structural Racism Works
• US black-white inequality in 6 stark charts
• The Racial Wealth Gap in America
• Examining the Black-white wealth gap
• The Black-White Wage Gap Is as Big as It Was in 1950

 
 
An old acquaintance from church, a little younger than my dad, so near-boomer, reached out to me tonight on Facebook to discuss Black Lives Matter. Apparently he took issue with a comment I had posted to a mutual’s thread and wanted to register his disagreement with me over DM. He’s a white man who has unfortunately latched onto a lot of the misinformation and conserva-ganda that circulates about the movement. He writes:
 

“I wanted to message you privately. I dont want to start a big thing. From everything I have seen, there are leaders that raise money from corporations and individuals and gave stated goals as an organization. Defund police, tearing down statues and promoting violence when necessary. They are also funding the Democratic party through a pac. I can gather a little of the information I have seen and send to you. I watched Patrisse Cullors state her leadership is quote, “Marxist trained.” Their ideology is very flawed.”

 
Oftentimes I’ll ignore these messages, but he seemed sincere enough and at the very least calm and collected and open to hearing a different perspective. So, I gave him mine. Below is what I wrote back, lightly edited for clarity. I decided to share this in case it can help others navigate their own conversations on racial issues.

Regarding Black Lives Matter, I’ve probably seen a lot of the same things you have shared on Facebook and elsewhere. Surely this won’t come as a surprise, but not everything people share on the internet is accurate or grounded in reality. Much of what goes ‘viral’ tends toward the provocative and the inflammatory and is often created for exactly that purpose. The reward for those who share it comes in the form of outsize engagement, but it also feeds the fractious state of our political environment and exacerbates the highly partisan atmosphere in this country. Whether it be from hardline partisans or coordinated trolls working on behalf of foreign actors, a significant chunk of what we see online is put there to mislead you.

This intent to deceive grows more pronounced when something in our society becomes political — for example, whether to wear a mask, whether vaccines are safe and effective, and yes, whether the BLM movement is a cause worth supporting. In each of these cases, we can count on bad-faith actors and ideologues to swoop in and spread misinformation in an effort to bias people in a particular direction. It’s highly effective in most cases because their messaging will inevitably find its way to innocent and relatively uninformed people, who then spread the misinfo to their own receptive social circles, and on it goes. You may have heard the quote “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

This being the case, where we get our information from matters. Personally, I prefer to get my information from books, academic journals, and articles written by reputed journalists, with a nod toward those with actual expertise in a matter, as I consider these types of sources more reliable. By contrast, memes, hot takes from narrowly informed friends and random strangers, or heavily edited clips shared to social media are far down the list of what I would (or anyone should) consider reliable and trustworthy.

The link I posted in the thread earlier is a review that I wrote of a scholarly book on the BLM movement. I found the book to be tremendously helpful in outlining the historical context behind the movement, its original purpose and intent, and where it goes from here. If you have time, I recommend reading that review and possibly picking up the book as well if you’re so inclined.

In brief, Black Lives Matter is a grassroots movement with no formal structure. Though it was initially founded in 2013 by three women from the US, the movement has blossomed over the years and now has an international presence. About as close as it gets to a formal structure is when someone starts a local chapter at their university or in their city to band together with other like-minded activists to advocate for social change, but other than that the movement is very loosely organized.

Consistent with any such movement or ideology that’s attained critical mass, the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ has proceeded to take on a number of different perspectives, interpretations, and goals. While the aspirations and tactics of those who act under its banner vary, the movement is generally if not universally marked by an acute concern for racial injustice. Those who support BLM and use the slogan do so in an effort to speak out against systemic violence against Black people, most notably at the hands of law enforcement, and other racial inequities pervasive in our society. They’re not all Democrats or liberals, and they’re not all “Marxists”. I personally know a number of conservatives who support BLM, enthusiastically use the slogan in conversation, and proudly display its signage on social media.
 

 
And that’s because BLM isn’t just a movement. It’s also a statement of basic solidarity. The phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ is simply an acknowledgement that Black people are often treated differently in our society, especially by the justice system, compared to white people. It’s a pointed response to a society that seems to disproportionately discard Black bodies as though they don’t matter. It’s looking at the pain and terror and death inflicted on this community by police in America and saying, ‘This is not okay. This needs to stop. I stand with you.’ You don’t have to be Black or a liberal or a Democrat or a socialist or a “Marxist” to understand and affirm this. You merely need to be someone who cares for the plight of people who’ve been put at a structural disadvantage through no fault of their own. There is absolutely nothing about this phrase that should be remotely controversial.

