From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation

Taylor begins Chapter 1 with a discussion of Mike Brown’s murder and how law enforcement and the media cast doubt on his innocence by painting him as a possible criminal. She connects this tactic to a long history of invoking stereotypes about Black people to justify inequality. She locates the roots of these stereotypical notions of biological and cultural inferiority in the period of race-based enslavement and notes that the justification was driven by the need to maintain an unequal labor force, even as the nation’s founders promoted ideals of equality and freedom. Citing historian Barbara Fields on the role of ideology in manufacturing widespread interpretations of the social world, Taylor argues that the ideology of race functions to transform the material causes of Black inequality to subjective causes of Black inferiority, thereby absolving the state and capitalism of culpability for the conditions that they have created.

This raises the question of why the ideology of deflective Black culture is widely accepted, despite there being evidence of the material causes of Black inequality. Taylor attributes the widespread acceptance to the dissemination of the ideology by politicians (regardless of party) and mainstream media alike. The widespread dissemination functions to maintain the myths of American exceptionalism and the American Dream. It allows the political establishment to avoid the issue of class inequality. Not only does American exceptionalism simplify the contradictions between the American creed and the American reality, but it also obscures and rewrites the history of genocide, slavery, and the exploitation of immigrant workers that are foundational to the nation. In addition, the American Dream concept, first coined and popularized in the 1930s, was advanced by Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the turn to Keynesian economics, and the US’s post-World War II subsidies. The three factors propped up the American middle class and expanded the US economy. These benefits, while bolstering the idea of meritocracy, were not extended to Black Americans.

The Cold War, rebellions of colonized peoples against European powers, and the continued resistance of Black Americans to racism and poverty played a key role in the US taking a formal stance against racism, even as it continued to promote and expand an economic system intimately tied to racism. Because the Holocaust made racism and eugenics deeply unpopular, and in the face of the USSR’s potential influence over newly-independent countries, the US was concerned with rehabilitating its image and curbing the spread of communist ideology. Cold War liberalism involved the perpetuation of the American myth by, again, resorting to notions of Black cultural depravity that would explain away the contradictions between the American creed and the American experience. The “culture of poverty” narrative emerged in 1959 as a seeming shift away from biological racism, while also doing the work of deflecting attention away from the structural factors that created Black inequality.

However, Black activists were aware of and called attention to the links between economic and racial injustice. The continued experience of inequality because of the legality of discrimination in the form of housing and employment code prompted continued rebellion among the Black population. Black resistance then pushed the Johnson administration towards expansion of the welfare state and Black inclusion in its benefits. This helped to reframe the understanding of Black inequality in terms of an economic issue.

However, the political establishment’s response did not mean that they readily abandoned notions of the Black community’s problems being rooted in Black people themselves. In fact, the Moynihan Report of 1965 concluded that the problems of the Black community were rooted in the Black family, and this notion was accepted by liberals and conservatives alike. Similarly, the Kerner Commission of 1967, while calling for investment in social welfare programs, included cultural arguments about the Black family alongside its structural critiques. Thus, while the Black liberation movement pushed mainstream politics to the left and increased political polarization between liberals and conservatives, both sides of the political spectrum continued to perpetuate notions of Black cultural inferiority.

Taylor attributes the political establishment’s inability to fully reckon with institutional racism to their need to maintain America’s public image and avoid massive wealth redistribution. In other words, their acceptance and perpetuation of the idea of Black cultural inferiority is tied to an effort to disguise the systemic inequities of American capitalism. At the same time, she insists that there is hope because of the way that Black resistance movements illuminate that political ideas are fluid, and the political establishment can be moved to enact changes.

Taylor opens Chapter 2 by noting that the focus on institutional racism and movement to challenge it receded by the 1970s. It was replaced by “colorblind” rhetoric and coded language that demonized Black people, sociopolitical resistance, and the welfare state. This conservative turn in mainstream politics was largely aided by the Nixon administration. The conservative turn was not only a response to how the Black resistance movement upset the racial status quo, but also to how Black resistance catalyzed other social movements against oppression and threatened to upset American capitalism. Taylor’s aim in Chapter 2 is to explore the “ideological and political restoration of order in efforts to rehabilitate the system itself” (55).

Nixon’s strategy for restoration was seizing upon the anxieties and resentments of the white working class and the white business elite. The appeal to both poor and working-class white people based on racism and to the business elite was a direct result of the Black movement’s challenge to capitalism, which involved cross-racial solidarity among the working class. Furthermore, the Black resistance movement contributed to fissures between left- and right-wing camps in both the Democratic and Republican parties. This gave the Republican Party an opening to “reestablish itself as the political home for conservatives” (55). However, Nixon faced two challenges: one, that the 1960s had made overt racism unpopular; and two, that the poor and working-class white population he needed to integrate into his constituency benefited from the social welfare expansion that the Black movement prompted.

Thus, he resorted to coded language and innuendo that provided the pretext for expansion of the policing state and the gutting of social welfare programs. Nixon used language like “freedom of choice” and “mobility” that not only obscured institutional racism and narrowed the definition of racism to individual actions and behaviors, but also satisfied the business elite’s need to maintain the myth of the American Dream. This coincided with the physical repression of the Black liberation movement. Although the Johnson administration had already instituted legislation that conflated protesting with criminal activity, Nixon expanded on it with the passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Corporations (RICO) Act of 1970. The Act attacked the organized left and the Black population through an increase in surveillance and testimony that provided information about resistance organization. In addition, the emphasis on crime statistics, partly a result of the absorption of political rebellion into criminal activity, provided the justification for an increase in police presence in Black communities. Many historians chart the beginning of the phenomenon of mass incarceration in this era of increased “law and order.”

In addition, Nixon and his administration used the racially-coded language of “urban crisis” and “crisis people problem” to justify cutting social welfare programs. When he declared an end to the “urban crisis” in 1973, he was absolving the federal government of its responsibility to resolve the economic issues that the poor and working-class faced. “Urban,” of course, connoted the Black population. When George Romney, Nixon’s Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), referred to the housing issue as a “crisis people problem,” he was signaling that the Black community, not the federal government, was responsible for its own issues. Along with the language of “choice,” these racially-coded terms shifted culpability away from the system and made Black poverty an issue of individual responsibility, or lack thereof. However, as Taylor notes, while racially-coded language was integral to this conservative shift away from social welfare, it was really an attack on all poor and working-class people.

Taylor concludes Chapter 2 by asserting that “colorblindness” not only became the default for how Americans understand race and racism, but it also functioned as a tool of division for those with a common interest in dismantling capitalism. It effectively reinforced the American myth of meritocracy and ushered in the dismantling of the welfare state. Nixon, in effect, laid the ideological groundwork for the Reagan era and further assault on the poor and working-class, constituted disproportionately by Black Americans.