 The New York Times says that 2020 saw the largest protest movement in U.S. history, with polls suggesting that anywhere between 15 million and 26 million people participated in various protests over the summer and into the fall. I think for many people this was viewed as a turning point in the ongoing struggle for racial justice, particularly in the movement for Black lives that had seemed to be in a lull after the election of Donald Trump — 2020 was a kind of wild, roaring affirmation that Black lives matter. There has been very little protest since then, though, certainly nothing on the same scale. So what happened? Why do you think those protests with millions of people on the streets did not produce the kind of change that people thought it would?

My frustration with The New York Times calling this the largest movement is that it conflated the number of people going into the streets in the United States with organization. Organizers at Dream Defenders and elsewhere realized that those people weren’t absorbed into organizations in such a way to build campaigns toward eliminating some of the kinds of violence that put them into the streets in the first place. What is exciting is that the 2020 protests also made abolition and defund the police mainstream conversations, which I think is huge. Those ideas were met with a lot of curiosity. A lot of people learned about abolition through podcasts, through tweets, and through articles. Organizations, especially Black organizations, are grappling with what can be done with all of that energy that was on the streets. I think a lot of people were excited about defund and abolition but weren’t necessarily connected to a political home that was able to transform that mobilization into strategic organizing.

And then I think people were just up against a lot, in terms of reforms being offered as a solution. They were up against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which felt like a real solution that people think at least is something; or they saw that some cities decided to take funds away from the police. They didn’t anticipate that Florida and Texas would try to make it illegal to defund the police and take that power back.

There’s a resource issue, knowing, again, that sometimes we’re up against The New York Times, which let Bill Bratton say that we have “defunded the police,” which isn’t true. Sometimes we’re up against fascists who are banning books; sometimes we’re up against liberal politicians pushing bad policies like community policing. People who tout reform as a more “realistic opportunity” to make social change have resources to push those reforms — more resources than people with more radical ideas about how to change the world. In 2020, I think some people went to the streets because it was anti–police violence but also anti-Trump. Now you have Joe Biden as president. Trump isn’t there anymore as a polarizing figure to resist. And now the new people who were in the streets have to figure out how to fight for causes when Democrats are in office, because there is a lot of “anyone blue will do”— but how do we hold them accountable? How do we push the people we mobilize to think and organize long term, beyond electoral politics?

 Definitely agree that there’s a resource issue. But I think there’s also a more basic tactical issue. You can protest your way to making an issue politically important and attention-grabbing: People talk about policing more and in more charged ways than 10 years ago. We have the mobilizations in the streets to thank for that progress, obviously alongside the organizers who have been keeping consciousness alive between eruptions.

But there’s still the question of who decides what the issue’s importance means and what systemic responses are going to fly — questions that usually get settled well after the protests themselves have been repressed. And that’s the stage when organization really matters. To me, this is why unions are so crucial to making any of this work — not because they are magic or because every member of every union has perfect politics — but because unions are one example of an organization with strategic options that many other kinds of organizations don’t have. They have a group of people who can decide, in democratic processes, what the group’s demands are — politicians don’t get to pick their favorite protest sign and just decide what the protest is really about, as we’ve seen post-2020. If those demands aren’t met, they can respond by withholding something that the people on the other side of the negotiating table want and need, rather than just writing clarifications insisting that the other side has misunderstood why people were picketing or what “defund” or “abolish” really means.

These are the advantages that explain why unions are so potentially politically powerful and have been crucial to movements for justice historically — why they were so pivotal to dismantling Jim Crow, why Dr. King was shot while he was linking up with them. To be clear, other kinds of organizations can play this kind of role too: attacking banks and politicians with debtors’ unions, going after energy companies with ratepayers’ unions, going after landlords and developers with tenants’ unions.

It also shows us what trouble we’re in now that unions are on the defensive. Less than three months after President Biden signed a bill shutting down the rail workers unions’ strike, there was a catastrophic derailment outside of East Palestine, Ohio, that spilled potentially deadly toxins into the air. Train safety had been one of the 

 the unions were pushing for. But corporations like 

, the rail company responsible for the derailment, continue to 

profit. At this point of the climate crisis, who really thinks this is going to be the last environmental disaster enabled by protecting big business’s right to risk all of our lives?

The important part is being able to decide on and build power together, and to do so by using leverage and not just expressing displeasure to people who don’t care. The stronger the organizations are that can do that, the better off we’ll be. Exactly like Derecka said: It’s organization that lets you do this in a stable way alongside and in between spontaneous uprisings.

I want to ask about the resistance. Some of what you all describe are internal debates within the given movement. Should we accept the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act as some means of change, or do we need to do something more radical? So there are those debates. But there’s also tremendous resistance from the right. I’m wondering if you could talk about that, because even as 2020 looked like a high point of resistance to the ineptitude of the response to the pandemic — and to this monumental racism — it also was a moment of mobilization for the right that has gathered momentum in the months since. Most of that looks like the attacks on what they describe as critical race theory, which is part of a discussion about institutional or systemic racism. The attacks on the 1619 Project, which is being literally banned in schools in some states. Derecka, you mentioned the Dream Defenders, who are based in Florida, where Ron DeSantis has created what historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad has described as a laboratory of fascism. A lot of those political attacks have been directed at either trans teenagers or the study of Black people, Black history, anything about contemporary Black America. What do you think the right is doing? Why have this particular response, and what do you think is significant about it?

