After Black Lives Matter

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.