Finalist: Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker

It’s time for Americans to rethink their squeamishness about releasing the photos of the youngest victims of mass violence.

By Jay Caspian Kang

In a series of three essays published in 1991, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued that the Gulf War, which ended up with more than a hundred thousand dead Iraqis, had not really taken place. In his inimitable fashion, his argument was filled with internal contradictions, annoying trolling (Baudrillard had initially written that the Gulf War would never actually happen, which, of course, it did), and some pockets of real clarity. His ultimate argument was that what had taken place wasn’t so much a war but a one-sided aerial slaughter that was scrubbed clean through intensive media control. What people in the West saw were so-called live feeds of missiles and aerial assaults fuelled by new forms of technology, whether the Patriot missile or the stealth bomber. The war was communicated to us almost like an advertisement for a new car—here are all the new features, and here are the salesmen in the form of generals or foreign-policy experts paraded on cable news. We did not see slain enemy combatants, destroyed civilian homes.

If the Gulf War was a slaughter sold to the American public as a clean military-technology show, the war in Gaza has been a production line of horrifying images. The footage of dead and wounded children, particularly on social media, has traumatized the world and made it clear that nothing—not even the Israeli military tightly controlling media access—can stop ordinary citizens around the world from seeing what happens when a shell hits a hospital or a school or an apartment building where families live. My guess is that this war’s lasting legacy may not be some geopolitical break after years of conflict but the images of the innocents we’ve seen, including children, killed in almost every imaginable way.

There should be no moral squishiness about any of this. If children are being slaughtered, if a father is carrying his dead daughter through a bombed-out street, or if there is footage of dead children in southern Israel, which, for now, seems to have been shown mostly in a selective way through screenings by the Israel Defense Forces, the world, at large, should see that.

Here in the United States, we have our own procession of dead children, but they’re almost all unseen. The victims of mass shootings in schools leave behind a spectral trail. We do not see their deaths; we do not see the agony of a parent holding their child’s lifeless body. Instead, we see the surrounding context—surveillance footage of the shooter stalking through the hallways of a school, the smiling school photos of the murdered child, the brave parents speaking in shaky voices at a press conference, the faces of law-enforcement officers providing nighttime updates on the death toll. These scenes have become so familiar that they feel like studio sets for a television show we watch over and over again. In the first act, we see the aerial shots of the school. Then we are on the grounds with the shooter. And here is the local chief of police, his face overly lit from a crowd of news cameras, each with its own little spotlight, grimly updating the nation.

This show does not trade in clean advertisements in the Baudrillardian sense, but its recurrence and its familiarity draw more attention to the bodies we don’t see. We are left to imagine the scene inside a classroom. Every time I hear about a shooting at a school, I picture my own children looking up with surprise as the gunman walks through the door. But our imaginations tend to stop short, in part because the vast majority of us have never seen actual carnage. If the parents are willing, and believe that their child’s death can spark the outrage needed to produce an outcome that would stop or reduce these mass shootings, should we see these dead children in the same way that we have seen the dead children of Gaza? One does not have to agree upon what the solution might be—gun control or early psychiatric interventions or whatever else—to understand the calculation here. It is similar to the decision Mamie Till made when she insisted upon an open-casket funeral for her son, Emmett, saying, “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.”

Earlier this month, the Washington Post published a lengthy multimedia story titled “Terror on Repeat: A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings,” which includes photos from mass shootings that the vast majority of the public has never seen before. We see the bullet-ridden walls of the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, a prayer book with a bullet hole found in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, a shattered glass wall at Sandy Hook Elementary, and the blood-streaked floors of a classroom at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas.

In a note that accompanies the story, Sally Buzbee, the newspaper’s executive editor, writes that “the goal was to balance two crucial objectives: to advance the public’s understanding of mass killers’ increasing use of this readily available weapon, which was originally designed for war, while being sensitive to victims’ families and communities directly affected by AR-15 shootings.”