So when you say things like, “their ideology is very flawed,” you’re missing the point that the phrase isn’t associated with or beholden to any single ideology or belief system. It’s okay to disagree with individual people who identify themselves with BLM, but it’s another thing entirely to reject or dismiss the phrase out of hand, as it demonstrates a misunderstanding of what it’s meant to represent. BLM is ultimately about respect and fair treatment for Black people across this country. And if someone can’t understand that, it’s because they’ve chosen not to. They’ve wittingly or unwittingly accepted the misleading rhetoric peddled by partisan hacks and have refused to correct their ignorance despite the profusion of opportunity available to them.

Don’t be that person. Set your politics aside for a moment, and take the time to familiarize yourself with the relevant history. Arm yourself with the facts. Dive into the many resources that have already been prepared for you by those seeking to inform others. As white people who are not subject to the same lived experiences as our Black brothers and sisters, the very least we can do is strive to deepen our understanding and find common ground. I’m not saying you need to go out and buy the T-shirt tomorrow, but I am saying that your attitude towards BLM should be shaped by accurate information and come from a place of genuine empathy.
 

Further reading and resources:

• Review: The Making of Black Lives Matter
• Review: Between the World and Me
• Anti-racism: What does the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ mean?
• 4 Black Lives Matter Myths Debunked | Decoded
• From Donating to Volunteering: Here’s How to Support Black Lives Matter, Protesters and Equality Initiatives
• 16 Books About Race That Every White Person Should Read
• Want To Be an Antiracist? Here’s A Place To Start
• 103 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice
• Anti-racism resources
• Black Lives Matter resources doc

Feature image credit: Corbis via Getty Images; Copyright: 2020 Ira L. Black

 
 
I feel a mix of inspiration, remorse, and frustration to know that the conversation around mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex was happening in earnest at the turn of the century — as I was making my way through middle school. Inspiration because brilliant intellectuals like Angela Davis have challenged the status quo for decades now, beckoning us to reimagine our approach to state punishment as more of our fellow citizens begin a new life behind bars. Remorse because so much of this conversation is as new to me as it is utterly shocking. But mostly I feel frustration that after all these years, advocacy efforts continue to be thwarted by perverse incentives and structural inertia.

Angela Yvonne Davis is no stranger to the injustice of the American prison system, having served a 16-month stint in New York City in 1971, partly in solitary confinement. She was briefly placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list courtesy of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, at the time only the third woman to make the list. She was ultimately acquitted of all charges. Following her incarceration, Davis became an icon for the prison abolition movement, spearheading a number of causes and organizations, including Critical Resistance, a grassroots group dedicated to dismantling the global prison industrial complex. Her treatise, Are Prisons Obsolete?, shines a light on the catastrophe of mass incarceration, examining its origins and evolution, and points us toward a new vision of justice.

Regrettably, the problems she identifies have only grown more pressing in the wake of her bracing manifesto. Writing in 2003, Davis cites an incarcerated population of 2.1 million, while the latest figure from the Prison Policy Initiative stands at 2.3 million. To unpack this number a bit further, as of last count there are 2,270,800 people confined to 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails, not inclusive of those in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the US territories. If we expand the scope to all US adults under some form of correctional supervision, the number swells to 6.8 million. These figures can be contrasted, as Davis does, with the late 1960s, when the prison population stood at under 200,000.
 

Incarcerated Americans, 1920-2014

 
These are not typos. By any measure, the US has by far the largest prison population in the world and the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world. In fact, despite making up about 5% of the world’s population, the US accounts for between one-fifth and one-quarter of its prisoners. According to data compiled by World Prison Brief and the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research, the US rate is 655 per 100,000 people, versus 107 for Canada, 135 for England & Wales, 169 for Australia, 124 for Spain, 104 for Greece, 60 for Norway, 63 for Netherlands, 39 for Japan, and 37 for Iceland. No other country is within hailing distance when it comes to the number of citizens it locks up.
 

Incarceration rates by country, 1981-2007

 
In her introduction, Davis reflects back on how dramatically, and how quickly, these numbers have grown since she took up the mantle of confronting one of the largest and most consistent state-sponsored social programs of our time:
 

“When I first became involved in antiprison activism during the late 1960s, I was astounded to learn that there were then close to two hundred thousand people in prison. Had anyone told me that in three decades ten times as many people would be locked away in cages, I would have been absolutely incredulous. I imagine that I would have responded something like this: ‘As racist and undemocratic as this country may be, I do not believe that the U.S. government will be able to lock up so many people without producing powerful public resistance. No, this will never happen, not unless this country plunges into fascism.'” (p. 11)

 
The situation becomes more troublesome when you parse the data from the perspective of race. Seventy percent of the US prison population today is composed of racial minorities, with Black women and Native Americans the fastest growing groups in this pie. As is also well known, the Black imprisonment rate is more than 5 times the white imprisonment rate, and the rate for African American women is more than twice that of white women. For 2018, 1,730 out of every 100,000 African Americans were behind bars, while the equivalent Hispanic and white per-capita rates were 856 and 274, respectively. Again, if you think those are typos, you haven’t been paying attention.
 

