From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapter 3-Chapter 5

Chapter 6-Chapter 7

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapter 3-Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “Black Faces in High Places”

In Chapter 3, Taylor opens with a discussion of the murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Baltimore police’s frequent and noted engagement in violent behavior against Black people. What distinguishes Baltimore from other cities where well-known instances of police murder of unarmed Black people have taken place is that the city is run by a Black political establishment. The fact introduces Taylor’s claim that the unprecedented growth of the Black political class has done little to change the material conditions, consequences, and experiences of ordinary Black Americans. In fact, Taylor asserts, Black political elites function as the interlocutors between the political establishment and the Black population because they have the unique capability of disciplining ordinary Black citizens in a way that their white counterparts cannot. They do so under the guise of racial solidarity, while invoking Black stereotypes and maintaining the American Dream myth that absolves the system of culpability for the conditions of Black life. Taylor’s aim in Chapter 3 is to explore the rise of the Black elite class and its consequences for poor and working-class Black people.

The integration of Black politicians into the mainstream political apparatus coincided with the effort to build a small Black middle class through government employment and technical/professional employment. While small, the Black middle-class functions to vindicate capitalism and perpetuate the myths of meritocracy and equal opportunity. The rise of the Black middle class made their interests of political importance because they shared values and goals with the political elite, and many of the elected Black officials were recruited from their ranks. The rise of this Black economic and political elite also coincided with a strategic shift towards electoral politics as the radical resistance movements of the 1960s receded. Electoral politics, along with Black control and ownership in predominantly Black cities, came to be seen as more “logical” and “pragmatic” alternatives to Black rebellion.

The election of Carl Stokes in the 1967 mayoral race of Cleveland, Ohio, demonstrates how the strategy was put into play, as well as the consequences of a Black elite whose interests diverge from those of its Black constituency. Stokes received support from the Democratic Party, the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, the SCLC, the Urban League, the National Council of Negro Women, and the Ford Foundation. He also received support from the local industrial and capitalist class. The slogan, “Keep it Cool for Carl” signified a commitment to quelling Black uprising. In addition, he was sure to emphasize his commitment to all of Cleveland, not just its Black population, although he did make many promises to the Black population to improve social conditions. Once in office, Stokes appointed a white police chief with a 43-year tenure, upgraded police weaponry, gave businesses a disproportionate role in local economic development, repressed Black rebellion, and played on fear of crime in Black neighborhoods to gain support for his re-election.

The turn to electoral politics was also evident on the national level. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) debuted in 1970, claiming to “arrive in Congress with a clear sense of their constituency and their objectives as Black elected officials” (89). Taylor points out that although they were perceived as a radical political force, they emphasized their “pragmatism” in contrast to Black protest, and their activity was limited to “hearings and studies quantifying Black oppression” (91). In other words, the CBC proved relatively useless. They moved away from community politics and a race-based agenda as they settled into the norms of congressional politics and moved further right with the mainstream. The move to the right was observable among all Black politicians as they conformed to the objectives of the Democratic Party, also subject to the shift towards right-leaning politics.

Taylor contextualizes the rise of the Black political establishment within the deindustrialization beginning in the 1950s and continuing into the 1970s, as well as Reagan’s draconian cuts to social spending in the 1980s. Black politicians inherited an economic crisis in Black communities and had few resources to deal with that crisis. Thus, many Black politicians embraced the idea of business development and privatizing public resources. For example, the National Black Leadership Round Table (NBLRT) of 1972 actively promoted the growth of Black capitalism as the key to Black survival, in addition to calling for law and order. Taylor provides examples of several Black elected officials who granted tax relief for private development, used taxpayer funds to build prisons, and led assaults on Black protest organizations. In the 1980s and 1990s, Black politicians signed off on legislation that bolstered mass incarceration and its disproportionate effects on the Black community.

Taylor emphasizes that her point is not to “simply assign blame to Black elected officials for the catastrophic conditions in Black communities” (102), but rather to point out the fruition of the turn to electoral politics as an alternative strategy to Black protest. Black political access and power, from the dawn of electoral politics as the dominant strategy to today’s Black political figures, is defined by the complicity of Black politicians in the prevailing ideologies and maneuverings of the American political establishment. This includes blaming Black people for their hardships and further punishing them for the effects of poverty, rather than instituting systemic changes that would alter those conditions. Furthermore, it illuminates the distance between the Black political elite and ordinary Black people. The 21st century uprisings, then, not only expose police brutality, but also highlight the ineffectiveness of Black politicians in terms of improving the conditions of poor and working-class Black realities.