But these images have also been edited, vetted, and responsibly published through an institutional process that included, in Buzbee’s words, grappling “with our own standard practices when it comes to publishing graphic content” and “training by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma,” which conferred “best practices for viewing disturbing photos and discussing how publishing them could affect readers.” What this means is that the Post’s story tightens the focus on all the areas surrounding the images of dead children—the bloody floor of a classroom in Uvalde—but for the most part still does not show the bodies themselves.

There are two notable exceptions. From the mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas, we see dozens of dead people lying on the ground. In a hallway at Robb Elementary, a photo shows two lines of white body bags. The latter image is stunning, and there is an argument to be made that the body bags are enough to convey the horror and to fully portray the destruction of these mass shootings. The anonymity the bags confer and the blankness of white allow the viewer to imagine what’s inside without any intervening politics or prejudices or narratives. The brightly painted hallway—lime green and light blue—could be at any elementary school in America. The white bags could contain anyone’s children. The anonymity is universal, and the mind is drawn immediately to the other white body bags we have seen since October 7th.

And yet I do not know if these images are enough. This is not through any fault of the Post, which should be credited for its exhaustive, original reporting. But because it is an institution that must be careful and must reflect the recommendations of other institutions, such as the Dart Center, the decision about publishing traumatic imagery will always be processed through existing standards and consensus. Part of that calculus involves assessing the images’ journalistic value, which, in this case, was to show the “devastation caused by AR-15 shootings.” The specificity of that framing might give it more political power, but it also feels slightly—and I do mean slightly—disingenuous. Are we really seeing all these images of carnage as a way to talk about the AR-15? Perhaps, but I imagine the Post also understands that the horror of the images extends well beyond the debate over one specific weapon of war.

In an excellent column in the New York Times about a photograph of six dead children in Gaza, Lydia Polgreen writes, “The news media no longer needs to disseminate an image for it to be seen. Social media bludgeons us with a flood of brutal images.” Polgreen points to a discomforting probability: when the world ultimately sees the images of dead children in a school shooting in the United States, it will likely come via social media and be taken by someone who was inside the school, or, perhaps more ghoulishly, the shooters themselves. The dam—which currently is held in place by the standards of news organizations and by law-enforcement organizations who, for understandable reasons, have tightly guarded these crime-scene photos—will inevitably break. At some point, we will see these children, and journalists will then be faced with the question of whether they should offer up a more sanitized version of what the rest of the world has already seen.

In her editor’s note, Buzbee mentions that the Post talked to families of the victims, some of whom were willing to grant permission to publish photographs of their dead relatives. But the paper ultimately decided that “the potential harm to victims’ families outweighed any potential journalistic value of showing recognizable bodies.” This is a perfectly acceptable decision, but one that prompts a broader question about whether it will be these institutional processes—and institutions—that ultimately arbitrate what is and isn’t made visible. There is also the question of why the Post would set aside the consent of victims’ families to protect them from the potential harm of what they had agreed to do.

The arguments against facilitating such a voluntary exposure are certainly compelling. A family who agreed to have the image of their murdered child published would be opening themselves up to the public in an excruciating manner. They might also retraumatize the families of other victims. There also is a legitimate concern about privacy that a dead child can no longer demand. But I also think that it’s worth thinking pragmatically, if such a word can be used in this context. Images of dead children have great emotional and political power because most people in the world rightfully agree that their deaths are intolerable. The taboo on showing the aftermath of this violence does not exist as merely some marker of civilized society—of good taste. It comes from those who, for whatever reason, are squeamish about putting names and faces to the escalating body count, who want to keep everything abstract. This isn’t limited just to gun manufacturers or to their lobbies or to politicians defending the Second Amendment but extends to just regular parents who would rather not fixate on something that’s probably not going to happen at their kid’s school.

The past six weeks have made it clear that the world will respond to images of slaughtered children, and it’s worth asking why it’s taken this long for people to see what that looks like. There is no question that images of dead children carry an immense amount of weight, which, in turn, must be handled responsibly. But that does not mean that any attempt to get the public to see them is automatically manipulative or propagandistic. It is far more manipulative to edit out the dead children or to hide them under a veil of solemnity and manners.

The original concept in pursuit of diversity was vital and righteous. The way it was practiced was hard to defend.

