 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?

After New York State passed the Build Public Renewables Act in May 2023, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò spoke with three organizers from the NYC-DSA Ecosocialist Working Group who campaigned for the legislation.

 To start off, what is public power? Why is it a big deal? Why was it an important struggle? Could you speak specifically to its implications for racial justice and class politics?

 When crises hit anywhere in this country — in the world, really — Black people are made to suffer the most. And we have a climate crisis that is not looming — we’re living in it. On top of trying to help people’s current material conditions, anything we can do to stave off the worst of the climate crisis for as long as we can is going to benefit Black and brown people who are thrown on the front lines of this. And people understand that. That’s not abstract to people. When we were doing canvasses in Gun Hill homes after Hurricane Isaias in 2020, I talked to someone about how whenever there’s a storm, they lose power. This is a low-income person, and they have to find a motel to stay in, because they are on ventilation and their mother’s on ventilation; all their kids have asthma. They’re not able to stay in that place. And when we talk about how we’re trying to rework the energy system and move to renewables, they get it immediately. A lot of climate activism does feel highfalutin, where you buy your Prius and go composting, and a lot of people just don’t do that. But when I’m tabling in the Bronx, saying, “Hey, don’t you hate ConEd?” that just connects. Everyone understands that; everyone knows their energy bills are too high and keep going up. You know there are proposed rate hikes all the time but never accompanied by improved service, so what are we paying for? Whenever there is stress on the energy grid and they have these planned blackouts, they do them in predictable neighborhoods — Canarsie, the Bronx, or somewhere like that. Not the West Village. Not Gramercy. People get it. Being able to change that reality is a direct hit on class politics.

 Socialists in New York City spearheaded the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) to authorize and mandate our public power authority, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), to build, develop, and own renewable energy in the state to meet the climate goals set in 2019 to decarbonize our energy system. We also wanted to create discounted utility rates for low- to moderate-income communities because people are struggling to pay their energy bills, as well as close down all of 

, which are primarily located in Black and brown neighborhoods, like where I live in Astoria, as well as the South Bronx.

Energy politics can be hard to translate, but we wanted to talk about the impact of fossil fuels on our neighbors in terms of health and environmental racism. Brandon and I live along one of the neighborhoods called Asthma Alley because of all the power plants and polluting infrastructure that were intentionally built here. In the context where our energy system is owned by private utility companies that are able to raise rates at any point, building renewable energy has to benefit impacted communities. So it was important not only to include the fossil fuel phaseout and discounted utility rates but also to connect that to everyday people’s lives and say, “If we build renewable energy, we can not only meet our goals and stave off the worst of the climate crisis in New York but also better your material conditions as a low-income person, as a Black and brown person living in these parts of New York.”

 It’s going to be really hot this summer in New York and all over the country. When it’s a hot day, we get a text message from ConEd saying, “Don’t use power.” Because our energy grid is overextended, the existing system cannot provide energy for our needs, which ironically is made worse by its reliance on fossil fuels. And everybody gets that. Everyone needs air-conditioning. We have lights in Times Square that never get cut. We have empty office buildings in midtown that are air-conditioned to 65 degrees. They never are told to stop. It’s always individual households, working families, who are told to sacrifice during these inhumane summer months. And people forget, but those are terrifying times.

 The other important aspect of our bill is that it’s a just transition bill — the AFL-CIO helped us write the labor provisions in BPRA so that any job that’s going to be created under NYPA will be a union job. For us to believe in a just transition, jobs need to be protected, and quality jobs under the public sector must be given to fossil fuel workers who are transitioning out of those jobs and also to working-class people in frontline communities.

 You talked about the AFL-CIO; you talked about canvassing in particular neighborhoods. Could you all say more about what the crucial alliances were to getting BPRA passed and how you made those alliances?

 From the start, the bill was DSA-coded; we had a lot of trouble getting the bigger climate organizations on board. We did build relationships with environmental justice organizations like 

, other DSA chapters who were with us, organizations like 

 to get labor unions and other organizations to support our bill and get it over the finish line. It’s really from the strength of us challenging power and making this seem like it was the most important climate legislation that we built strong alliances toward the tail end of our campaign. I want to give a special shout-out to not only the teachers union, UFT, which co-sponsored a rally with Representative Jamaal Bowman to call for “

,” but also 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, which supports climate legislation because the union sees how health care workers struggle on the front lines of the climate crisis. It’s no coincidence that the unions that do care work and are on the front lines of their communities bearing witness to the effects of the climate crisis, especially in Black and brown communities, are aligned with the broader movement and socialist legislation.