Chapter 4 Summary: “The Double Standard of Justice”

As Taylor opens Chapter 4, she notes that police presence and harm has been a consistent feature of Black life and experience. Not only is police harm a tangible reminder of the limits of formal equality, but the consistency of anti-Blackness and attacks on the poor and working class reflect law enforcement’s role as armed agents of the state whose function is to “enforce the rule of the politically powerful and the economic elite” (108). The racism of the police overlaps with the elite’s need to “create a racialized political economy” (108).

While Taylor notes that historians locate one of the origins of modern policing in 19th century slave patrols, she emphasizes the transformation of the police state in post-Emancipation racism. With the need to maintain a labor supply following Emancipation, many states across the South instituted laws, known as Black Codes, that conflated Blackness with criminality. The creation of Black Codes coincided with the creation of convict-leasing. Per the loophole in the 13th Amendment that allowed incarcerated people to be treated as slaves, convict-leasing was a legal practice that re-created the conditions of slavery by sentencing “criminals” to hard labor as punishment for the vaguely-defined crimes in Black Codes. Police were deployed to enforce Black Codes and provide a perpetual supply of labor for the elite planter class. This was in addition to the extra-judicial policing of newly-freed Black Americans by ordinary white citizens.

The conflation of Blackness with criminality continued into the 20th century and became a part of the national “common-sense” consciousness, even among the Black elite. Particularly, employment and housing discrimination in Northern cities played a key role in perpetuating the conflation of Blackness with criminality because the “concentration and effects of Black poverty provided a constant pretext for police incursions, arrests, and violence” (113). The police displayed racism not only through their own violence, but also by refusing to intervene or joining in when ordinary white citizens terrorized Black communities. Tensions reached a peak in the 1940s as race riots broke out across the nation. The proliferation of racism across the nation, not merely the South, resulted in Black Americans’ bringing attention to the incongruity between inequality and America’s promises of democracy.

When Black urban rebellions broke out in the 1960s, it made the urban crisis an issue of political importance to the Johnson administration. While the urban crisis was defined by numerous issues—“poor housing, police brutality, poor schools, and unemployment, among many others” (115)—Taylor notes that that the riots were almost always ignited by police brutality. Despite evidence of the antagonistic relationship between Black communities and law enforcement, the Johnson administration’s response to the urban crisis was the Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. The Commission’s central focus was “improving” policing by further professionalizing law enforcement and recruiting Black officers. The Commission also argued that the problem was Black lawlessness and recast Black protest as criminal activity. As Taylor notes, diversifying law enforcement and increasing professionalization has done little to mitigate the tensions between Black communities and law enforcement. Even Black police officers perpetrate undue violence against Black citizens.

Taylor identifies three distinct but overlapping and connected periods of post-civil rights era policing: the War on Drugs, Clinton’s crime regime, and the War on Terror. Each period increased “scrutiny, surveillance, policing, and imprisonment of all working-class people, but especially African Americans” (119) and culminated in the phenomenon of mass incarceration. Taylor provides statistics on the skyrocketing prison populations fueled by these eras of policing, noting that the rising crime rates and prison population coincided with cuts to the welfare state and social services. At the same time, there were increased budgets for law enforcement and prison construction. The War on Terror prompted the increased militarization of the police through military weaponry under the pretense of increasing the nation’s security against “potential terrorist targets” (120).

The function of law enforcement in policing poverty is even more evident in the 21st century as the police “‘clean up’” the consequences” (123) of cuts to social services that would mitigate the impact of poverty. For example, those without private insurance and in need of mental health treatment are often arrested and imprisoned. Another example is the increasing criminalization of public displays of poverty, like sleeping on sidewalks, begging for money, and other victimless crimes. Taylor links this 21st-century approach to policing to the 1990s theory of “broken windows” policing, which argues that stopping “quality of life” and “nuisance” crimes would prevent serious crimes. There is no empirical evidence to support that “broken windows” is effective at preventing serious crime, and poor and working-class people are more likely to commit the “quality of life” and “nuisance” crimes that “broken windows” policing targets.

In addition, encounters with law enforcement mean that poor and working-class people are drawn into paying fines and fees, which are an increasing source of municipal revenue. Taylor sees this as legal extortion that shifts the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor. Because of the disproportionate impact of policing on Black communities, Taylor amounts this municipal revenue to a “race tax.” Furthermore, she notes that law enforcement’s burden on taxpayer funds is taken for granted. While “[a]stronomical sums of taxpayer money” (130) are used “to settle police brutality and misconduct cases” (130), other public institutions, like “hospitals, clinics, libraries, [and] schools” (130) have their budgets cut or are privatized when they create municipal debt or face accusations of malfeasance. Police impunity contributes to their continued tendency to murder American citizens at rates astronomically higher than in other developed countries.