Protesters outside the U.S. Supreme Court while the justices consider Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban in Washington, D.C., on April 25, 2018. Photograph by Yuri Gripas/Reuters, via Redux.

 When the Muslim ban happened in 2017, do you remember the protests? Another thing also happened that I thought was very fascinating. Donations to the A.C.L.U. exploded. Legal organizations became the vanguard for how to resist white supremacy. If you look at these bans targeting queer and trans kids and families, who are prevented from getting gender-affirming care, the way that people are responding is to outsource the resistance to lawyers and have them go fight: donate, sue in court, threaten to file an injunction. I think that outsourcing resistance lets fascism flourish because then it becomes a problem that we are not confronting with mass mobilization and organization. Instead we’re telling people to let lawyers, legislatures, and the courts work it out.

Do we need a legal strategy? Of course. But we need mass resistance by everyday people. We need to go to the libraries where people are banning books to say, “Absolutely not. We’re not going to allow this.” We need strategic, disruptive, direct action. We need protests to push back and to show in numbers that this is wrong. I fear that we now just expect a lot of lawyers to do that work. That makes me particularly nervous because the right wing has taken over the courts and several facets of government. You have lawyers who are afraid to bring lawsuits in federal court because of the Supreme Court. How do we reconcile that with what’s been happening since 2017 — the urge to simply donate to the Legal Defense Fund, donate to the A.C.L.U., donate to other legal organizations to go fight — instead of the kind of mass mobilizing we experienced in 2020 as forms of broader resistance to what’s happening?

And along with the anti-trans bills, alongside banning critical race theory, we have also witnessed since 2014, when Michael Brown was killed, the criminalization of dissent, the introduction of laws to remove access to health care and food stamps for people who decide to go and protest. Some states have passed legislation that have enhanced protections for police, so that police have become essentially a protected class. We are up against states criminalizing dissent, and states banning and criminalizing the ideas that encourage people to think differently and act more courageously about the world, all while Biden calls on Congress and states to give more money to the police and increase the number of cops on the streets by 100,000. Who do you think will be enforcing the criminalization?

It’s also worth pointing out that what we’ve seen on the right are just the latest outcomes of an extremely long-term organizing strategy. Derecka, you mention the takeover of the courts — the Federalist Society started incubating the legal careers of the people who would control the Supreme Court decades ago — for at least one justice, as early as the 1980s. ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, formed in the early 1970s and has been laying the groundwork since then to mobilize police violence against the exact kinds of protest that Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita — a forest defender who was killed by state troopers in January — and comrades were doing in Atlanta against Cop City. The right wing is ahead of us by decades, not just by dollars.

But what do we do? I had not thought about the way the different levels of governing are working here — Trump spent the entirety of his presidency packing the courts with young conservatives, unqualified right-wing judges, who are just there on ideological missions. Then you see Republicans across the country just doing blatantly unconstitutional, illegal things, in hopes of sparking lawsuits that go to these corrupt courts, taking a local issue and making it national. And then the only recourse within this framework is to the reactionary, undemocratic, monarchical Supreme Court. It seems like liberals have played right into this by deciding, We’re just going to sue, we’re going to file a lawsuit here and file a lawsuit there. It is a sophisticated web that has entangled people who think that because these things are so outrageously unconstitutional, of course we must challenge them and get them off the books. But instead it becomes more complicated because of the shape of the judiciary. So what do we do?

 In early February, I had an event with Amna Akbar, Bernard Harcourt, and Cornel West. We discussed Dr. West’s law-review article on the role of lawyers and progressive social movements that he published in the 1990s. What he says in that piece is that lawyers need to continue to fight defensively, to protect and safeguard the rights that we have struggled to secure over time, and remind people about the suffering that we had before those rights. But we, lawyers and the public, have to understand that litigation is not the most radical intervention we all can make; it’s just a very specific role for some lawyers to protect what we already have. To me, it makes a clear case for movement lawyers to be supportive of and in political homes with grassroots organizations who engage in mass resistance to state violence. But we also need to do what Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs call us to do, which is to project — and then build — the alternate vision of the society that we want. I’ve been thinking about that over the past couple of weeks. I think broadly, for people who care about freedom and justice, we can’t be afraid and should be encouraged to be more explicit in our bold ideas about the society that we deserve.

We have to identify and condemn hypocrisy and the criminalization of our ideas. When I hear liberal and corporate Democrats criticize defunding the police and abolition because they say they are losing electoral seats — and go on to sign resolutions that condemn socialism — it’s as if they almost blatantly ignore that whatever sort of language or narratives they use in their campaigns, the right is going to paint it as the most radical thing ever. You cancel a measly $10,000 in student debt, it’s “socialism,” so you may as well just cancel it all — it can’t be that much more “socialist,” right? But Dems pretend that student-debt cancellation and abolition are narrative issues; they hide behind language to obscure why they don’t support the substantive reasons that lead members of the public to organize for these causes. They are not interested in social transformation, and they benefit personally, professionally, and politically from the status quo. So we must be much more energetic, powerful, strategic, experimental, and organized.