 The unions in New York are a little bit politically and socially conservative. They don’t take bold steps. Our municipal unions were not at the front line of fighting 

, for example. So there’s a lot of risk aversion despite the fact that New York has one of the highest union densities in America — 

around 20 percent of public and private sector workers are unionized

. But many unions don’t take a progressive, frontline approach toward full policy changes, so it was difficult to get some unions on board. My union, the PSC-CUNY, which represents the faculty and professional staff at the City University of New York, 

. But we’re not 1199SEIU, we’re not 32BJ, we’re not the biggest union. We’re not the teachers [UFT, United Federation of Teachers]. The NYC teachers’ union has almost 200,000 workers. But our union is part of this broader statewide coalition called NYSUT, the New York State United Teachers. Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced a 

 for New York state pensions in 2020, but internal activists — local unions and members of NYSUT — continue to 

. A nice thing about a union coalition is that you can get them to pass things. But leadership may not necessarily use their political capital to support a resolution. Yet our union and other NYSUT Bernie-type folks throughout the state helped to pass a resolution in support of the Build Public Renewables Act. We got it passed unanimously at the 

, which is a big deal because now we could say, “We’ve got statewide labor support.”

 We tried really hard to build with the impacted trade unions, but we also didn’t wait for them to come around. We shifted the material conditions. We passed this piece of legislation. And now they’re like, “Let’s have a meeting. Let’s talk about this.” We were the ones who led with the policy and the vision, and now the trade unions are included in the planning and implementation process. And honestly, the role of the left is to say, “Our vision 

 include you all, and you don’t have to be with us every step of the way. But now we are here— let’s build together.” That’s what BPRA is doing: creating a path for green workers and the left to build a coalition to guarantee high-quality jobs and put more power at the hands of workers and the movement in the long term.

 You have this vision that included labor, and you didn’t wait around for them to figure that out. It’s moved forward now. And so now you’re at the stage where NYPA has this new public authority, but the way that it’s written into the budget language, NYPA has to hold public hearings on its clean energy projects. That will involve you and various unions potentially being involved in the planning stages, but NYPA is in the driver’s seat. What does the next step look like in terms of organizing to make sure that you try to push NYPA in the right kind of direction, aligned with the broader vision that BPRA came out of?

 We only got this far by organizing regular, normal people, organizing labor, organizing politicians into the vision. That’s how we got to where we are right now. So it only makes sense to keep that going. We understood that from the beginning, and it was important for there to be democracy in this process, and that requires constant organizing. It’s not like we get to a point and then we drop it off.

 We are continuing to do outreach with labor unions, so that we are aligned on what we want NYPA to do, which is to make sure that NYPA builds and that these jobs are union jobs. And we will continue organizing and building up socialist chapters across the state, so when projects are proposed, there is already a base of people who say, “Yes, we want this. We want these jobs. This is good for us and the future of our community.” We’re going to continue to pressure NYPA so that we have a firm hand on the implementation of this bill. We have to implement this thing. And that’s going to be a lot of work. So I’m aware of and feeling the burden of organizing labor and organizing people across the state to make sure this happens.

 Plenty of laws get passed in New York that don’t get implemented. The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that passed in 2019 was a gold standard climate change protection act. It put us at the front of the map, a better law than anything California passed, and for years, New York State didn’t do anything to implement it, which is part of one of our talking points: We haven’t passed any climate legislation in four years. This law means nothing if nothing happens behind it. But there’s a movement behind it that won’t allow the state and its agencies to just kick the can down the road, because we have nothing better to do except to be a pain in their asses until we hit our goals plus new ones, because BPRA is not enough. It’s a first step toward decarbonization; there’s so much more left to do to reach climate justice. We hit our first goal, but the goalpost just keeps moving. I’ve got two kids, and I’m like, “Why did I have two kids while the world is burning? Unless I’m actively trying to stop them from being on the front lines of the water wars 2040?” So I think that our political enemies are right to be skeptical, but they’re wrong to underestimate just how annoying we can be.