Although Black Americans disproportionately bear the brunt of police murders, non-Black people are also subject to the lawlessness of the police force. For Taylor, this not only indicates an American crisis, but also an objective basis for multiracial solidary against police terrorism. Taylor draws Chapter 4 to a close by reiterating that the police function as agents of social control in primarily poor and working-class communities. Efforts at police reform, such as Obama’s Task Force on Twenty-First Century Policing and Camden’s institution of community policing, do little to curb the disproportionate impact of the policing state on the overlapping communities of Black citizens and poor and working-class citizens and reveal the “poverty of the concept” (132) of police reform.

Chapter 5 Summary: “Barack Obama: The End of an Illusion”

In Chapter 5, Taylor turns her attention to Barack Obama and his administration. She begins by acknowledging the tenor of optimism among Black Americans in anticipation of and after Obama’s 2008 election. Obama distinguished himself from establishment politicians by campaigning against the war in Iraq, the Guantanamo military internment camp, and economic inequality, in addition to connecting with young people. His presidential persona turned out to be quite different from his campaign persona. However, even during his campaign, he was construed as far more left-leaning and radical than he actually was. For example, his March 2008 address in Philadelphia during the presidential campaign was his most comprehensive speech on race, but according to Taylor, it was couched in terms of “African American responsibility,” “American progress,” and “the vitality of the American dream” (138). He established his role as an “informed observer” of racial issues rather than as someone with the overwhelming power to effect change, and this role would continue during his presidency.

Taylor again notes the optimism and themes of “hope” and “change” among Black people regarding Obama’s potential presidency, especially among the younger generation. This optimism was reflected in the way that hip-hop artists endorsed Obama and the unprecedented voter turnout of Black millennials. However, the post-election euphoria quickly wore off as he exhibited his reluctance to directly address racial issues and his quickness to invoke anti-Black stereotypes and publicly admonish Black Americans for their perceived personal, behavioral, and cultural flaws. Black America’s collective recognition of Obama’s racial agenda, or lack therefore, came with his refusal to intervene on behalf of Troy Davis, an innocent Black man sentenced to execution by Georgia’s death penalty. Davis’s case was an international issue.

The protests that erupted leading up to and in the aftermath of Davis’s execution coincided with the Occupy Wall Street movement. The two protest encampments merged, effectively linking issues of racial injustice and economic injustice. While support for the Occupy Wall Street was higher among the Black population than the general population, the media seized on the opportunity to present the Occupy movement as “white.” However, as Taylor notes, the racial composition of Occupy activists varied from city to city, and there were tremendous efforts among Black Occupy activists to increase awareness of the movement in communities of color. Ultimately, the involvement of Black activists in the Occupy movement helped create space for structural critiques of Black poverty and economic inequality. Like other protest movements before, however, the vicious crackdown on Occupy protestors revealed the police’s role as state agents for the political and economic elite.

The murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman constituted a turning point in the illusion of a postracial America. Taylor attributes the widespread national protest response to the impact of the Occupy movement re-legitimizing street protests, occupation, and direct action as a proper response to displays of injustice. Obama, however, deflected questions about the case for weeks, and it took him over a month to finally make a statement. While the murder became a national and international embarrassment for the US, Obama signaled that the federal government would stay out the matter and leave it up to “local” authorities to resolve the issue. While Zimmerman’s eventual arrest was the outcome of weeks of protest and widespread attention facilitated by social media, he was exonerated. Furthermore, Martin was vilified as a thug and an aggressor.

Obama’s response in the aftermath of Zimmerman’s acquittal, which amounted to a “call for quiet, individual soul-searching” (150), communicated to the Black community that they would have to fend for themselves and could not rely on the political establishment, Black or otherwise, to address issues of racial injustice. In response to the acquittal and recognition of the limits of the political establishment, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi launched the Black Lives Matter movement. Charlene Carruthers and other Chicago activists formed the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100). Activists in Florida formed Dream Defenders and occupied the office of the Florida governor for 31 days. There was newly-developing young Black left activism, largely organized through social media, dedicated to “mass mobilizations, street demonstrations, and other direct actions” (151) to counter the ineffectiveness of the political establishment.