We need to continue to explicitly name the radical ideas that we’re struggling for and to take time, as many organizations do, to be in conversation with the public through political and popular education; through art in various mediums; through media that explains what we mean when we say socialism, abolition, feminism, internationalism. We’re struggling and fighting for these concepts, right? So what are they? Why do they exist? Where are people experimenting with them? We need to use these spectacular incidents of violence that have brought people to the street as an opportunity for everyday door knocking, canvassing, and reaching out to people to strengthen our bases. This is why I’m so excited about what Dream Defenders is building, because we need a national membership-based organization that organizes people and invites them to think more critically about politics and what they could be. They can go on to put pressure on the establishment through electoral politics, through protests, through mutual aid, and building alternatives.

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) rallies hundreds of young climate activists in Lafayette Square on the north side of the White House to demand that President Joe Biden work to put the Green New Deal into law on June 28, 2021. Photograph by Chip Somodevilla, via Getty Images.

We have to train people to engage in all kinds of direct action, train people to vote, train people to run for office, and train people to organize. These are not my ideas. These are the conversations I’m having with other organizers, with other human rights lawyers, with scholars, with artists, because not only do we have to think about what we need to do, we have to take the risk and go experiment and try it! And then evaluate, and try again. It is an iterative process. But I think one beauty of that, part of the Black radical tradition that makes me and my work possible, is knowing that we’re not doing that alone. We have to do that not only with people across state borders but in deep solidarity with people who are resisting other kinds of fascism across international borders and learn from their struggles — be in conversation with and think critically about what’s happening in India, in Brazil, in South Africa. We have to be ready to understand and also see ourselves as students of movements who are rejecting the kinds of fascism and neoliberalism that we see in other parts of the world and who are embracing new kinds of relationships and potential futures for us all.

 It’s a tough predicament. Unlike the people whose interests they’re protecting, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring the short term to focus only on the long game — the movement is fighting against murder and caging and evictions and deportations, not the very livable disappointment of getting stuck in a job at a lower federal court. But I think we can probably all agree that the legal organizations, whether the Legal Defense Fund or A.C.L.U., are not the organizations that are going to get us over the finish line. So it’s worth figuring out which fights can do double duty — which organizations we can support that will help build long-term power while and through fighting the needed short-term campaigns. I’m glad that we get to hear from KC Tenants in this issue, because that definitely seems like the kind of organizing that could do both.

I’m teaching a course on the civil rights movement right now, so I’ve been reading a lot about tactical questions, questions of strategy and social movements. The legal strategy versus the mass movement was so profound in the civil rights movement. The N.A.A.C.P., of course, championed a legal strategy that targeted Jim Crow laws; just the whole legal edifice in the South was an affront to the 14th Amendment. So the N.A.A.C.P. believed that the movement should let the lawsuits work their way through the courts to have a more secure victory. But King, and the activists in SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], argued that the legal strategy makes no sense without a mass movement. In other words the 14th Amendment had been the 14th Amendment for nearly 100 years by 1965. And that didn’t matter, even after the Voting Rights Act. Often histories of the civil rights movement or this period of the 1960s almost immediately pivot outside the South after the Voting Rights Act — we go elsewhere, we go to Watts, we go to the urban rebellions in the North. But if we stay in the South, you see that even though the law changed, there was not the kind of transformation where the law was this on Tuesday, and on Wednesday all the new regulations went into effect. And we thought we overcame; we were singing “We Shall Overcome.” The law doesn’t matter if people aren’t on the ground, making its enforcement reality. King makes a particular point: that the legal strategy relies on the passivity of those who are most impacted by these decisions. Because you’re telling people to wait for the courts to solve this question, wait for the law to change. And meanwhile, you know, life is hard on the ground. I think those are powerful points. 

I also think that part of the power of the protests against the Muslim ban in the winter and spring of 2017 was not just that people weren’t just sitting around waiting for lawyers, even though that may have eventually been the result, but that it did three things. One, it showed the authorities that no, you can’t just get away with this. Two, it forces the mainstream media to have not just this kind of surface, drive-by coverage but a deeper engagement with the issues bringing all of these contradictions to the surface, the main one being that we are supposed to be a country founded on religious freedom. Protests create the conditions so that people are able to see the contradictions that usually exist beneath the surface. And then third, and perhaps most importantly, is that it imbues a sense of confidence among those of us who are horrified about what the state is doing. Because it can absolutely seem overwhelming if you’re just sitting with your newspaper or watching the news. And seeing people do blatantly illegal things. This is supposed to be a country based on religious freedom, right? That is one of the core tenets in the Bill of Rights: freedom of religious association. There is no state-sanctioned religion; you’re free to practice whatever your religion is. You know this, but if there’s no one doing anything to protect it, it feels like maybe I’m not sure about what I know. Maybe no one cares, or maybe this is just the fate of our society. But when you see hundreds and then thousands of people protesting, it affirms that you know what you know. And it is a way to encourage resistance; it is a way for people to build confidence. It is a way of demonstrating that we are many. And so I feel like that combination of things is part of what we need now. I completely hadn’t thought about it until you said it, but this whole idea that we’re just going to fight this out in the courts isn’t enough.