US prison population by race, ethnicity, and gender, 2015

 
A different way of thinking about this is that although African Americans and Hispanics make up 32% of the US population, they comprise over half — 56% in 2015 — of all incarcerated people. If African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%. Tell me that wouldn’t save a hefty chunk of the more than $80 billion the US government spends on imprisonment every year.

Davis explains how the effects of mass incarceration have always fallen most heavily on African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latinx communities:
 

“The racialization of crime…did not wither away as the country became increasingly removed from slavery. Proof that crimes continues to be imputed to color resides in the many evocations of ‘racial profiling’ in our time. That it is possible to be targeted by the police for no other reason than the color of one’s skin is not mere speculation. Police departments in major urban areas have admitted the existence of formal procedures designed to maximize the numbers of African Americans and Latinos arrested—even in the absence of probable cause.” (p. 31)

 
You might think that the era of incarceration in which we still live at least has logical or defensible origins. You might think, as I once did, that our heightened avidity for removing growing numbers of citizens from society and placing them behind bars was coincident with rising levels of crime. But in fact, during the Reagan-Bush years, when the “tough on crime” ethos took center stage and crime was hyped as among the greatest social ills of the day, crime statistics of all varieties, including homicides and property crimes, were in decline.
 

Homicide Rate in the US per 100,000, 1960-2016

Property Crime in the United States, 1960-2014

 
Both the murder and property crime rates peaked in 1980, and were already falling by the time Reagan took office. Though violent crime saw a brief resurgence in the late 1980s and early 90s, it fell sharply afterward and has continued to decline over the past quarter century. A very similar story played out for the property crime rate, which peaked in 1980, increased between Reagan’s second term and Bush Sr.’s first term, and has consistently declined thereafter. Yet inmate counts continue to climb.

What did happen, which has ended up accounting for much of the increase in the US prison population, was an expansion of criminalized behavior. As Davis notes, at the same time that prison construction took flight across the country, “draconian drug laws were being enacted, and ‘three-strikes’ provisions were on the agendas of many states.” Akin to how a broadening of diagnostic techniques accounts at least in part for the increase in cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in recent decades, new classifications of criminal conduct help explain the proliferation of imprisoned persons. This shift in focus manifested in harsher sentencing practices for petty drug offenses and disproportionate numbers of incarcerated Black and Brown Americans. Today, there are more people behind bars for drug offenses than all of the people who were in prison or jail for any crime in 1980.

As our prison population started spiraling, media coverage generated greater interest in crime-centric lawmakers and a consequent demand for more and larger prisons. Of course, the sorts of crimes that garner broad public interest are not the sorts of crimes for which increasing numbers of people were being sent to jail, but that didn’t stop local news from concentrating its attention on murders and shootings, which were falling throughout the 1990s. As journalist Vince Beiser reported in 2001, “According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, crime coverage was the number-one topic on the nightly news over the past decade. From 1990 to 1998, homicide rates dropped by half nationwide, but homicide stories on the three major networks rose almost fourfold.” During this pivotal decade, when its influence could have helped move the needle in the opposite direction, mainstream media’s role in shaping public perceptions of crime instead abetted politicians and interest groups whose success was wedded to mass incarceration.

Our incarceration binge thus began with opportunistic politicians creating false narratives about public endangerment from criminal elements, which fostered waves of new legislation, including tougher sentencing laws that kept offenders locked up longer. An ongoing prison construction boom shortly followed, carving out niches for private industry in the form of lucrative government contracts. This unprecedented deployment of capital was matched by enormous social costs absorbed principally by communities of color for generations. Meanwhile, the misleading narratives coming from the top were zealously fed by the media, preying on the public’s fear of crime to boost ratings and thereby reinvigorating support for legislative crackdowns along with new bursts of spending on federal and state penitentiaries.

The Prison Industrial Complex

With or without hindsight, it should have been obvious that such a pernicious cycle — kept afloat by Republican and Democrat administrations alike — would culminate in what we refer to today as the prison industrial complex (PIC). Though our understanding of this phenomenon has evolved over time, Davis describes it as the sprawling web of relationships that exist between private entities and the prison institution, together with the incentive structures that sustain it. Despite the tangible associations the term tends to connote, it is not an isolated, physical entity but a far more sinister force that since its inception has served to exacerbate a number of existing social problems.
 

“Since the 1980s, the prison system has become increasingly ensconced in the economic, political and ideological life of the United States and the transnational trafficking in U.S. commodities, culture, and ideas. Thus, the prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards’ unions, and legislative and court agendas.” (p. 107)

 
Due to the tremendous demand for prison space that accompanies the war on crime, and the large variety of goods and services a skyrocketing prison population requires, corporate involvement in state punishment has escalated over the last four decades. From construction contracts and surveillance technologies to health care, food, and phones, private companies sell their products to correctional facilities in all fifty states, deepening the ties between punishment and profit. And as publicly managed facilities have become overcrowded, federal and state governments have increasingly turned to private companies to share in the housing burden.
 