 That’s a perfect segue to the strategic power of being the right measure of annoying. I want to ask about balancing the need for alliance and antagonism. When you’re canvassing and talking to regular folks, you probably hear a range of opinions — some people are aligned with you, other people aren’t. And then the same thing was true across the different union leaderships and among the different elected officials. How do you balance the need to find some connections with people who might not have the same vision that you all had with the BPRA but also the need to be a pain in the ass to others? How do you make those decisions, coming back to Brandon’s point about movement democracy?

 In terms of decision making, this campaign has been extremely democratic. There are quarterly strategy sessions where people get together and take the lay of the land: What have we done? What have we accomplished? What remains to be done? What happens next? And we sit down and talk about them, take votes on things. You win or you lose on your particular vision, but you keep moving forward. Leadership was spread out as broadly as possible, and we were always trying to bring new people in. Not everything was nice and easy. There were some arguments. There were some tense moments, and trying to figure out how to balance things, including the actual strategy, wasn’t an easy process, but it was extremely democratic — one person, one vote, and staying together within that.

Now for the fun part, the antagonism. BPRA and public power in general is an unabashedly eco-socialist vision for how to work energy in this state, which also means that it is a natural magnet for enemies. We were trying to upend how the energy system works, so obviously we had fossil fuel corporations and all sorts of politicians who are in various pockets against us. Honestly, the ability to show power was the most important thing, and a lot of that is antagonism. Some of that is alliance building, too. How do you build alliances so you can have power to back what you’re trying to achieve? That’s where the balance is. It’s difficult to figure out how to do that. I’m naturally an attack dog; I go in on people. I help with comms. Often, I’ve tried to take a very aggressive approach against a particular target, and then someone has to say, “Hey, listen, we can’t really do that with this person, because behind the scenes they’re doing x, y, or z,” which I don’t necessarily know about. It really is about trust in the people that I’m working with, who are engaged in different parts of the campaign, who know things that I wouldn’t be privy to, so if someone tells me something, I trust and believe that they’re on top of what they’re doing. At the same time, they trust and believe in what I’m doing, too. So there’s a little push and pull there. But overall this was a bold campaign to reset people’s ideas on what was possible on climate, which made it naturally antagonistic. But there is always a need for coalition building and seeing people as partners, even in moments when they don’t necessarily agree. I do think the key to bringing everyone on board was wanting to see a just transition for workers, wanting to see workers in these frontline communities brought on board to be part of the solution. You have to want to do that alliance building. And then you have to want to attack people, too, when they get in the way.

 When we were power mapping, we did an analysis of who has power, who moves leadership within the legislature, and who is not acting on climate. And it turns out our own Senate bill sponsor is not moving our bill past committee. So all across the state we ran seven electoral candidates specifically on climate as their key issue. That was part of our calculation: if you are not moving climate legislation, you will lose your job. After our bill’s lead sponsor was primaried and won by a plurality, by less than half, then he started moving things. We came up on PowerPoint presentations that he was giving to the rest of the Senate where BPRA was presented as priority legislation. And then electing Kristen Gonzalez and Sarahana Shrestha was incredible because there was renewed energy behind this legislation. Sarahana was a Public Power organizer before she ran for office; her organizing brought a lot more legislators on board where we previously didn’t have access. As scrappy socialists who don’t have power but understand that we need to contest power in order to build it, we challenge seats and are trying to expand the state electorally so that we can implement legislation. And that’s not just for climate, it’s for everything—housing, taxing the rich, workers’ rights, decarceration, and true justice in our communities. So yeah, we did that. [

] And it was exhausting. But if we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t have gotten this far.

 In addition to primarying, there’s also a lot of shaming. There was this great 

 where I got arrested along with many other leaders. Our team created these great Venmo boards that demonstrated how much money all these electeds took from the fossil fuel industry, and some of them were so offended, like Amy Paulin. It became clear how many of our elected officials were in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry. That was an example of a very confrontational protest. We all got hit with misdemeanor charges, later dropped, because it took an hour or so to get us power-sawed out of this structure that included chicken wire and cement, so it was a big deal. I think it kind of worked as a way to mobilize our organizers to continue and feel energized about the fight.