It’s not something we can just litigate or legislate our way out of, as you both have acknowledged. I’ve been frustrated with the silence of a lot of the popular leadership in the Democratic Party — not surprised, because they are the leadership of the Democratic Party, but frustrated because they are further proof why we need mass public resistance and can’t simply vote our way out of this problem either. For example, as a gesture toward countering the fascist and racist critical race theory bans, why aren’t liberal Democrats rushing to affirm the thing that’s been banned by Republicans? Grants from the Biden administration to affirm racial justice in our schools — where’s that? Where’s that program? What resolutions are being passed to highlight the importance of Black study? Why is this the time to pass a resolution to condemn socialism? Where’s the resolution at least acknowledging “diversity” in educational thought? Because the banning of books and ideas, in addition to the silence coming from the Democratic Party, leaves even liberals feeling isolated and overwhelmed that this is happening. But when the masses are being told that the right way to approach this is to “go vote” or “go sue,” they are implicitly being told not to “go resist,” “go fight.” But that’s what we all need to do — go fight.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 7, known as the “Stop Woke Act,” to ban critical race theory on April 22, 2022. Photograph by Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service, via Getty Images.

This is where the liberal political establishment and the conservative establishment often intersect. The Democrats are more than willing to criticize DeSantis for his authoritarianism, but they don’t actually want to talk about the content of what is being banned. They don’t want to talk about critical race theory. They don’t want to talk about African American studies. They don’t want to talk about Black feminism. They don’t want to talk about the Movement for Black Lives, because it brings to the surface the same issues that the Republicans also want to avoid. Because if we deal seriously with Black history, with African American history, and nearly 300 years of slavery, 100 years of legal subjugation, maybe these Black people have a point about redress. Maybe they have a point about reparations, and maybe they have a point about the need for programmatic institutional interventions to repair the inevitable harm and financial devastation that would come from nearly 300 years of slavery and 100 years of legal subjugation. Neither party is interested in having that conversation, because that’s a trillion-dollar conversation. More than a trillion dollars goes to the military now. It doesn’t go to reparations; it doesn’t go to housing, health care, education, and all of the forms of redress that are owed as a result of nearly 400 years of legalized oppression and exploitation. So neither one wants to talk about it.

And what we get instead is, “Look at this Black woman I put on the Supreme Court. Look at my vice president, look at what I do for Black people” — which is through these individual appointments of Black people —“look at my press secretary.”

Yeah! “Look, here’s a holiday. I’ve surrounded myself with all of these Black women, surely I hear you. And I’m committed to this.” I think it’s important that we continue to polarize people who support the Democratic Party around these issues. We should help reveal how racial representation and political power are actually dichotomies presented by the Democratic Party. Do you want a Black Supreme Court justice? Or do you want student-debt cancellation for HBCU students? Because Biden promised both and reneged on the latter. Do you want him to choose a Black woman running mate so that he can keep your votes, or do you want him to champion universal health care so that you can keep your life? Do you want an additional 100,000 diverse cops on the streets? Or do you want investment and the proper infrastructure in your neighborhood to keep you and your community safe?

Biden is not the only target. We experience this directly with Black politicians, too, who are willing and excited to play into a certain kind of racial-representation politics in exchange for more transformative demands. Keeanga, you write about this so well. I think that’s such an excellent point. We have to continue to remind each other what we are owed, what we deserve, and what we can build together.

After the Uprising, What Is to Be Done?

oe Biden stated what his party takes to be the truth about Democrats and Black America, when, days before police officers murdered George Floyd in 2020, he told a host of a popular Black radio show while promoting his candidacy, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”

Biden’s claim was galling. As a race-baiting legislator in the 1980s and ’90s, he helped to dismantle welfare and expand the criminal legal system. The comment was also presumptuous; for weeks, Biden was engaged in competitive Democratic primaries. But the Democratic Party 

 basically owned the Black vote for nearly a half century. Did Blackness confer such a political uniformity that even someone like Biden could say that a vote for him was a vote for the interests of Black Americans?

If that’s true, why has it been hard to sustain a movement against racism in the United States? What undermines the unity of Black people amid racist attacks, including the recent mass shooting of Black people in a Dollar General store by a white supremacist in Jacksonville, Fla.? Days after Biden’s impolitic quip, the largest protests in American history unfolded across the country. The “Black lives matter” slogan assumed new meaning in a pandemic that had ravaged Black communities in particular. The murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd shocked the public out of its exhaustion with our upended society.

Local activists unveiled radical demands to uproot the causes of violence, disease, and death — demands born of the chaos of the pandemic and the radicalization created by the state’s failure to enact meaningful reform. Protesters called for the redistribution of public money away from the police and back into libraries, health care, housing, schools, and social programs. Ordinary people responded to the pall Donald Trump cast over national politics, and they also protested local conditions worsened by police brutality and austerity budgets.

When Biden claimed that no Black person could vote for Trump, he sensed the political impact of Trump’s racist insults hurled at cities with Black mayors or large Black populations. Trump had once 

 Baltimore as a disgusting and rat-infested city where no human being would want to live. Chicago became a catchall for his racist caricature of American cities — what he called “American carnage” in his inauguration speech in 2017. He 

 of San Francisco, “It’s worse than a slum; there’s no slum like that.” As a response to Fox News host Sean Hannity singling out Black-led cities, Trump 

, “Everyone gets upset when I say it. It’s not racist. Frankly, Black people come up to me and say ‘Thank you, sir, for saying it.’ They want help. These cities, it’s like living in hell.”

