KYT

In my book, I talk about the relationship between the disappointments of black millennials in the administration of Barack Obama and the rise of Black Lives Matter. People believed Obama, they campaigned for Obama, they thought that the election of Obama would actually transform conditions for black people in the United States. When that didn’t happen, it not only created deep wells of disillusionment, but it created a wave of anger as well.

That in combination with the persistence of police violence and the daily grind of unemployment, underemployment, and under-resourced public institutions produced a different kind of consciousness, one that rejected the idea that we can just elect these problems away.

It created the space for a different kind of consciousness and the confidence to do something. One of the reasons why Ferguson exploded was because of the history people had there with a police force that was becoming more and more disconnected from the concept that they were acting as an impartial state agency. It suddenly became clear that there was a kleptocracy in the county seat and that the stormtroopers, if you will, were the police.

So the public execution of Mike Brown and then the transformation of that execution into a lynching by leaving his body uncovered for over four hours, signaled to young people that there’s no longer any pretense that the police are public servants. They have the capacity to transform into death squads, and if you don’t do something about it, then this stuff with Mike Brown is going to become a regular occurrence.

There were particular dynamics in Ferguson that can be located in cities across the country, which is why the movement was able to generalize so quickly from a local attempt to get a cop indicted into a national uproar about police abuse and violence and the inability for the state — the most powerful state, the most powerful government on the planet — to rein in its police.

I don’t think that dynamic was just relegated to black communities. There’s a tremendous overlap between young white people who worked on Obama’s campaign in 2008 in the explosion of the Occupy Movement.

People believed that Obama would be a breach with the devastating neoliberal order from the Clinton regime of the nineties into Bush. The way the country was dragged into an illegal war in 2003, the collective shrug of the federal government in the face of the hurricane of the Katrina catastrophe, when New Orleans is allowed to drown because it is a black city, and then the near collapse the United States and the global economy in 2007 and 2008.

Obama was politically adept at figuring out which way the wind was blowing and crafted a campaign that responded to that and exploited it all the way to the White House. But with big expectations and big hope come even bigger disappointment.

Then when you get Occupy and the struggle around the execution of Troy Davis, both helped create the conditions for a movement to emerge against the murder of Trayvon Martin and the police misconduct that was bound up in that. The infusion of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and their reporting on police brutality. Then Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, which narrates and explains this entire political period that a generation of young people have come of age in.

All these things work together to create the conditions for the emergence of a political movement. The complicating factor is that it’s happening in the context of a fractured, divided, and politically inept left. People are trying to overcome that deficit, but it means that the movement starts on a certain level and has to politically mature in order get to the point that will be necessary to challenge this particular kind of administration.

You can understand what happened to the black movement, the most important movement of the 1960s. You have the deliberate efforts of the political establishment to redirect black politics into the Democratic Party, to remake the Democratic Party as a “legitimate arena for activism and for politics” as opposed to the streets. The point was to move from protest into formal politics. So you have what some have described as cooptation of the movement and the development of a small but important black middle class. Black people can now buy homes, you open up pathways for African Americans to go to college, open up the civil service so that African Americans can get stable middle-class jobs.

You essentially give people a stake in the society. That five hundred thousand people participated in urban, armed uprisings throughout the mid-sixties was indicative that people were not invested in the system and were locked out from it.

Then you have the sort of brutal physical repression of the movement itself, where black activists are jailed, exiled, or killed by the federal government. Then you combine that with the ramping up of law and order, you grease the wheels of mass incarceration, and then, politically, you help to roll back and undermine all the structural logic that emerged from the 1960s.

Stokely Carmichael gives us the language of institutional racism to understand what has happened to black communities. Even characterizations that I don’t necessarily agree with — like the idea that African Americans were an internal colony in the United States — give a structure and form to black disenfranchisement and inequality, when others were describing this phenomenon as products of defective culture, as products of moral lapses.

In the 1970s, you begin to see the retreat from this. If you identify structural inequalities, then that demands structural responses. If, however, you can transform that narrative into one of personal irresponsibility as the main feature of black oppression and black inequality, then that calls for personal transformation — not robust public policy.

If you put all of those things together, it has a depressing impact on political organizing and political activism. There are episodic outbursts that pierce that general political framework — whether it’s the Los Angeles rebellion in 1992, the emergent global justice movement at the end of the 1990s and along with it, an emergent movement against racial profiling — all of which is destroyed and wiped out by the terrorist attacks on September 11. You have to rebuild those networks, that consciousness, that confidence that was beginning to come together at the end of Clinton’s reign in the 1990s.

We are now seeing the revival of that political awakening. These things never disappear completely. They can be driven underground, but the basis of it is still there. But then you have fifteen years of new garbage heaped on top of it. In that sense, you get an even deeper radicalization but it is emerging within the context of a left that is not yet in a position to give it any direction.

We’re at the very beginning of this process, and you can see that the radicalization is quite deep. If you look at Black Lives Matter, Occupy, the fact that the Democratic Socialists of America has twenty thousand members: all of these things point to that. There’s no getting around the rebuilding of the Left. It doesn’t mean that it’s a slow, one-by-one numeric process. It’s something that can happen in leaps and bounds. We saw that the day after the inauguration of Trump, when three to four million people come out in protest.

This is completely unprecedented in the era of American history. That is something that can be built on and built on quite quickly.