 An important aspect of this was the outside stuff, the direct actions, the meme warfare. And there’s the inside stuff — you’ve got the stick of shaming and then the carrot of Sarahana and Kristen and all the people running the inside strategy. It seems like you are saying that was key to your success here. But I’m thinking of other parts of the country that don’t, at this moment, have allied elected officials. What parts of this are replicable in those parts of the country? Should folks elsewhere start with trying to find vulnerable places in the state legislature and try to run candidates? Do you think they should start outside and see what labor or other organizations they can get on board? What do you think folks who face a different electoral side of the power map could take from what you all have done?

 We didn’t have aligned electeds at first either. We had to create that. That’s harder to do in other places than for us. So it’s hard to say what someone should do specifically or technically. But here are the broad takeaways. People understand that we are in a crisis. People understand their own material conditions. Workers understand what will help pay their bills. Politicians understand that you can get them the hell up out of there. Playing on all of those things is how you win. However that happens from state to state, municipality to municipality, that’s different. But you have to go to the people. You have to have an aligned group of individuals with you. You can start off really small, as we did. And you have to be bold in challenging power, particularly on this issue, because we’re working with tight timeframes. We don’t have time for half measures. We don’t have time to play that game. Bold antagonism is what’s needed. And doing as much as you can to align people’s material goals with your own climate goals is the real key.

 As an organizer, I’m always like, “You’ve got to power map. You have to understand and assess your conditions, and then chart your path forward and be willing to fail and make mistakes.” But the heart of the matter is that I loved organizing with my comrades. I was changed and developed through this campaign. A lesson to come out of this, besides analysis, power mapping, and electoralism is: Take heart. Believe in your comrades, believe in the movement, and build with people. All organizing, all building, happens with people. All of our vision is implemented through people. And trust that your vision will win. And that’s not even poetic. That’s just something that you need. That’s a spiritual foundation you need to fight over the long run, and for our comrades across the country who face violence, increased state surveillance, and the rise of fascism, let’s take heart. All of our issues are connected. And there are already people who are working on these issues in a wide array of ways. So do not fear that you are alone. And build as big of a historic bloc that you can, in a Gramscian sense, to let people know that this is a mass movement.

 The bill passing changes the organizing landscape for people in other states who want to replicate or improve on this. Being able to look at New York provides better opportunities for other groups. DSA, for example, is trying to organize nationally to build this out across the country. Success breeds more success. It’s not going to be easy, but we are working as much as we can with others. Somebody just said, “Let’s get in touch with an organizer in Minnesota right now. Let’s get them to pass BPRA, if they’re going to pass all this other stuff through with a 

.” I just called somebody in Minnesota. I went there for grad school. I said, “Let’s find out how we can use our networks to spread these strategies, because every place is vulnerable and in need of these kinds of changes.”

 Is there anything that you didn’t get to say about BPRA or organizing in general?

 It took every single person to pass this bill, and we do not take that for granted. Everybody who participated in some way felt like this was building something, and it did. One day, we will win, and it takes everybody. Don’t take your comrades for granted. Love, trust, and respect the people you organize with.

 We have a lot of direct discussions with regular New Yorkers ahead of us. This summer’s going to be really hot; it’s a good opportunity for us to do the work the government should be doing, which is “Here’s the law. Here’s how it can improve your lives.” We’re going to make everyone we speak to learns what the NYPA is.

You Can Win Bold Climate Laws in Your State

Here is the real modern labor problem. Here is the kernel of the problem of religion and democracy, of humanity. … The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and Black. — W.E.B. Du Bois, “Black Reconstruction in America,” 1935

hen the British Crown assumed direct rule over Kenya in 1895, that year marked a milestone in a project to restructure the social world to aggrandize a few well-placed elites in London. The British Crown had pursued this same project in Jamestown, where it created the colonies that would become the United States; in Bengal, where the British East India Company’s armed forces established a political foothold on the Indian subcontinent; and in countless far-off places. Racial capitalism is a framework to understand what the British Crown sought to build.