Trump’s misconduct made it easy for Black public officials to decry him across national news outlets and voice solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Many protesters hoped that those politicians, some of whom 

 to empathize with the anger on the streets, would lead the way in transforming protest demands into public policy. Sylvester Turner, the mayor of Houston and the former president of the African American Mayors Association, said as much in 2021: “Black mayors, we have to get it,” adding, “We come from these communities and many of us live in these communities. So who better situated to address all of these needs and challenges than we are?” The sentiment was the same the year before: Black elected officials would stand in solidarity with Black protesters to pursue reform. All of this heightened protesters’ expectations; if federal politicians rejected their demands, maybe local ones would fulfill them, especially when it comes to police reform, which is a local issue given there are around 18,000 police departments.

Yet Black leaders in local and federal office largely failed to enact substantial reforms, which they claimed to be uniquely qualified to deliver. Instead, police killings nationally 

 in 2021 and 2022 than they had been in 2020. Often in politics, politicians say one thing and do another, and Black elected officials are no different. Political change requires cooperation among multiple parties, which can be hard. But these officials used their identity to cultivate an impression that they harbor unique insights that allow them to be effective legislators. It is a perspective crystallized by the title of an article by the social scientist and writer Andre Perry: “To Protect Black Women and Save America from Itself, Elect Black Women.”

Despite the greatest concentration of Black political power in American history, the problems that plague poor and working-class Black communities persist. We not only had a two-term Black president, and Black attorneys general, but now there are two Black Supreme Court justices. Black people preside as mayors of some of the largest and wealthiest cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston; soon, Cherelle Parker, a Black woman, will become mayor of Philadelphia, the sixth-largest city. There are more Black elected officials in Congress than ever, but there has been no substantive reform. As a result, nearly 40 percent of Black people said in a recent poll that “B.L.M. has done the most to help Black people in the U.S. in recent years,” compared with the paltry 6 percent that said the Congressional Black Caucus had done the most. And for all the B.L.M. movement’s problems, more than 80 percent of Black people polled say they support it.

Black politicians’ suggestion that a shared racial identity means their election alone will fix Black communities makes it appear that the hard work to forge solidarity and engage in political struggle is unnecessary. Some describe this gap between promises and outcomes as selling out or even betrayal, yet Black elected officials complain of being held to a higher standard by the media or Black voters, who, they claim, hold unrealistic expectations for change. But these officials made false promises as Black insiders working on behalf of the community, which prompted new questions about how to achieve change.

he historian Robin D. G. Kelley has challenged the “presumption of a tight-knit, harmonious Black community that has existed across time and space.” During the Jim Crow era, residential segregation and racial terror seemed to unite the fates of Black people. Then, just as now, the Black community was contingent, fragile, and riven by class tensions between the Black middle class and the Black poor and working class. Whatever cohesion born of necessity then cannot be invoked today as an actual strategy to fight oppression. The successes of the civil rights movement further frayed any sense of a unified Black community, as more Blacks rose to the middle class and elected office. The generation that came of age after the 1960s benefited from the rights and affirmative action initiatives that cracked open the possibilities of a better life. Greater access to college and better-paying work, and with it better housing, transformed their lives and raised expectations that they could ascend in society. But that came at a cost.

“When members of a racial or ethnic group become affluent,” the political scientist Michael Dawson wrote in his groundbreaking book “Behind the Mule,” “they seek to preserve their ‘well-earned’ measure of security and privilege by forming coalitions with other racial or ethnic groups whose economic interests are similar,” leading to increased “class conflict among African Americans.” This was true in 1994, when Dawson published his book, and it is even more true today. For all the focus on the racial wealth gap between Black and white families, the greatest transformation in Black life in the past 50 years has been class polarization 

 Black families. In 1975, fewer than 1.4 percent made over $100,000. Today, that figure is 20 percent.

When it comes to the Black elite, the top 5 percent of Black households 

 had higher incomes than 85 percent of white households. The highest-earning 20 percent of Black middle-class households had higher incomes than 62 percent of all white households. “Du Bois’s ‘talented 10th’ has become the ‘prosperous 13 percent,’ ” quipped Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard African American studies professor, in a 2016 article. Today, that number is most likely higher. In the article, “

,” Gates observed, “There are really two nations within Black America.” “The problem of income inequality,” he added, citing the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, “is not between Black America and White America but between Black haves and have-nots, something we don’t often discuss in public in an era dominated by a narrative of fear and failure and the claim that racism impacts 42 million people in all the same ways.”

This was an exaggeration, of course. Compared with white Americans, we can measure the fragility of the Black middle class and even the Black elite by their relative debt burdens, or income or wealth disparities. And while the wealth gap between the Black poor and the Black middle class may strain political allegiances, it also connects them. Middle-class Blacks are more likely than their white peers to provide financial support to poorer relatives. But this does not guarantee political solidarity; middle-class Blacks may resent people who “hold them back.” Largely because of racism in the real estate market, middle-class Black people are also more likely to live closer to poor Black neighborhoods than middle-class white people relative to poor white areas. This is no recipe for unity. Instead, Black homeowners who want property values to rise to protect their devalued assets may feel antagonized by this proximity.

The new opportunities for social mobility increased class tensions, which manifested in negative attitudes. In 1986, only 44 percent of Black people felt the values of middle-class and poor Blacks had “become more different.” That figure rose to 61 percent in a 

 where 70 percent of Black respondents with a college degree agreed that there was a value gap between middle-class and poor Blacks. Nearly one in four said that growing diversity within Black communities meant that they could no longer be considered a single race.