Chapter 3-Chapter 5 Analysis

The connecting theme of Chapters 3, 4, and 5 is the collusion among the political establishment, the capitalist class, and law enforcement to maintain the American myths of postracialism and meritocracy by policing Blackness and poverty. The Black elite plays an integral role in this maintenance because they are in the unique position of being able to validate the American system while exercising authority over poor and working-class Black communities under the guise of racial solidarity. However, their policies and rhetoric reveal a commitment to the political economy, i.e., the preservation of racial capitalism and the policing of Black poverty, rather than solidarity with the Black poor and working class.

As Taylor opens Chapter 4, she makes a significant point about the role of police in American society:

The racism of the police is not the product of vitriol; it flows from their role as armed agents of the state. The police function to enforce the rule of the politically powerful and the economic elite: this is why poor and working-class communities are so heavily policed. African Americans are overrepresented among the ranks of the poor and the working class, so police overwhelmingly focus on those neighborhoods, even as they direct their violence more generally against all working-class people, including whites. But the police also reflect and the reinforce the dominant ideology of the state that employs them, which also explains why they are inherently racist and resistant to substantive reform (108).

Given the “bad apples” rhetoric that has dominated contemporary media in regard to police killing unarmed Black people, Taylor’s statement wrests police violence from individual behavior and makes it a systemic matter. This connects to Taylor’s assertion in the Introduction that institutional racism is the best framework for understanding Black deprivation, as well as the discussion in Chapter 2 where Taylor notes Nixon’s use of “colorblind” rhetoric “to narrow the definition of racism to the intentions of individual actors” (63). Except for the Nixon discussion, much of Taylor’s focus about individual behavior has revolved around the way that the idea is used to vilify Black people and culture. She illuminates that the other side of the individual behavior narrative is its application to police. As both applications serve the purpose of absolving the state of culpability for the conditions it creates and maintains, Taylor’s statement argues that the individual behavior idea must be altogether abandoned, no matter to whom it is applied. None of the problems of American society can be chalked up to individual behavior.

In addition, the statement supports the central argument of the book: that police violence is not merely a reflection of racism, but rather it is a part of a larger matrix of systemic oppression undergirded by capitalism. At the same time, the statement draws an intimate relationship between racism and capitalism that cannot be ignored, which Taylor fully explains in Chapter 7. However, the connection is present in Chapter 4. As Taylor discusses Black Codes and the convict leasing system, it becomes clear that the conflation of Blackness with criminality was a tactic employed by the political and economic elite to keep a perpetual labor force after Emancipation had eroded the labor supply: “convict leasing became a new way for Southern employers to manipulate the law and resolve a perpetual labor shortage” (111).

Furthermore, even without being arrested and thrown into the convict leasing system, newly-freed Black people were expected to continue fulfilling their roles as laborers who propped up the elite planter class. Taylor alludes to the parallel between wage labor and slavery. Though not identical, they both serve the purpose of further enriching an elite class and maintaining the capitalist structure of the US, and the police are deployed to ensure that that maintenance happens.

Again, however, the problem of policing is not only a matter of racism. As “agents of social control in a society that is fundamentally unequal, which means that they largely function in poor and working-class communities” (133), police perpetrate violence against non-Black people as well. Taylor notes the “lethality that infuses American law enforcement” (130) when she discusses statistics from the Bureau of Justice that relay the astronomical number of American police killings in comparison to police killings in other developed countries and the death toll of American soldiers in Iraq (130). After citing statistics from a ProPublica study on police killing, Taylor writes:

If the estimates of the number of Black people killed by police in the last decades are true, then police have also murdered hundreds of Latinos and thousands of white people. Not only does this constitute a crisis, it also establishes an objective basis upon which a multiracial movement against police terrorism can be organized. The overwhelming racist nature of American policing obscures the range of its reach, but it is in the interests of anti-police brutality activists to point to the specific and generalized nature of police terror (131).

Taylor brings the specific and generalized nature of police terror and its reinforcement of the elite’s stronghold on political and economic power into sharper focus when she illuminates the role that Black politicians play in reinforcing the political economy of the US. Not only is the gap between the Black elite and ordinary Black citizens reflective of larger society, but like their white counterparts, Black politicians rely on the police state and Black stereotypes to reinforce the power of the elite. For example, in Chapter 3, she explains how Carl Stokes catered to the business class through the repression of Black rebellion and the invocation of Black stereotypes.