“At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the numerous private prison companies operating in the United States own and operate facilities that hold 91,828 federal and state prisoners. Texas and Oklahoma can claim the largest number of people in private prisons…In arrangements reminiscent of the convict lease system [in the aftermath of the Civil War], federal, state, and county governments pay private companies a fee for each inmate, which means that private companies have a stake in retaining prisoners as long as possible, and in keeping their facilities filled.” (p. 95)

 
Though private prisons still make up a minority of total prisons in America, the trend toward for-profit prisons is an alarming one. Davis cites Joel Dyer in his book The Perpetual Prison Machine: How America Profits from Crime: “In 2000 there were twenty-six for-profit prison corporations in the United States that operated approximately 150 facilities in twenty-eight states.”

I wanted more recent data on this, so I did some desk research. Since 2000, the federal prison system alone has seen a 120% increase in the use of private prisons, with the number of people housed in private facilities growing 47% over this period. As of 2016, 128,063 people serve their time in for-profit prisons, or 8.5% of the total state and federal prison population. And now, with the previous Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to overturn the Obama-era policy that sought to phase out private prison contracts, we can expect the growing corporatization of the prison economy to continue well into the future.

Women and Gendered Punishment

Davis also delves into the unique challenges women face in the prison, in what may be the most eye opening chapter of the book. It wasn’t until the 1870s, thanks to the decadeslong struggle of Quaker reformers, that separate prisons for women started to appear in the United States. But because the prison is an environment originally devised by and constructed for men, gender-specific accommodations have always been lacking, even in the twenty-first century.

There are now more than 111,000 women in prison nationwide, a large majority of whom have chronic histories of physical and substance abuse, HIV, hepatitis and other illnesses. The differing health care and other needs of women and men is a reality not often reflected at the institutional level. Private sector involvement in both women’s and men’s prisons, moreover, means that those signing the checks tend to cater to the lowest common denominator, without consideration of the needs or vulnerabilities of female inmates.

Integral to this history is how preconceptions about gender have informed the ways in which the state has punished women. Women historically have been given harsher sentences than men, which Davis owes to the markedly different attitudes society has about women convicts compared to their male counterparts. “Masculine criminality,” Davis writes, “has always been deemed more ‘normal’ than feminine criminality.” (p. 66) Therefore a woman committing the same crime as a man must be that much more socially deviant and criminal in nature, with fewer possibilities for reform and redemption.
 

“Male punishment was linked ideologically to penitence and reform. The very forfeiture of rights and liberties implied that with self-reflection, religious study, and work, male convicts could achieve redemption and could recover these rights and liberties. However, since women were not acknowledged as securely in possession of these rights, they were not eligible to participate in this process of redemption. According to dominant views, women convicts were irrevocably fallen women, with no possibility of salvation. If male criminals were considered to be public individuals who had simply violated the social contract, female criminals were seen as having transgressed fundamental moral principles of womanhood.” (pp. 69-70)

 
These sexist tropes went on to dictate the gendered punishment programs administered by the state. Unlike the rehabilitation efforts afforded men which focused on isolation and hard labor, programs for women centered more on promoting domestic skills. This was surely a reflection of the fact that not only did women have fewer rights than men, but they also had fewer options both in and outside the prison walls. Drawing from Joanne Belknap’s work, the aim of one of the first US reformatories opened in 1874 was to:
 

“…train the prisoners in the “important” female role of domesticity. Thus an important role of the reform movement in women’s prisons was to encourage and ingrain “appropriate” gender roles, such as vocational training in cooking, sewing and cleaning. To accommodate these goals, the reformatory cottages were usually designed with kitchens, living rooms, and even some nurseries for prisoners with infants.” (p. 71)

 
Those women that could not be “reformed” in the traditional sense would be passed off to the clinician and issued psychoactive substances as treatment. Here again, because of the perception that female crime was unorthodox and outside the bounds of normal female behavior, perpetrators were deemed to be of unsound mind. This meant that women, unlike men, were more likely to be treated clinically rather than criminally, with more women serving time in psychiatric institutions than in prisons. “That is,” Davis sums up, “deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.” This paradigm runs through to present day, with imprisoned women far more likely than men to be given psychiatric drugs as part of their treatment plan.