, only half of Black people believed that “what happens to other Black people in the United States affects their own lives.” About a third said that they have “everything or most things in common” with poor Black people, compared with 12 percent who felt a deep affinity with wealthy Blacks. Any sense of a shared reality decreased as a person got wealthier: only 22 percent of Black people who identified as “upper income” expressed the greatest solidarity with the Black poor compared with almost 40 percent of low-income Black people who did.

The Black radical scholar Angela Davis lamented this shift in attitudes in a 2007 interview with British journalist Gary Younge: “We used to think there was a Black community. It was always heterogeneous but we were always able to imagine ourselves as part of that community. I would go so far as to say that many middle-class Black people have internalized the same racist attitudes to working-class Black people as white people have of the Black criminal. The young Black man with the sagging pants walking down the street is understood as a threat by the Black middle class as well. So I don’t think it’s possible to mobilize Black communities in the way it was in the past.” She went on to say, “I don’t even know that I would even look for Black leadership now. We looked to work with that category because it gave us a sense of hope. But that category assumes a link between race and progressive politics and, as 

 says, ‘There aren’t any guarantees.’ What’s more important than the racial identification of the person is how that person thinks about race.”

Not only attitudes but even the meaning of Blackness has changed over time. There are 11 million more Black people in the United States than there were in 2000. This includes Black immigrants, who make up 12 percent of the Black population, and Black Hispanics are 6 percent of Black people, per the U.S. Census. Attachment to their racial identity varies widely across these groups. More than half of U.S.-born Blacks say they have “everything or most things in common” with other U.S.-born Blacks. But that figure drops to about a quarter for Black people born outside the U.S. These differences in identity, lifestyle, and income are expressed in finances and economics, as well as politics.

While Black people vote almost in unison for the Democratic Party, they may want different things based on social class: Greater access to homeownership may be urgent for middle-class Black people, but rent control and eviction mitigation strategies matter more for the Black working class, whose needs are harder to meet politically. The needs of the Black middle class are both in sync with the aspirations of the Black political class and more legible within the existing political and economic system. This is why corporate entities have been eager to champion ending the racial wealth gap, increasing homeownership rates, and expanding Black business, while ignoring calls for rent control, expanded access to Medicaid, and reinstatement of the monthly child tax credit that lapsed in 2021. These different political goals help explain the gulf between Black elected officials who receive corporate donations and the millions of ordinary Black people they claim to represent. And when Black elected officials engage in the age-old politics of blaming poor people for their own condition, which former senator Carol Moseley Braun tried to put into legislation, the prospect of a single, unified “Black agenda” gets muddied.

s one of two Black women ever to serve in the U.S. Senate, Carol Moseley Braun showed that she was ready for the political prime time in the Democratic Party when she offered an amendment to the much despised 1994 Crime Bill that would try juveniles as young as 13 as adults if they committed a crime with a gun. She initially crafted what was her first major piece of legislation to target 12-year-olds, The Chicago Tribune reported, and she called for their parents to be fined up to $5,000.

Moseley Braun made sure there was no confusion over her intentions in an 

 with reporters. “Do we treat juvenile criminals like criminals or like juveniles?” she asked. “I believe the philosophical basis and practical basis for separating juveniles out of the criminal justice system that existed 100 years ago, when all this reform happened, no longer exists.” She added, “The older juvenile criminals use the younger ones as mules for their guns, for their weapons; they are the ones who are doing more shooting now than any other group, in large part because they know there will be no sanction in the juvenile court system.” Moseley Braun aimed her comments at a white audience to try to validate her presence as the lone Black woman senator.

More so than any other Black political figure, it was Barack Obama who spoke to the American public in two registers, often at the same time: one for a white audience and one for Black America. He pioneered the archetype of the compassionate scold, willing to tell Black communities hard truths. When Obama stumped for the presidency in 2008, at a stop in Beaumont, Tex., he said: “Turn off the TV set, put the video game away. Buy a little desk or put that child by the kitchen table. Watch them do their homework. If they don't know how to do it, give them help. If you don’t know how to do it, call the teacher. Make them go to bed at a reasonable time. Keep them off the streets. Give ’em some breakfast. Come on.” He added, “You know I am right. I’ve got to talk about us a little bit.” The people in the crowd loved it, because it sounded familiar. Now Obama was authentically Black, not just jockeying for the Black vote. And white people could also enjoy it without feeling racist, because a Black man said it to a Black audience roaring in approval.

Three years later, the mayor of Philadelphia at the time, Michael Nutter, made national news when he excoriated Black teenagers as thugs at a Black church. “If you go to look for a job,” he warned, “don’t go blaming it on the white folks or anybody else if you walk into somebody’s office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, with your shoes untied and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arm, on your face, on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won’t hire you? They don’t hire you ’cause you look like you’re crazy! That’s why they’re not hiring you.” He went on: “Buy a belt! Nobody wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt! Buy a belt! Learn some manners. Extend your English vocabulary beyond the few curse words that you know, some other grunts and grumbles and other things that none of us understand what you’re saying.” Nutter also 

 their Black fathers as “just sperm donors” he presumed had abandoned their children.

