After Black Lives Matter

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“After Black Lives Matter should be commended both for the clarity of its message and the bravery of its convictions.”
–Jay Caspian Kang,  New Yorker

Why did a movement as powerful as the one inspired by the murder of George Floyd fall short of securing its most militant demands?

The murder of George Floyd prompted a historic uprising that transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did that movement fall short of the most militant demands to defund and dismantle police departments? After Black Lives Matter argues that the failure to make institutional changes was not a simple result of the mercurial and reactive character of the protests. Rather, the core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial injustice that underpins the crisis of policing:socioeconomic inequality.

The anticapitalist and downwardly redistributive politics of many Black Lives Matter activists has too often been drowned out in the flood of black wealth creation, the fetishism of Jim Crow black entrepreneurship, corporate diversity initiatives, and a quixotic reparations demand. Contemporary policing reflects the turn from welfare to domestic warfare as the chief means of controlling the most dispossessed elementsof the working class.

The way forward lies in building popular democratic power to advance redistributive policies and social welfare.Introduction: The Frayed Thin Blue Line

1. Policing Capitalist Society
2. Making Consumers and Criminals: The Postwar Urban Transformation and the Origins of Policing as We Know It
3. The Roots of Black Lives Matter: Racial Liberalism and the Problem of Surplus Population
4. The World of Freddie Gray: Dispossession, Rebellion and Containment in Revanchist Baltimore
5. Whose Streets? Building the Just City in Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago and Beyond
6. The Labor of Occupation

Conclusion: Abolish the Conditions

Acknowledgments
Notes“A virtuoso performance! Weighing the successes and limitations of Black Lives Matter, Johnson concludes that identity-based mobilization—confusing what people look like with what they need—cannot substitute for majoritarian political coalition-building.”
—Barbara J. Fields, Columbia University

“Cedric Johnson delivers that increasingly rare experience in political writing: surprise. Whether telling the story of Louis Armstrong’s first hearing of Mack the Knife or reporting on the inequities of Chicago’s public transportation system or mounting a mini-memoir of his encounter with crime in Louisiana and Rochester, Johnson invests the drama of Marxist theory with new energy and vital detail. No matter how dark and dreary the landscape may be, it gets lit up wherever Johnson casts his sharp and appraising eye.”
—Corey Robin, author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

“A brilliant scholar who is first and foremost concerned with equality and justice. It’s those very commitments that lead him, in After Black Lives Matter, to question today’s antiracism and its nostrums.”
—Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto

“A compelling argument for reinstating a meaningful anticapitalist analysis and politics into the fight to end police violence and the harms of the criminal justice system in the United States. Readers will undoubtedly come away with new perspectives that deepen their understanding of the successes and limitations of Black Lives Matter and its political vision.”
—Leslie Kern, author of Feminist City

“Essential reading for those weary of platitude-driven texts on race and criminal justice and in the market for an empirically grounded political analysis that points to practicable solutions to one of the biggest problems of our day.”
—Touré F. Reed, author of Toward Freedom

“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…After Black Lives Matter should be commended both for the clarity of its message and the bravery of its convictions.”
—Jay Caspian Kang, New YorkerCedric Johnson is associate professor of African American Studies and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His book, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics was named the 2008 W.E.B. DuBois Outstanding Book of the Year by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Johnson is the editor of The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism and the Remaking of New Orleans. His 2017 Catalyst essay, “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” was awarded the 2018 Daniel Singer Millenium Prize. Johnson’s writings have appeared in Nonsite, Jacobin, New Political Science, New Labor Forum, Perspectives on Politics, Historical Materialism, and Journal of Developing Societies. In 2008, Johnson was named the Jon Garlock Labor Educator of the Year by the Rochester Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO. He previously served on the representative assembly for UIC United Faculty Local 6456.Given the sheer scale, magnitude and diversity of 2020’s resurgent Black Lives Matter protests, many pundits, scholars and activists celebrated the George Floyd rebellion as an historic watershed, one where the possibility of real reform came into view. For too  many, however, the euphoria of the moment suspended any criti- cal analysis of what it all meant. This is a deeper problem on the  US left—the tendency to read protests as always prefigurative rather than contingent, and as a manifestation of real power rather than a reflection of potential. Such wish-fulfillment think- ing, however, forgets that mass mobilization is not the same as  organized power, and that mass mobilization is much easier now with the endless opportunities for expressing discontent provided by social media, online petitions, memes and vlogging. The scale of protests can be misleading, and their actual effectiveness, regardless of their size, is dependent on historical conjunctures, such as the balance of political forces, the organized power and  capacity of opposition and the clarity of objectives among activists. Throughout the opening decades of this century, ever larger  protests have proved incapable of consolidating in a manner that might effectively oppose ruling-class prerogatives. In recent memory, we have witnessed successive mass protests—turn-of the-century demonstrations against global capitalism, protests against the Bush administration’s so-called War on Terror, Occupy Wall Street encampments, anti-eviction campaigns, the March for Our Lives following the Parkland High School mass shooting, protests against police violence and ICE deportations, among others—but these have done little to depose capitalist class power and the advancing neoliberal project. If anything, the hegemony of finance capital, the war-making powers of the national security state, the criminalization of immigration, the power of the gun lobby and the unaccountability of police are as entrenched as ever.