But what is racial capitalism, anyway, and where does the term come from? For some people, racial capitalism is one word too many: “Capitalism” alone explains the kinds of oppression and exploitation we see in the world. For others, “racial capitalism” is several words too few: The phrase fails to mention gender, ability, nationality, and other bases for systematic injustice. But racial capitalism is best understood as a way that both racism and capitalism work in history and in the present — and how the world as a whole is formed from the areas of colonialism built off the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Consider a closer look at the historical example of colonial Kenya, where the British Crown — an empire, not a corporation — embarked on a massive redistribution of economic and political power. The categories for these redistributions were racial. The colonial government 

 the most agriculturally productive land and relegated the African “natives,” including the Maasai, Kikuyu, and Kalenjin who had lived and worked on these very lands, to “reserves.” The colonial government gave exorbitantly large estates to white settlers and restricted Indian settlement to low-lying lands.

By 1951, the result was a standard assignment of teams: wealthy capitalists at the top, proletarians and peasants at the bottom. Some other distinctions stood out as well. The historians 

 have chronicled sharp age, gender, and racial stratifications in colonial Kenya within and across the economic designations of “worker” and “peasant.” African women and children were the lowest paid for farm labor overall. Even the highest-paid African men made less than half of the earnings of the lowest-paid Asian men and one-tenth of the lowest-paid European men. The stark divides evident in land and housing continued. The colonial government created racially segregated urban areas to serve as administrative centers, while reserving the most well-planned residential centers for whites and more crowded segments for “Asians.”

Race served as a hierarchical principle of accumulation in the society the British Empire created, whether speaking of income, land, or housing: more for whites, less for “Asians,” least for the Black “natives.” To the racial capitalism theorists, of which I consider myself one, these sorts of stratifications are social divisions that are just as relevant for political analysis as distinctions among capitalists, workers, and peasants. All of these stratifications, not just the latter ones, help explain why this system stayed in place.

Racial capitalism is hardly only an artifact of the past. It tells us just as much about conditions in the present and closer to home. Consider the mounting water crises in the United States, where the most publicized of these so far has occurred in Flint, Mich. The city temporarily switched its water source in 2014 from Detroit’s water supply to the Flint River as part of cost-cutting measures recommended by the city’s emergency manager. 

, residents began complaining about the color, taste, and odor of the contaminated water, and General Motors Corporation discontinued its use of local water. Compounding matters, Flint officials continued to insist into 2015 that the water was safe to drink. 

This crisis was the culmination of a decades-long downward trajectory, as the geographer Laura Pulido 

 in an article: “Flint was abandoned by capital decades ago, and as it became an increasingly poor and Black place, it was also abandoned by the local state. This abandonment can be seen in shrinking services, infrastructure investment, and democratic practices.”

 that the term “racial capitalism” is deeply tied to 1960s and ’70s 

 with Nelson Mandela for working to destroy apartheid) and the South African Communist Party’s organizer (and onetime 

 debated their contemporaries about the nature of the relationship between race and class in South Africa’s social structure.

But the global studies scholar Yousuf Al-Bulushi 

 of the relevance of broader trends and conversations in African political thought and practice at the time. During these same years, in Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam school of radical thought and in other countries, a connected set of researchers reshaped social science in a radically interdisciplinary direction. They argued that the global development of colonialism and capitalism had linked too tightly the history, economics, and sociology of far-flung reaches for countries or regions to be well understood in isolation. The work of this Tanzanian community — which included visiting thinkers like the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, the Italian economist Giovanni Arrighi, and the Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin — helped develop a number of new directions in left intellectual thought, including what’s now known as the world-systems theory.

The African American political theorist Cedric Robinson met and exchanged ideas with intellectuals and activists who had participated in these communities as he traveled in England and throughout the African continent. Thus, his classic text “Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition” developed an analysis that borrowed from structural insights on the relationship of race, class, and capitalism developed by the South African Marxists, which he combined with the global scale of politics influenced by world-systems theories. As a result, Robinson’s book played an instrumental role in popularizing both the term and a version of the analysis known as “racial capitalism.”