Black officials perform such rebukes in the vernacular of the Black working class, which evokes a sense of familiarity, but at the expense of the guilty culprit who has shamed the race. When the Black political class invokes stereotypes or calls for “law and order,” it allows them to appear busy addressing the issues plaguing their cities, when in reality, they are merely upholding the long American tradition of blaming Blacks for social problems. We might expect this from officials who lack resources, or the ability to garner them, needed to undo decades of disinvestment. In the end, it is just easier to blame the victim and vow to unleash more police. Indeed, Nutter’s vicious speech came soon after a federal court ruled that the way the city’s police officers had engaged in stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional.

The eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 would make it impossible for any Black Democrat to ever make a speech like that again, but it also opened the gates for new dynamics in intraracial relations.

he 2020 protests opened a period of “racial reckoning,” where “systemic racism” entered mainstream dialogue. So Black elected officials gained new prominence and moral authority. More than ever before, they felt emboldened to use their racial identity as a shield to deflect criticism from whites, Blacks, and Latinos who opposed them or their political agenda. In a 2020 interview with Vogue, for example, Mayor London Breed of San Francisco dismissed her critics by suggesting they were white and had not lived the life that she had. She said: “I had to live in a public housing development that they wouldn’t have even dared set foot in. This is over 20 years, not just two years, of my life. I’ve been working in the trenches for my community my entire life. And none of these people have been in the trenches when we were dealing with issues of police brutality on a regular basis. Almost every day you’re hearing that someone that you loved was killed. I think part of it is, my experience is what determines how I make decisions. The good news is the people who know me and love me from the neighborhood I grew up in, they understand why I do what I do. They’re not ‘activists,’ but they love and they trust me.”

Breed has since made racist comments about Latinos, blaming them for the spread of fentanyl amid her broader attack on public drug use in San Francisco. “There are unfortunately a lot of people who come from a particular country, from Honduras,” she claimed last fall, and “the people who are dealing that drug happen to be of that ethnicity.” This statement is just as racist as Trump’s infamous admonition that Mexicans are “rapists.” But Breed’s willingness to deploy identity politics as a force field dampened the condemnation she should have received. The idea that one’s “lived experience” supplants knowledge or politics is what the philosopher 

 described as “deference epistemology”; the assumption that the racial politics of the moment would put a person beyond reproach is a powerful rejoinder.

Laurie Cumbo, a Black woman formerly on the New York City Council and now in Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, 

 the demand to defund the police as evidence of white progressives’ “colonization” of the racial justice movement. She 

 Jabari Brisport, a Black state senator and member of the Democratic Socialists of America who supports the push to divert funding from police, of being the product of “gentrification.” Here Cumbo wielded the language of the left to launch a conservative attack on a Black socialist. She felt emboldened for the same reason Breed did.

Many of these elected officials have experienced racism. They are Black people in America, after all, so their own experience or those of their parents may have compelled them to become grassroots activists or to throw their hats into the political arena. But lived experience alone does not make them progressive or democratic. Nor does it mean that they share the same politics or viewpoints of those they claim to represent. Instead, social class, and especially political power, mediates how racism is experienced and lived in this country. Angela Davis explained this in her interview with Gary Younge: “When the inclusion of Black people into the machine of oppression is designed to make that machine work more efficiently, then it does not represent progress at all. We have more Black people in more visible and powerful positions. But then we have far more Black people who have been pushed down to the bottom of the ladder. When people call for diversity and link it to justice and equality, that’s fine. But there’s a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change.”

lack America is increasingly immigrant, young, insecure, and skeptical that racial equality can be achieved in their lifetime. The splintering social realities among Black people undermine any assumptions that political solidarity is innate. Nor does a politician’s racial identity give them an ability to solve long-standing economic crises in a skewed social order. Instead, solidarity is formed through mutual struggle; shared realities like racism and police brutality; and the common experiences of economic precarity, vulnerability to climate change, and bottomless student debt. Only through collective struggle can we fundamentally change this social order.

The outcry of Black support in response to a video of white thugs beating a Black riverboat worker on a dock in Montgomery, Ala., shows we want greater unity. When the video captures Black people coming to his rescue and beating back the white assailants, a wave of pride, combativity, and catharsis swelled across multiple social media platforms. Such solidarity through identification with racist violence has been ubiquitous in this age of social media exposés. We can also see a desire for solidarity in the aftermath of mass racist attacks like those in Charleston, Buffalo, and now Jacksonville; the one thing that all Black people share is the potential to be the victim of one. But when it comes time to decide what to do about the situation and how to achieve social change, we lack clear answers.

For a powerful moment, the historic protests of 2020 seemed to provide solutions. The most defining characteristic of those demonstrations was that they included everyone. Millions of white, Indigenous, and Latino people took part. The millions who poured into the streets forced the Democrats to produce the most far-reaching social programs in at least two generations in response to the pandemic, a shift from how the Democrats had planned to approach the looming presidential election. Voters were motivated by fear, not enthusiasm, to elect Biden and prevent a second disastrous term for Trump. But in the absence of a sustained movement, even as the Democratic Party controlled Congress and the White House, those emergency measures were dismantled. And then promises made at the height of the struggle to end police brutality and cancel student loans were abandoned, which reinforced the idea that nothing had changed, despite the historic nature of the movement. For all of the talk about reckoning with the history of racism, Republicans now lead the charge in erasing that history through book bans and attacks on curriculums, while corporate America reneges on many of its promises to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Some activists dismissed the participation of white people, in particular, as performative and ephemeral. It is doubtful that the hundreds of mostly white young protesters in Boise, Idaho, or a 

 in Portland, Maine, were performing to gain credibility with the few Black people who live in those areas. Instead, their participation suggests a more hopeful truth: Many of them were appalled by the murder of George Floyd, as well as the direction society is barreling toward. And the Black movement, as it so often has, allowed them to express their grief and dismay. But it was not just their opposition to racism or police brutality but also the relationship of these to the failed public response to the pandemic that brought them to the streets.