Though modern conditions in women’s prisons are no doubt an improvement over historical times in terms of more humane treatment and the variety of services available, in many ways the system has failed to keep pace with the changes that the introduction of greater numbers of women requires. The widespread and well documented sexual abuse of imprisoned women presents an enduring crisis for which the state cannot relinquish responsibility. Routinization of practices like the strip search and body cavity search, often conducted by male officers, amounts to state-sanctioned sexual assault, as recounted by ex-incarcerated activists like Assata Shakur — now living in Cuba after being granted political asylum in 1984 — and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and illustrated in hit series like Orange is the New Black.
 

“As the level of repression in women’s prisons increases…sexual abuse…has become an institutionalized component of punishment behind prison walls. Although guard-on-prisoner sexual abuse is not sanctioned as such, the widespread leniency with which offending officers are treated suggests that for women, prison is a space in which the threat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger society is effectively sanctioned as a routine aspect of the landscape of punishment behind prison walls.” (pp. 77-78)

Abolition, Not Reform

Finally, Davis turns to alternative approaches to incarceration. If we conclude that the prison has indeed become obsolete, with what do we replace them? Where will all of the prisoners — the murderers and the rapists — go? What might that society look like? Given how the prison as an institution is so deeply embedded in our social psyche, the mere idea of abolishing it can seem rather daunting. Davis argues that this is the wrong way to think about such a formidable problem, urging us to think bigger.
 

“It is true that if we focus myopically on the existing system…it is very hard to imagine a structurally similar system capable of handling such a vast population of lawbreakers. If, however, we shift our attention from the prison, perceived as an isolated institution, to the set of relationships that comprise the prison industrial complex, it may be easier to think about alternatives. In other words, a more complicated framework may yield more options than if we simply attempt to discover a single substitute for the prison system. The first step, then, would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system.” (p. 106)

 
In her view, the key to upending the status quo lies in untangling the relationships that cement the PIC as a seemingly permanent fixture of our society. At a minimum, this means divorcing corporate profit from state punishment by reducing reliance on private prisons and removing the economic incentives that make the PIC tick. It also means dislodging the prison from our social consciousness — in short, removing its ever present stamp on our society. It involves cutting the mic of self-seeking politicians, correcting the historical record on crime, and disseminating the facts about US incarceration. And it entails communicating a bold, progressive vision that lends inspiration for the future and seeks to mend what has already been broken.

An unabashed countercultural revolutionary for the better part of her life, Davis isn’t one to soft pedal the radical transformations realizing such a vision will require. To meaningfully confront the epidemic of mass incarceration and usher in a more egalitarian system of justice, she insists we target both ends of the pipeline: not only rolling back many of the wrongheaded legislative decisions of the past forty years, but also addressing the systemic issues that create vacuums for crime.

What might this look like in practice? Eliminating excessive sentencing rules such as mandatory minimums; applying greater pressure to prosecutors and law enforcement with respect to transparency and accountability; formally ending the colossally misconceived war on drugs; shoring up immigrant’s rights and protections for refugees fleeing harsh conditions in their own countries; decriminalizing sex work; and shifting our penal priorities in the direction of rehabilitation, substance abuse prevention, educational reforms, and correcting the pervasive inequality, both economic and racial, that threatens the fabric of US society.
 

“An abolitionist approach…would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.

Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.” (pp. 107-108)

 
Davis is careful to note that this doesn’t mean we forsake the needs of the currently incarcerated in our quest for more just horizons. We still must bring an end to the profit motive underlying the unethical practices and outcomes caused by lapses in officer training, understaffing and overcrowding in our prisons, for instance, so long as those institutions persist. The lives and human rights of prisoners will always matter, even as we fight to terminate the conditions and systems that put them there in the first place.
 

“Radical opposition to the global prison industrial complex sees the antiprison movement as a vital means of expanding the terrain on which the quest for democracy will unfold. This movement is thus antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist, and antihomophobic. It calls for the abolition of the prison as the dominant mode of punishment but at the same time recognizes the need for genuine solidarity with the millions of men, women, and children who are behind bars. A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system.” (p. 103)

Closing Thoughts

Angela Davis has been on the front lines of the prison abolition and decarceration movements for longer than I’ve been alive. In her careful yet uncompromising book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis presents a compelling case that the prison as an institution intended to solve our social problems is beyond saving. Rather than mitigating the racism, misogyny, toxic masculinity, sexual violence and other constants in our society, Davis says our current system merely hides them away — where they take on a “ghastly vitality behind prison walls” — and renders them less visible to the public eye. She invites us to consider whether carceral approaches to justice are still, or ever were, valid. Does locking more people in cages actually enhance public safety, or, as the evidence suggests, lead to recidivism and accelerate the cycle of poverty and racial inequity?

She further asks us to envision a society no longer in need of prisons. Though this closing section could have been more developed, Davis sprinkles in more than enough ideas and real world examples to jumpstart the conversation. For the United States to embrace sustainable alternatives, we will need to kick our unhealthy obsession with punishment and begin diverting resources away from the prison industrial complex to which we’ve collectively succumbed and toward housing, accessible health care, education, drug treatment programs, and jobs for disadvantaged communities. Perhaps then we will have cultivated a society in which the School and other institutions of promise achieve more cultural resonance than the Prison.