Some activists immediately seized on the 2020 protests as evidence of Black Lives Matter’s resonance, and it was clear at least from some public opinion polls that a new majority of Americans momentarily accepted the core claims of BLM.13 While many Americans now opposed the most racist excesses of policing, however, the majority did not accept the demands about defunding and dismantling police that many activists were now pushing.14 In Minneapolis, after a summer of intense protests, the majority of residents supported repurposing police funds towards social spending, but only 35 percent of black residents and 40 percent of whites wanted to see reductions in police staffing in their neighborhoods.15 This was true nationally as well, and across all racial and ethnic statistical groups. The George Floyd rebellion not only had the effect of intensifying public opposition to the Trump presidency, but also of bringing the internal contradictions of Black Lives Matter into sharper relief, in particular the tensions between the liberal valence of the slogan and the more progressive and radical left forces who have taken up the mantle.

During the Obama years, Black Lives Matter protests created a seeming crisis of legitimacy for policing as an institution. In one city after another, in social media threads and corpo- rate news coverage, Black Lives Matter shifted the terms of  debate, expanding public discussion from the specific demand for trial justice for victims and restitution for their families to demands for deeper systemic reforms and, in its most radical corners, the abolition of policing and prisons altogether. From its inception, however, Black Lives Matter was essentially an expression of racial liberalism, made more urgent and mili- tant by the context of the early Obama years. During Obama’s  campaign and through the opening years of his administration, the first black president faced a hail of racist attacks from Tea Party protestors and the Birthers, led by Trump, who questioned his citizenship and the constitutionality of his presidency. Such attacks were read by many black citizens against the backdrop of their own hardships due to the subprime mortgage crisis and the subsequent Great Recession. For many blacks, the racism towards Obama was symptomatic of the unresolved problem of the color line. If the BLM hashtag grew out of the rising political efficacy engendered by the Obama phenomenon, it was equally a rejection of the conservative claim that his election signaled the dawning of a post-racial society. Within the specific context of policing and vigilante violence, Black Lives Matter insisted that blacks deserve equal protection before the law, that is, direct and meaningful enforcement of the US Constitution—an absolutely  worthy and also definitionally liberal goal. In our twenty-first- century cultural landscape, the problem of unequal protection  has been captured graphically in viral videos of police killings and abuse of black citizens.

The most immediate impact of the hashtag and the kind of public monitoring of police activity it facilitated was to make public what were historically clandestine activities. Police torture and violence are a longer-standing problem, with generations  of formal complaints, litigation and activist campaigns as evi- dence. Black Lives Matter sentiments, however, combined with  societal surveillance and the instantaneous information flows of networked cellular communication, made these incidents more visible than ever before. In a manner reminiscent of the televised coverage of civil rights demonstrations, which forced some white northerners to witness the brutality experienced by black southerners demanding basic rights, the viral videos of  police killings created a similar dissonance between the much- vaunted progress symbolized in the election of Barack Obama  and the brutal treatment of black civilians by police. Millions of Americans became bystanders and witnesses to police violence. The videos, investigations and demonstrations that followed  undermined public trust in official reports that routinely justi- fied lethal force. Familiar defenses like “he was reaching into his  waistband,” “the suspect was the aggressor,” “she resisted arrest,” etc., were falsified by one viral video after another. The videos most often humanized the victims in ways that carefully worded press briefings and departmental chicanery would never permit, sparking a growing chorus demanding institutional reforms and immediate justice for the victims. 

In a few short years, the mass protests, public forums, pres- sure tactics and community organizing produced some notable  reforms aimed at creating greater police accountability and transparency and more public oversight and decision-making capacity. Cities like Baltimore and Chicago saw federal Justice Department investigations in response to well-publicized deaths in police custody. In numerous cities, offending officers were fired and, in some cases, indicted and brought to trial with mixed results. In Baltimore, all four of the officers involved in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray were indicted, but none were convicted of wrongdoing. In Chicago, Jason Van Dyke was convicted on sixteen counts of second-degree murder in the 2014 death of Laquan McDonald—one count for each shot Van Dyke fired into McDonald’s body. The Obama Task Force on 21st Century Policing recommended procedural modifications such as implicit bias training, revision of use-of-force policies, and processes that might identify problem officers. The administration also supported a federal program to underwrite the purchase of body cameras for local police departments.

During the Obama years, other state and local measures aimed at reforming the carceral regime came to fruition, many of them  aimed at repairing the damage of the War on Drugs and address- ing the ways that the poor are punished for survival crimes. Organizations like the Innocence Project worked to overturn  scores of wrongful convictions. Decriminalization and legal- ization of cannabis became a reality in the more urbane and progressive parts of the country, with some states including expungement and exoneration for previous, low-level cannabis  offenses as part of the legislation. Organizations like Just Lead- ership USA advanced a “Bill of Rights for Criminalized Workers” to address the unemployment and discrimination ex-offenders face.16 Decriminalization of sex work gained momentum in some  cities, especially those where such labor is a critical but dishon- ored and illegal aspect of the tourist economy, and where sex  workers face routine arrest and imprisonment as well as violence and precarity in an unregulated labor market. Other counties and states took steps towards ending cash bail, seen as a penalty on the poor and a cause of overcrowding in many jails. And many jurisdictions pushed for e-carceration, or the use of electronic monitoring rather than physical detention, as a way of uniting offenders with their families and communities and scaling back the carceral state.GB

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