During the uprisings, young workers returned to their jobs even as thousands among us were dying of Covid-19. Threatened by eviction, afraid for the future, and infuriated by the insouciance of the millionaires in Congress and in the White House who dither while the world burns, millions of people came together in solidarity, despite our differences. That is a start, an opening we can either walk through or turn away from. Now it’s up to organizers, activists, and those invested in building a mass movement against racism and inequality to create organizations and other entry points. A new left will not just be willed into existence. We must organize and build it together on the basis of radical politics.

Black Class Matters

e live in a time of catastrophe. Tyre Nichols screamed for his mother as cops in Memphis beat him to death. Parents in the world’s richest country must drive for hours to find formula to feed their babies. Lawmakers are banning books and censoring knowledge in schools about race, gender, and sexuality. Around the world, millions of bereaved children have lost a parent or caregiver to the coronavirus, while capitalism accelerates the climate crisis — as flash floods wash away towns, and the elderly and disabled people die first during otherworldly heat waves.

But we also live in a time when there is enormous potential for change. Millions of people rebelled after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, demanding a new kind of politics, one that attends to people’s basic needs and establishes a sense of common purpose. They risked their lives during a deadly pandemic to call for collective care, for an end to evictions, for reinvesting police budgets into housing for all — demands situated in a critique of capitalism. Mainstream media and the political class shrugged off the rebellion, and multinational corporations tried to co-opt it, but the conditions that propelled millions into the streets are still with us. People still yearn for a radical new future.

We created Hammer & Hope out of the urgency to make a practical contribution toward those efforts, from Brooklyn to Bahia to Botswana. “If there’s a book that you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,” Toni Morrison counseled in 1981.

We are inspired by the Black women and men who made up the Communist Party in Alabama. Their lives and struggles to organize against capitalism and white supremacist terror in the 1930s and ’40s are memorialized in Robin D. G. Kelley’s book “Hammer and Hoe,” 

. Those Communists came up with shrewd methods to spread radical ideas in a hostile environment; they hid stacks of literature in hollow trees, circulated leaflets in baskets of laundry, and one even dropped papers into the breeze for passersby to come along and pick up.

Ours is a magazine of Black politics and culture with roots in radical political traditions. We will invite people engaged in local struggles to share knowledge with one another. People like the workers in low-wage retail, call-center, and fast-food jobs who have inspired one another to strike for decent wages; like the public bus drivers who refused to let police commandeer their vehicles to transport people arrested at demonstrations; like the thousands of people held in Alabama prisons who withheld their labor in protest of deadly and exploitative conditions; and like the teachers who are resisting censorship as an act of solidarity with their students. People who are connected to one another possess the strategic brilliance and authentic urgency needed to take control of their own futures.

We are also indebted to the Black Panthers, whose newspaper promoted their free breakfast program, raged against police violence, and connected liberation struggles at home to those abroad. “We feel that information is the raw material for new ideas,” their de facto archivist Billy X Jennings told a reporter in 2019, adding, “We sought to find solutions to problems instead of just reporting the news.” Information begets ideas. Ideas expand imaginations. Imaginations fuel social change. The best ideas are rooted in action and practice.

We exist to publish deep reporting and to amplify the first-person stories of activists like those in Atlanta who have engaged in a range of tactics, from tree sits to carefully targeted property destruction, to stave off the destruction of the Weelaunee Forest. Political elites plan to build a $90 million complex there so that cops from around the country can sharpen their urban warfare techniques to kill more people like Tortuguita, Breonna Taylor, and Atatiana Jefferson. We want to host boundary-pushing debates between organizers working to close local jails and stop the construction of new ones and anti-pipeline activists, so that people can learn from their insights to strengthen their own efforts. By publishing stories from movements around the world, we hope to provide a platform for a politics of struggle that is built from the bottom up.

In fighting for an alternative political future, we also turn to the creative visions of artists and culture makers to help us conceive of a new world — from 

, one of the largest cultural events ever held on the African continent; to Afrofuturist literature; to the toppled, graffitied monuments to colonialism and the Confederacy; to the women, queers, femmes dominating rap today — with the knowledge that shifts in culture often precede shifts in politics. As Claudia Jones wrote, “a people’s art is the genesis of their freedom.” We want to hear from and publish reviews of the work of artists who push the culture rather than just reflect it.

We believe in the hammer of struggle and in the power of hope. Hope is a discipline, as Mariame Kaba reminds us, not unfounded faith. It is the deeply held belief that a better world is possible if we fight for it. This magazine is an attempt to create what we desire to see in the world: a radical and evolving vision we can collectively work toward. There is no barrier to entry. A desire to change the world is all that you need to participate. Let’s build together.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

@KeeangaYamahtta

Contributions

Issue

1

After the Uprising, What Is to Be Done?

Issue

2

Black Class Matters

Issue

1

Hammer & Hope: Toward a Radical New Future

Sign up