From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation

“This crisis goes beyond high incarceration rates; indeed the perpetuation of deeply ingrained stereotypes of African Americans as particularly dangerous, impervious to pain and suffering, careless and carefree, and exempt from empathy, solidarity, or basic humanity is what allows the police to kill Black people with no threat of punishment.”

Here, Taylor identifies the problem of anti-Black stereotypes that are used to absolve the state of its perpetuation of structural inequality. The promulgation of anti-Black stereotypes obscures institutional racism and instead locates Black inequality in perceived inherent Black inferiority and Black behavior, culture, and family. Blaming Black people for Black hardship is the subject of Chapter 1.

“In other words, the radical movement of ordinary Black people has forced the federal government and its leader, the most powerful political figure in the world, to account for the war against Black life. The challenge, of course, will be going from recognizing Black humanity to changing the institutions responsible for its degradation.”

This quote underscores a theme central to the book—that Black resistance prompts attention to structural inequality. It also raises the question of how BLM moves from protests as its primary action towards effecting institutional transformation.

“The Black experience unravels what we are supposed to know to be true about America itself—the land of milk and honey, the land where hard work makes dreams come true. This mythology is not benign: it serves as the United States’ self-declared invitation to intervene militarily and economically around the globe.”

Taylor points out that Black experience exposes that American exceptionalism, meritocracy, and equal opportunity are myths. The mention of both Black American experience and America’s actions around the globe draws the connection between America’s domestic and foreign policies, a connection that has the potential to create international solidarity with the Black American movement.

“American exceptionalism operates as a mythology of convenience that does a tremendous amount of work to simplify the contradiction between the apparent creed of US society and its much more complicated reality. Where people have failed to succeed or cash in on the abundance that American ingenuity has apparently created, their personal failures or deficiencies serve as the explanation.”

This quote explains the purpose that anti-Black stereotypes serve. Because Black experience illuminates that the American reality does not live up to America’s purported ideals, the state must absolve itself of culpability for Black poverty by locating the source of inequality in Black behavior and cultural deficiency.

“Cold War liberalism was a political framework that viewed American racial problems as existing outside of or unrelated to its political economy, and more importantly, as problems that could be fixed within the system itself by changing the laws and creating ‘equal opportunity.’ Themes of opportunity, hard work, resilience, and mobility could be contrasted to the perceptions of Soviet society as being impoverished because of its planned economies, prison labor, and infringement of freedom.”

The book highlights the ways the state’s formal stance against racism and its promotion of capitalism interacted as a strategy to rehabilitate America’s public image to the world. There is, however, a fundamental contradiction between antiracism and the promotion of capitalism, as capitalism relies on racist ideology for its maintenance. This quote also situates America’s racist political economy within the larger phenomenon of America’s global influence and dominance.

“The political uprisings of the 1960s, fueled by the Black insurgency, transformed American politics, including Americans’ basic understanding of the relationship between Black poverty and institutional racism—and, for some, capitalism.”

Taylor calls attention to the ways that Black resistance movements effect political change and influence public consciousness. Because a structural framework for analyzing society undergirds Black resistance movements, the connection between racial and economic injustice can be drawn.

“The politics of colorblindness helped to shroud not only racism but also its companion: the economic crisis of the early 1970s. At the precise moment when the Black movement was demanding enormous infrastructural investment to revive urban enclaves, the booming American economy of the postwar era was grinding to a halt. With its end came a relentless ideological assault on the kinds of public expenditures needed to attend to deep economic deprivation. Colorblindness helped to explain this retreat from public expenditure as the consequence of moral decay and the rise of criminality in the ‘inner city.’”

Taylor maps out the role of colorblindness in the conservative shift in 1970s politics. The gains of the Black resistance movement of the 1960s were formal equality before the law and the expansion of social welfare programs. However, it was precisely formal equality that allowed the colorblind paradigm to emerge, and the expansion of social welfare threatened the capitalist class. Colorblindness was an important strategy for recycling the narrative of Black cultural deficiency and irresponsibility, so that the entire welfare state could be rolled back, affecting not only Black communities but their poor and working-class white counterparts as well.

“It is important to understand ‘colorblindness’ as much more than the denial of racism. Colorblindness has become the default setting for how Americans understand how race and racism work. It is repeatedly argued that the absence of racial insult means that racial discrimination is not at play.”

The colorblind paradigm obscures the role that institutional racism continues to play in Black inequality. Its widespread acceptance by the public means that when Black people air racial grievances, they are largely accepted as illegitimate, not merely by the political class but also by the general population who would benefit from the exposure of institutional racism, since institutional racism is integral to class exploitation.