Earlier in the chapter, she notes that Mayor Rawlings-Blake and President Obama referred to Baltimore protestors as “criminals” and “thugs” without making any connection “between the desperate levels of poverty in Baltimore and the crime that exists in those communities” (78) in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death. Furthermore, Judge Barry G. Williams, a Black judge, “presided over the trial of Black police officer William G. Porter,” (77) who demonstrated severe negligence in the Gray incident by not buckling Gray into a seat belt or calling an ambulance after Gray’s injuries (77). Porter’s trial ended in a mistrial after the jury did not find his negligence to be a significant factor in Gray’s death. Referencing the late 1980s, Taylor emphasizes that Black elected officials supported “various aspects of the War on Drugs” (96) and promoted “an agenda that prioritized private investment over rebuilding the public infrastructure” (96). For example, Randy Primas authorized the New Jersey Department of Corrections to build a $55 million prison in North Camden.

These examples from the 1960s, 1980s, and 21st century demonstrate a continuity in the Black political establishment’s role as preservers of a legacy of overlapping racial and economic oppression that did not begin with them, but that they perpetuate in service to the political economy of the United States. They also demonstrate the distance between the Black elite and the constituency that suffers from their policies and rhetoric. Taylor underscores the point with her discussion of Barack Obama’s presidential tenure in Chapter 5. She opens the chapter with a passage from Tef Poe’s 2014 “Dear Mr. President: A Letter from Tef Poe,” in which Poe expresses the Black community’s disappointment in Obama’s response to the Ferguson rebellion. Poe writes that they speak on behalf of many and condemns Obama’s statement regarding Ferguson as an act of supporting the racial and economic oppression of the Black community.

Taylor’s inclusion of Poe’s excerpt points to both the invocation of stereotypical notions of Black Americans and the endorsement of “law and order” as the proper response to Black rebellion. As the occupant of the highest office in the nation, Obama becomes the most exemplary figure of the Black political establishment’s inefficacy. As Taylor notes, during both his campaign and his presidency, he strategically presented himself as “a thoughtful interlocutor between African Americans and the nation as a whole” (138), as if he didn’t have “the political influence to effect the changes of which he spoke” (138). Taylor raises the question of what point Black politicians serve, if not to use their power to improve the conditions of Black life.

It’s a question that she succinctly answers in Chapter 3 by noting that Black politicians summarily perpetuate the myths of postracialism and meritocracy by virtue of their existence as exemplars of Black success who have the perceived authority to denigrate ordinary Black people for not achieving the same success. The skillful way they do so is exemplified by Obama’s equivocating tone in the face of Black people’s righteous anger at injustice. For example, in his March 2008 Philadelphia speech, Taylor notes that he condemned Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s “God Damn America” sermon as a “divisive” and “profoundly distorted view” (137) of America. By contextualizing Wright’s sermon as the outcome of Wright’s upbringing in an America characterized by “legal discrimination” (137), there is both a simultaneous acknowledgement of American racism and a suggestion that legal discrimination is a thing of the past. Therefore, Wright’s anger is no longer justified from Obama’s perspective. Taylor points out that in that same speech, Obama used the rhetoric of personal responsibility and the suggestion that absentee fathers are a part of the Black community’s problems to counsel Black Americans. Both the myths of American postracialism and meritocracy are evident in the speech’s contents. Black despair becomes a matter of personal responsibility and cultural and family defects.

Another example is Obama’s response to Trayvon Martin’s murder and the acquittal of George Zimmerman. When he finally spoke publicly on Martin’s death after more than a month of deflecting questions, he stated, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. . .When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids” (148). There is a feigned racial solidarity that is belied when he signals that the federal government will stay out of the case and allow local authorities to deal with it. It is further belied in his response when he acknowledges that “passions may be running higher” (150) in the aftermath of Zimmerman’s acquittal, but that “a jury has spoken” (150). In other words, he counsels Black Americans to temper their anger and respect the American rule of law, as he does after the grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Mike Brown (169).

The emphasis on the rule of law fits within the pattern of the political establishment to respond to Black anger and rebellion at unjust outcomes by invoking “law and order” and the “rule of law,” rather than addressing the inherent inequality of the systemic structure by enacting structural change that mitigates the overlapping impact of racism and capitalism. Taylor’s articulation of the relationship among the political establishment, the capitalist class, and law enforcement, and the role that Black politicians play in that relationship, sets the stage for Chapter 6 by contextualizing why the BLM and new left activists see the need for working outside of the political establishment and challenging the political economy to bring about any change.

Stated succinctly in her concluding sentence for Chapter 5, “The Black political establishment, led by President Obama, had shown over and over again that it was not capable of the most basic task: keeping Black children alive. The young people would have to do it themselves” (152).