Cedric Johnson dropped After Black Lives Matter into an ongoing debate between a ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ left. It’s an older debate, but one running hot in the last few years. Unlike many other authors, Johnson tries, at least in some ways, to work around and between the two camps.
Not that he always succeeds. And it’s pretty clear which side he prefers (the ‘anti-woke’ side). But I think he wrote After Black Lives Matter in an effort to move the debate forward.
Let’s take a look.
After Black Lives Matter
In After Black Lives Matter, Cedric Johnson discusses leftist and left leaning opposition to police violence. He moves from the history of policing to both major stages of the Black Lives Matter movement (2013-2015 and 2020-now).
Johnson notes both the promise of BLM and, ultimately, its lack of success on its core issues. He traces BLM’s failures to its race reductionist moves and its poor diagnosis of the history and function of policing in the U.S.
Johnson situates himself closely to Adolph Reed Jr. and Touré Reed, who often argue that BLM slides into a kind of PMC liberalism. But Johnson brings to the table a more nuanced approach, akin to Ben Burgis. He comes off as sympathetic to black radical and abolitionist views.
The History of Policing
Abolitionist segments of BLM argue for a ‘race first’ narrative of the history and function of policing. On this account, we can trace policing to slave catching in the 19th century. More careful authors like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in fact, argue that it’s not so simple. She argues that policing traces both to slave catching and to the policing of labor in the early 19th century. But some in BLM circles ignore that latter half.
Johnson promotes an alternative narrative in After Black Lives Matter. He traces policing to certain events after World War II, namely the expansion of the suburbs and deindustrialization in U.S. cities. On this narrative, modern policing arose from the decline of New Deal era social democracy. The U.S. failed to build a universal health care system. It dismantled its social safety net. It lost union density, scrapped its public housing system in favor of ‘vouchers’ and other forms of public-private ‘affordable housing‘ partnerships, and so on.
These moves created a massive ‘surplus population.’ An Industrial Reserve Army, as Marx called it. These people live at the edge of survival as a constant threat to ‘take the jobs’ of working people. Johnson sees policing as the U.S.’s ‘solution’ to this situation. Since we refused to create real social programs and public works projects, we farmed the problem out to militarized police.
Policing and Lived Experience
The Jim Crow system – which ‘New Jim Crow‘ rhetoric takes as a model – grounded these inequalities in race. But Johnson points out that policing cuts across race and hits the so-called ‘underclass’ more broadly. After all, as Johnson puts it, the police kill Native Americans and people suffering from mental illness at even higher rates than they kill black Americans. And quite a few people police kill are, indeed, even white.
What do people have in common when police kill them? Johnson points to their status as members of the ‘sub proletariat’ described above. They have trouble finding jobs. They lack access to good schools, housing, and health care. Above all, the capitalist system pushed them to the margins, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.
As Johnson details, the lived experience of black Americans with police varies widely by class. We all know examples of even well-off black Americans who police target – Henry Louis Gates comes to mind – but these incidents are outliers. When police harass or kill black Americans, it’s rarely a person in the position of Henry Louis Gates. It’s usually a person in the position of Eric Garner.
Class Language and the American City
So, what kind of coalition could come together to cut into our problems with policing and mass incarceration? Johnson sees a coalition built on class. And he thinks we should use class language to build it. He wants to put together working class people who are black, white, Latino, Native American, and so on. Much unlike the BLM coalition, which is built on a model of ‘black vanguard, white ally’ politics that, on Johnson’s view, will never build a real working majority.
To sketch out this coalition in more detail, Johnson analyzes the details in the U.S. cities of Baltimore and Chicago. He sees these as places with two forces – massive police violence against residents, as well as mature anti-policing activist networks.
He also promotes a few positive ideas for combating police violence, things he sets up as alternatives to standard BLM politics. Most notably local public works projects. These projects put together a broad need (public infrastructure) with a narrower, pro social agent (unemployed people). This kind of idea carries the potential to abolish the conditions that led to modern policing.
Policing, Unions, and After Black Lives Matter
Where do I come down on these ideas? I see a lot of merit in the basic story Johnson tells about the history and function of policing. It’s a better story than the BLM one Johnson opposes. I think public works projects are good ideas, though I’m much more skeptical than Johnson about how far they’d go toward doing the things he thinks they’d do, and also about the extent to which they work in current city politics.
If I want to poke at a deeper disagreement with Johnson, I’d look to the later parts of After Black Lives Matter, to what Johnson has to say about police unions. Johnson sees a positive role for police unions in reform. But as orgs designed to promote the interests of their members, I can’t see the potential to convince them to ever go beyond the most superficial efforts at ‘justice.’ And, practically by definition, they can’t support the long term goal of major reductions to police budgets.
It’s not that I oppose internal efforts by police officers to push for a positive vision that reduces the role of policing in society. I don’t. No one should. But I don’t find the efforts promising. And I don’t think leftist orgs should put major resources into those efforts.
Police Budgets and Privatization
And then there’s Johnson’s case against the call by Mariame Kaba to cut police budgets in half. He argues that Kaba’s demand is ‘leftist in form, but rightist in substance.’ The claim? When Kaba calls for massive cuts to police budgets, she does so in the context of broader debates over privatization.
So, even if Kaba wins, she loses. Suppose a city cuts the police budget in half. What happens? According to Johnson, policing just gets privatized. Now we have lots and lots of private rent-a-cops, many of them worse than regular police. Meanwhile, a public sector union gets broken and public services get increasingly shifted away from public delivery to various private contractors and non-profits.
Johnson isn’t exactly wrong about this. It shows, again, the importance of building up public services, public capacity, and meaningful alternatives to policing. And doing these things first.