“Colorblindness is a critical weapon in the arsenal of the politically powerful and economic elite to divide those who have an interest in uniting to make demands on the state and capital to provide the means for a decent quality of life. Colorblindness and ‘postracial’ politics are vested in false ideas that the United States is a meritocratic society whose hard work makes the difference between those who are successful and those who are not.”

Again, Taylor explains how the colorblind paradigm functions to maintain both institutional racism and capitalism. Without a structural analysis of Black inequality, it becomes possible to blame Black people for their own poverty, thereby obscuring the role of class exploitation in the general population’s subjugation.

“Black elected officials obscure their actions under a cloak of imagined racial solidarity, while ignoring their role as arbiters of political power who willingly operate in a political terrain designed to exploit and oppress African Americans and other working-class people.”

Taylor presents the main idea of her argument about the inefficacy of the Black political elite. As functionaries of a larger political establishment that is invested in maintaining institutional racism and capitalism, they have the unique role of acting as intermediaries between the Black population and the political establishment. Under the guise of racial solidarity, they gain support from the Black community in elections, only to take office and impose policies and practices that are harmful to the Black community.

“Promoting more Black political participation on a local level was a project of the Black movement, but the broader political establishment approved. The government and politicians widely promoted greater Black control of urban space as a preventive measure against urban uprisings, from including Black businesses in the Small Business Administration to Richard Nixon’s fomenting Black capitalism to bipartisan support for greater homeownership in the inner city.”

Taylor illuminates that the emergence of a Black elite class and the turn to electoral politics was a part of the political establishment’s strategy to quell Black resistance and maintain the myths of meritocracy and equal opportunity. When Taylor notes that Black activists themselves saw electoral politics as a pragmatic alternative to protests, she is building to her argument that the outcome has not been beneficial to the Black community, hence the new activist generation’s turn to a strategy outside of electoral politics.

“Black politicians embrace programs that fleece and harm working-class African Americans because of the pressures of governing in the era of austerity budgets. Today’s Black elected officials are beholden to the same logic as their predecessors.”

This passage emphasizes the continuity between Black politicians in the aftermath of earlier movements and Black politicians today. The continuity not only demonstrates the inefficacy of the electoral politics strategy, but it also addresses the question that Taylor raises in the Introduction about why BLM emerged under the nation’s first Black president. Simply put, Black liberation is not a reality under a capitalist structure that is designed to exploit and oppress all poor and working-class people, of which most of the Black community is constituted.

“The daily harm caused by the mere presence of police in Black communities has been a consistent feature of Black urban history and, increasingly, Black suburban history. Police brutality has been a consistent badge of inferiority and second-class citizenship. When the police enforce the law inconsistently and become the agents of lawlessness and disorder, it serves as a tangible reminder of the incompleteness of formal equality.”

The history and ongoing presence of the antagonistic relationship between Black communities and law enforcement exposes the limits of formal equality and requires more deconstruction and transformation. This quote also demonstrates that there is no amount of police reform that could repair the relationship because the police function as armed agents of the state to “clean up” issues that are conditions of institutional racism and capitalism.

“Crime—where it is actually a problem—is treated as moral depravity instead of a product of poverty or social injustice, relieving the state of any obligation to address poverty; instead, it concentrates even more resources into policing.”

Taylor affirms that the state response to poverty is to absolve itself of responsibility and instead wield the policing apparatus to punish the poor. This connects to Taylor’s discussion in Chapter 1 where she illuminates how “culture of poverty” rhetoric and anti-Black stereotypes are used by the political establishment to justify the conditions of Black condition and avoid redirecting revenue to social services that would mitigate the impact of poverty

“Violence and brutality have always defined the police’s relationship to African Americans. There is no ‘golden age’ of policing to which elected officials can point, and there is little reason for optimism that American police can truly be reformed.”

Taylor repeats that the relationship between the Black community and law enforcement has always been antagonistic. She states that police reform will not resolve the issue. This quote is an important precursor to one of Taylor’s closing statements at the end of Chapter 7 where she asserts that radical transformation of America’s political economy would altogether eliminate the need for police, since their primary role is to police poverty.

“Obama has not shown nearly the same reticence when publicly chastising African Americans for a range for behaviors that read like a handbook on anti-Black stereotypes, from parenting skill and dietary choices to sexual mores and television-watching habits. These public admonishments work to close off the political space within which African Americans can express legitimate grievances about an economic recovery that has offered material relief to bankers and auto executives but only moral uplift to Black people.”