To get back to basics, it’s helpful to be clear about what we mean by both racism and capitalism. To some, racism is a moral commitment held by individuals and institutions: for example, the explicit commitment to treat people of some skin types and assumed ancestries better than others. This view might reserve an accusation of racism for the most full-throated white supremacist groups. Other definitions might focus on subtler targets: for instance, the 

 of negative ideas, imagery, or dispositions with racially marginalized people. These ways of thinking about racism prioritize acts, the bad things people do (e.g., hate crimes) or the bad ways people do innocuous or even good things (e.g., enforcing neutral policies in a racially discriminatory way). In this wider view of racism and racists, even well-meaning liberals may count as racists, or as acting in racist ways. This line of thinking is embedded in many anti-racist workshops and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Another way to consider racism might focus on the ways race fits into or makes up social structures, rather than how racism might characterize particular actions or actors within those structures. The racial capitalism family of thinkers and theorists sits under this broader umbrella. As the American studies scholar Lisa Lowe 

 these are the theories that begin with “the sense that actually existing capitalism exploits through culturally and socially constructed differences such as race, gender, region, and nationality and is lived through those uneven formations.”

If you ask a skeptical Marxist to define capitalism, the kind of person who thinks racial capitalism is one word too many, that person might say something like this: Capitalism is a system that organizes economic activity around those who control the means of production (capitalists), who use that leverage to buy the productive labor of others (the workers) and produce goods and services for exchange. Through today’s version of this production and exchange, capital accumulates, making it possible to make even bigger production and exchanges tomorrow. This cycle repeats endlessly — well, until the triumphant rise of the workers to dig capital’s graves (if you’re a glass-half-full type of person) or until we destroy the planet (for the pessimists).

A racial capitalism theorist needn’t disagree with this basic picture. After all, this framework doesn’t tell us what is being produced, where it’s being produced, or who does the accumulating. It’s possible, of course, that this highly abstract picture of the world tells us most or all of what we need to know to figure out the sides of political struggle as the years change: capitalists and workers. If that were right, it would be a good reason to think racial capitalism was one word too many, after all. But one reason to disagree returns to Lowe’s observation earlier: that “actually existing capitalism” has spread through “uneven formations” of differences like “race, gender, region, and nationality” and that these sources of unevenness are politically important. That disagreement might start from the suspicion that the steady deterioration of Flint’s water quality had something to do with which people lived there; that to determine which people in colonial Kenya got the fertile land and which people got the “reserves” was to largely determine the colony’s future.

The term “racial capitalism” has been used in many ways by many theorists, but not all in compatible ways, as the sociologist Julian Go 

. This opens the door for potential tensions in reconciling one person’s claims about racial capitalism with another’s, many of which critics have continually raised as the term surges in popularity. Hudson 

 of one particularly important tension: South African Marxists Martin Legassick and David Hemson (among the 

) focused on claims specific to the South African context, whereas Cedric Robinson preferred to wield it in a characterization of the world system as a whole.

In the end, racial capitalism is perhaps better thought of as a set of questions about how racism and capitalism work than as a separate theory of what our social system is like. But rather than insisting on principle how racial stratifications and disparities are “really” just disguised forms of class oppression (as “class reductionists” might) or how all social injustices might boil down to the preservation of white supremacy (as “race reductionists” might), theorists have simply tried to explain what these different but related things might have to do with each other. To ask such questions is simply to pay attention to how capitalism’s restructuring of production alters the relationships that make up our entire social world, not just our practices and roles in economic production.

Some skeptical Marxists see racial capitalism as a deviation from class and proper left thought in its insistence on the tight relationship of economic relations to broader social ones. But in this respect, racial capitalism is quite in agreement with 

 thought. The writings of many figures in Marxist history link social categories to purely economic ones, and this connection is one of Marxism’s most basic and fundamental insights. This goes beyond the level of theory to the level of practice: Revolutionaries like 

 connected women’s political rights to the class struggle; 

 did the same with anti-colonial nationalism. We would do well to remember that the Russian Revolution gained a foothold for socialism by way of overthrowing an empire. The thinking offered by racial capitalism allows us to “open up, as opposed to foreclose, more complex analyses,” as the Black studies scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly wrote, analyses that integrate thinking about other forms of hierarchy and marginalization.

You don’t need to be sold on the phrase “racial capitalism” to understand it. Use it or don’t; the world will be what it is, whether we subtract a word or add several to any term. What matters about racism, capitalism, racial capitalism, and any other options are the ideas underneath and what we do with them. Racial capitalism offers us a clue: If it is true that racism and capitalism are in a mutually supporting relationship, then we should expect that any potentially effective anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles will also be mutually supporting. Our ultimate goal isn’t to understand the origins of a term or even its lineage, but to understand the workings of a world we are trying to change.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

@OlufemiOTaiwo

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