Further reading and resources:

• Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex
• Critical Resistance project
• The 13th
• How We Got to Two Million: How did the Land of the Free become the world’s leading jailer?
• Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020
• The Sentencing Project
• NAACP Criminal Justice Fact Sheet
• Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Statistics

 
 
The movement Black Lives Matter emerged onto the social justice scene in 2013 following the murder of 17 year-old Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman, his killer. Founded by three women — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — its goal has been to shine a light on the systemic injustice, expressed in violence and targeted discrimination, that haunts men and women of color across America, and to make equal rights and equal dignity a reality, not merely at the level of the law but at the level of everyday life.

As more names and more bodies have piled up behind Trayvon Martin, including Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, John Crawford, Marlene Pinnock, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and countless others, Black Lives Matter has become a call to action that challenges all Americans to reckon with the horrors of police brutality and the modern criminal justice system and the endemic racial woes that have been allowed to fester in our society for far too long.

“Thus, it was the death and failure of our justice system to account for the unnecessary death of a black American that prompted three women to offer these three basic and urgent words to the American people: black lives matter.” So writes Christopher Lebron, a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins University, in the introduction to his excellent 2017 primer on the movement, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea.

From the start, BLM has been a loosely organized grassroots movement with no formal structure. It has since grown and blossomed and now has an international presence. Accompanied by hashtags and T-shirts sporting the ubiquitous slogan, like-minded activists have formed dozens of local chapters that regularly engage in organized protests and political demonstrations. Its rapid cultural uptake has also inspired a number of sister groups like the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and Campaign Zero.

Consistent with any movement or ideology that’s attained critical mass, BLM has taken on a number of different perspectives, interpretations, and goals. While the aspirations and tactics of those who act under its banner vary and may not always align with the views of its founders, the diversified movement is generally if not universally marked by an acute concern for human rights and its uncompromising demands for racial justice.

Lebron captures the unorthodoxy of the movement thusly: “Eschewing traditional hierarchical leadership models, the movement cannot be identified with any single leader or small group of leaders, despite the role Cullors, Tometi, and Garza played in giving us the social movement hashtag that will likely define our generation. Rather, #BlackLivesMatter represents an ideal that motivates, mobilizes, and informs the actions and programs of many local branches of the movement.”

While the decentralized, pro-communal ethos of BLM fosters greater intellectual and political diversity and allows for more fluidity in terms of organizing, its informal nature also leaves its core principles and ambitions open to interpretation. In practice, this suscepts the movement to unfair, distorted, or otherwise wide-of-the-mark characterizations, both by those seeking to sustain the injustice the movement is meant to dismantle as well as by those who operate under its name. Therein lies the impetus behind Lebron’s book. As he explains, “The Black Power generation had in the sharp and brave tome penned by Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton, Black Power, a published manifesto and theoretical edifice. In contrast, no such text exists to provide the philosophical moorings of #BlackLivesMatter.”

To construct his canonical text, Lebron marshals the generative insights of a roster of heralded black intellectuals like James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Zora Neale Hurston, Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, and Langston Hughes, charting their unique contributions to black intellectual and creative life. During the course of this process, he touches on everything from black political expression and civic engagement to issues of gender, sexuality, and artistic expression in the black community.

From this richly textured history we see how the legacies of previous black influencers have informed the racial struggle movements of contemporary times. By probing deeper into each of these legacies, Lebron manages to craft an eloquent, authoritative primer that grounds the Black Lives Matter movement alongside an enduring tradition of black resistance against the institutional inequality of American life.

As is to be expected with an intellectual history rooted in philosophical ideals, Lebron’s book is dense and not for the faint of heart. While the scholarly tone may be off-putting to some, he packs plenty of insight into its slim, 150-page frame. How much one gets out of this book may ultimately depend on the volume and flavor of ideological baggage with which one goes into it. Those harboring ill will toward the movement will inevitably find ways to nourish that enmity despite its broad informational value, while those already on board with the movement’s essential purpose and its means and methods will walk away rejuvenated in the fight for racial progress.

But no matter one’s politics, color, or creed, it is incumbent upon all decent people to lend a fair and honest hearing to our generation’s defining social justice movement. Lebron’s sweeping distillations of generations of black thought and insight are worth the entry price alone, and the ways in which he connects historical activism to modern day struggles should bring renewed clarity to those pursuing a more equal and just world.

I have little doubt that Lebron’s careful, compelling book will maintain its relevance beyond the current era, but I would be remiss were I to conclude this review without mentioning how today’s political environment shapes the urgency of its message. The ascendance of Trump and the all too familiar themes of white supremacy encoded in his rhetoric have brought the subject of race and racial politics into the national spotlight once more.