Connections are made in this passage to the points made in Chapter 3 about the role of Black politicians. They are in the unique position to admonish ordinary Black citizens in a way that white politicians could not. Having held the highest office in the nation, Obama epitomized the way that the Black political establishment is able to invoke anti-Black stereotypes in service to the broader political establishment and their maintenance of American meritocracy myth.

“None of this began with Obama, but it would be naive to think that African Americans were not considering the destructive impact of policing and incarceration when they turned out in droves to elect him. His unwillingness to address the effects of structural inequality eroded younger African Americans’ confidence in the transformative capacity of his presidency.”

Again, the discussion of Obama connects back to the discussion in Chapter 3. This quote comes with the added emphasis on the new generation’s resignation to the fact that electoral politics are not the most effective strategy for addressing structural inequality. Even with a Black man occupying the highest office in the nation, there is not much transformation to be had when the political establishment, regardless of race, is committed to maintaining institutions and ideologies that function to subjugate Black people.

“No one knew who would be the next Trayvon, but the increasing use of smartphone recording devices and social media seemed to quicken the pace at which incidents of police brutality became public. These tools being in the hands of ordinary citizens meant that families of victims were no longer dependent on the mainstream media’s interest: they could take their case straight to the public.”

Taylor illustrates the role of social media in the BLM movement. This quote illuminates the innovative strategies that the new movement employs to bring attention to institutional racism. In addition, it underscores the community-centered activism of the new movement, organized largely through social media.

“The tactical and strategic flexibility of the youth activists flowed from a developing politics that could not be constrained by a narrow agenda of voter registration or a simple electoral strategy. In Ferguson, these emerging politics were embodied by the emergence of young Black women as a central organizing force.”

Taylor pinpoints what largely distinguishes BLM from the civil rights era of the Black liberation struggle—that they generalize beyond specific cases and local issues, explore alternatives to electoral politics, and that young Black women are the driving force. These distinctions are significant because the focus and strategies of the newer movement create the potential for solidarity and activism on a larger scale.

“Narrowing the demands of the movement in order to retain focus does not mean narrowing its reach. The brilliance of the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ is its ability to articulate the dehumanizing aspects of anti-Black racism in the United States. The long-term strength of the movement will depend on its ability to reach large numbers of people by connecting the issue of police violence to the other ways that Black people are oppressed.”

Taylor reiterates the movement’s potential for solidarity and activism on a large scale. However, she implies that the movement is constrained by its demand for “freedom,” which is too large and abstract of a demand to effect any institutional change. Here, she suggests that articulating specific demands creates actionable goals towards the broader project of the radical revolution of society.

“The Black Lives Matter movement, from Ferguson to today, has created a feeling of pride and combativeness among a generation that this country has tried to kill, imprison, and simply disappear. The power of protest has been validated. For it to become even more effective, to affect the policing state, and to withstand opposition and attempts to infiltrate, subvert, and undermine what has been built, there must be more organization and coordination in the move from protest to movement.”

Taylor articulates that the BLM movement has illuminated that protest and direct action are valuable strategies for increasing awareness of institutional racism and galvanizing the population to demand change. Taylor asserts that organization and coordination are necessary to make the specific demands and effect the reform that she previously discussed as actionable steps towards radical revolution.

“The political and economic elite shape the ideological world we all live in, to their benefit. We live in a thoroughly racist society, so it should not be surprising that people have racist ideas. The more important question is under what circumstances those ideas can change. There is a clash between the prevailing ideology in society and people’s lived experience.”

Taylor implies that a change in public consciousness is possible despite widespread acceptance of the prevailing ideologies that allow the political economy of the US to remain in place. Because of the objective reality that all poor and working-class people are oppressed, and therefore can become present to this reality because of their lived experience, there is potential for solidarity among the masses that could bring about radical transformation of society and the elimination of the capitalist structure and its ideological underpinnings.

“The common experience of oppression and exploitation creates the potential for a united struggle to better the conditions of all. This is obviously not an automatic process, nor is it a given that essentially economic struggles will translate to support or struggle for the political rights of Blacks to be free of discrimination and racism. Political unity, including winning white workers to the centrality of racism in shaping the lived experiences of Black and Latino/a workers, is key to their own liberation.”

Taylor restates that the potential for solidarity lies in recognition of the common experience of class exploitation. Non-Black people have an investment in exposing and challenging institutional racism because it is intimately tied to capitalism, under which all poor and working-class people suffer. Thus, non-Black support for the Black liberation movement is support for human liberation.