While it is true that white supremacists and their co-conspirators were around long before Trump, it’s become increasingly clear that the current president has emboldened this contingent like never before. We’ve observed an alarming uptick in hate crimes since the day he took office, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other human rights groups. That is to say, the disreputables to which demagogues like Trump cater are no longer concealed behind societal expectations of decency and civility, but are out in broad daylight, spreading their hate and dehumanizing minority groups in record numbers.

It is in these historical moments that our moral mettle is tested. Those of us with privilege are invited to join hands with the oppressed and push back against the surge of intolerance that threatens black lives and black dignity and all peoples subjected to indecent treatment — because complacency in the face of unchecked hate is a choice.

Excerpts

I’ve pulled a few of my favorite excerpts from the book to include here.

“Such shame seemed to take on a sharper and, if it can be imagined, more urgent tone after the Emancipation Proclamation had ended slavery but had failed to usher in an era of genuine black freedom. While blacks were unshackled from plantations, whites reminded them that their freedom remained dependent on whites’ goodwill. But that goodwill was not forthcoming. Instead, the era of black lynching and Jim Crow filled the space formerly occupied by slavery. As Reconstruction crumbled under President Andrew Johnson’s hammer blows, institutions relied less on controlling black bodies for labor and started controlling them with segregation and brutal punishment. White supremacy increasingly became an unmediated relationship between common white and black Americans as well as between blacks and institutions that were de facto and often de jure agents of white power interests.” (p. 3)

“The notion of black criminality was essential for white supremacists. If blacks were going to roam American streets free, then they were a threat to the lives of good, upstanding whites, and the government could not be counted on to practice exacting justice. Completely unfounded charges of crimes were offered up to turn the gears of racial vengeance within communities and institutions. Once these gears began moving, almost no person or institution could or would prevent the ensuing barbarity…By some estimates, more than 3,400 black Americans were lynched between 1862 and 1968.” (p. 4)

“The essence of radical politics is using unsanctioned means to effect change to disrupt the status quo.” ( p. 63)

“In present times, a common refrain to the slogan “black lives matter” is the disingenuous retort, “all lives matter.” This retort subverts the message of the original slogan by semi-sincerely worrying that to insist black lives matter must somehow mean that black lives matter more than other lives–in other words, those insisting that all lives matter are really concerned about what they perceive to be a fundamental inequality in the status of lives based on race. To these individuals it seems arbitrary that equality would be qualified by skin color. Of course, to most black observers, this is the height of bitter irony since the precise substance of saying “black lives matter” is to instate a nonarbitrary form of equality that eliminates the systematic endangerment of black lives, whether at the hands of the police by gunshot or at the welfare office through resource withholding.” (pp. 81-82)

“Were Cooper a present-day activist she would most certainly admire Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the three black women who founded BlackLivesMatter.org. Their position has been that #blacklivesmatter must encompass black lives on both sides of the gender divide and across the spectrum of sexual identification. Cooper was one of the most important early feminist thinkers to argue that black women are worthy humans—their skin color was not a warrant for dehumanizing them; their sex was not a reason for rendering them invisible, mute, and usable.” (p. 83)

“For Lorde, blacks who did not support gay rights, especially those of black gays and lesbians, failed to see that the struggle of homosexuals was not of a different kind from their own, but, rather, was simply taking place in a different key.” (p. 94)

“James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. were powerful proponents of the role of love in American race relations. For them, love was the key to democratic redemption.” (p. 99)

“The use of nonviolent protest as a cornerstone for national moral progress remains one of King’s enduring contributions to American society, and it was grounded in the notion of love.” (p. xix)

“The average white American in the middle of the twentieth century did not grasp that “separate but equal” was a moral offense against blacks. Blacks saw deeper into that principle—they rightly perceived that separate meant quite the opposite of equal and that Jim Crow was white supremacy by any means necessary.” (pp. 101-102)

“Blacks, then, face a very tangible predicament. Baldwin’s call for blacks to love themselves is demanding, but his additional call for blacks to love whites despite the pains and torments of racial oppression can sometimes seem unreasonably demanding. It calls to mind a kind of schizophrenia in which my self-respect requires anger against white power but in which my soul also requires that I be compassionate despite the rage.” (p. 112)

“What has gone wrong in the claim that “all lives matter” is not that it is false. Rather, it is beside the point as a matter of both hubris and lack of imagination. Further, it obfuscates the question of identity altogether as well as the different kinds of value placed on various identities.” (p. 143)

“The person who wonders why Sandra Bland spoke back to the cop in question cannot see what Sandra saw—an imminent threat to her personhood. Bland’s, and everyone else’s death, then, is a false enigma, a puzzle easily solved with the key of white privilege.” (p. 155)

“Do or do not black lives matter? We still wait for America’s response. But the question has been asked, the conversation is being demanded, and there are yet other futures to be written if we so will it.” (p. 151)

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

 
 
This is not an easy book for white people to read. Nor should it be, because it is not easy for black people to read and learn about their historical travails, much less navigate the same, yet different world in which white and black people, collectively, live out their existence. Coates forcefully articulates the invidious, discriminatory past that has chased and haunted people of darker skin across the ages — a history with great and heavy repercussions which can never truly be atoned for or erased. Too much taken, and too much lost that can never be recovered: lives, livelihoods, memories, culture, possibilities, dignity. America’s is a past with a pulse, one that cuts across demography and state lines, across tax brackets and social strata. And because it is lived by each and every black man, woman, and child in America today, we must never lose sight of it.

Addressed to his adolescent son, Between the World and Me recounts Coates’s story as a youth growing up in Baltimore, his dawning awareness of black-white relations in America, and his personal journey to find peace and enlightenment amid the struggle. Equal parts intellectual and emotional, what he gives to his son is a headstrong portrait of being black in America.

You will hear about his time at Howard University, upon learning that his gifted and charismatic friend was gunned down, sans provocation, by police, with little in the way of justice to follow. You will hear about how what should have been a pleasant night out with his young son in the Upper East Side turned out to be memorable for all of the wrong reasons. You will see the names of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, John Crawford, Marlene Pinnock, and Tamir Rice — and the echoes of their plights — plastered throughout these pages.

None of this is new. But little of it is acknowledged, and its magnitude understood even less. Coates’s message is not for white people to plead guilty en masse for every problem wracking black communities today, but rather to come to terms with the history that has led us to where we are today and be willing to listen to those whose experiences are not our own. And though we, as white people, may be unable to cognize these experiences directly, we can still be vigilant and considerate of how this history affects their every waking moment and infiltrates nearly all aspects of their lives.

The acknowledgment of the divide before us should come with ease. It is this: the lived-in experience of blacks in Western cultures is not something to which people of white skin have access. Systemic or institutionalized racism is not something white Westerners can mantle for themselves.

“But white people can be poor, too!” cries the disaffected white person unbeknowingly conflating racism with the demographics of poverty. Because, after all, being white and poor is not the same as being black and poor, recalling President Lyndon Johnson’s sentiment from 1965. One cannot correct for or reengineer racist people and racist institutions overnight. The exploitation of the weak by the strong has been a facet of American society dating back to its inception. People in privileged positions, as a function of their race and status owing to this history, have a head start, and traditionally this has excluded black people.

For this and other reasons, we must not do away with the very notion of race. There are two streams of thought found among academic and more mainstream discourse today. One holds that there is no such thing as race: we all are one species (Homo sapiens) that descended from a common ancestor in Africa some two hundred thousand years ago. Race, for this camp, serves only as a token of division, one we are better off without. The other maintains that race has been a persistent feature of human relations throughout our history, and because of this persistence, it is a real phenomenon which helps explain various socioeconomic disparities evident in society.

Wishing the construct of race had never emerged might be an interesting counterfactual thought experiment, but the fact is that it did emerge and thus cannot be ignored given the fallout of its societal penetration. The ontology of race is undeniable; it set people of darker skin on separate trajectories, with vastly different historical outcomes from those of white descent. Hence regardless of whether “whiteness” and “blackness” are constructs with purely social or biological dimensions, the realities they brought forth are self-evident and still manifest in the modern era. They are constructs with consequences. To disacknowledge the palpable inequities racial identity has wrought — or racial identity itself — is to paper over our past and may subvert the project of redress.

Ta-Nehisi Coates was awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grant for this work, and it’s not difficult to see why. He writes with a raw emotion and effortless profundity that is unparalleled among living writers. As I absorbed his polished prose and clever yet subtle use of metaphor, I was continually brought back to Zora Neale Hurston and her many great literary treasures. And yet absent those things, it is the power of his message that leaves the lasting impression.

Postscript: I highly recommend pairing Coates’s book with his earlier essay, “The Case for Reparations,” which appeared in The Atlantic, as the two complement one another really well. While the former is an autobiography with all the energy of a poetry slam, the latter is more a factual recapitulation of the racist divisions running throughout America’s past. Both articulate, each in their discerning way, why these divisions are deep and irreparable, how they heaped both tangible and intangible harm upon black communities, and why it is the intangibles that make plenary redress impossible. Acknowledgment and avowal of the past may not be enough, but it’s a good start.

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

Further reading:

• How Ta-Nehisi Coates’s letter to his son about being black in America became a bestseller
• With Atlantic article on reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates sees payoff for years of struggle
• Ta-Nehisi Coates and writing about race in America
• Solving the Riddle of Race (Marks 2016); ScienceDirect

Feature image via The Guardian