By Jay Caspian Kang

Nearly a decade has passed since Students for Fair Admissions, or S.F.F.A., first filed a lawsuit against Harvard University over its race-based admissions policies. During that time, not much has changed about the particulars of the case, nor how they have been processed by both the courts and the public. The announcement of the Supreme Court’s ultimate ruling in the case—a 6–3 decision that effectively ends affirmative action in college admissions and most likely beyond—did not contain any surprises. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, argued that “many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in dissent, wrote about “gulf-sized race-based gaps” and argued that racial preferences in admissions were necessary to address “the well-documented ‘intergenerational transmission of inequality’ that still plagues our citizenry.”

Asian Americans, the group whom the suit was supposedly about, have been oddly absent from the conversations that have followed the ruling. The repetitiveness of the affirmative-action debate has come about, in large part, because both the courts and the media have mostly ignored the Asian American plaintiffs and chosen, instead, to relitigate the same arguments about merit, white supremacy, and privilege. During the five years I spent covering this case, the commentators defending affirmative action almost never disproved the central claim that discrimination was taking place against Asian Americans, even as they dismissed the plaintiffs as pawns who had been duped by a conservative legal activist. They almost always redirected the conversation to something else—often legacy admissions.

The deflections were understandable. The evidence the plaintiffs had amassed that Harvard, in particular, discriminated against Asian applicants through a bizarre and unacceptable “personal rating” system is overwhelming. These facts, and, more important, the conservative composition of the Supreme Court, placed the defenders of affirmative action in a bit of a discursive and legal corner. If you acknowledged that Harvard was, in fact, engaging in behavior that by any reasonable standard would be considered discriminatory and rooted in harmful stereotypes, it was nearly impossible to then turn around and say that the university should have the right to conduct its admissions in whatever manner it pleased. Why would anyone trust Harvard to do anything?

An air of inevitability also hung over the Court’s decision, which mostly made the specific claims of the plaintiffs irrelevant. The end of affirmative action really started in 1978, with Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.,’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke—the first Supreme Court case on the matter—which tried to split the difference between a divided Court by arguing that the race of a candidate could be considered, but not as part of a reparative, quota-based program that tried to reduce the harms of slavery and injustice. Rather, race could only be considered by an admissions office that wanted, for the benefit of itself and its students, to produce a “diverse” student body.

Affirmative action, in my view, was doomed from that moment forward because it had been stripped of its moral force. It is one thing to argue that slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, and centuries of theft demand an educational system that factors in the effects of those atrocities. If that principle were to express itself in, say, a Black student who was descended from slaves and had grown up in poverty in an American inner city receiving a bump on his application when compared with a rich private-school kid from the suburbs, so be it. But that is not, in fact, how affirmative action usually plays out at élite schools. Most reporting on the subject—including my own, as well as a story in the Harvard Crimson—shows that descendants of slaves are relatively underrepresented among Black students at Harvard, compared with students from upwardly mobile Black immigrant families. It is easy and perhaps virtuous to defend the reparative version of affirmative action; it is harder to defend the system as it has actually been used.

Powell’s decision gave schools like Harvard—where, according to a study published in 2017, only four and a half per cent of the student body came from the bottom twenty per cent of the nation’s income earners and fifteen per cent of students came from families who make more than six hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year—the leeway to corrupt the original spirit of affirmative action and turn it into a counting game for rich kids. Harvard did not have to pursue such a comical vision of social justice. It could have vastly expanded its class sizes, relaxed its admissions standards, and cut off its pipelines from exclusive private schools. It could have opened its doors to hundreds of community-college transfers. If Harvard were truly committed to increasing access to an élite education, it could have invested a fraction of its fifty-three-billion-dollar endowment in free college-preparatory academies across America and guided hundreds of poor Black and Latino students through the university’s gates.

Harvard, of course, did none of this and chose instead to chase an absurd and empty vision of diversity that allowed it to stay as exclusive as possible. Institutional arrogance and the refusal to actually produce a defensible affirmative-action system made the university an easy mark for conservative legal activists.

But there were other legal factors that made the decision inevitable. Prior law dictated that race could only be used as a “positive” when it came to college admissions and not as a “negative,” which was in line with the equal-protection clause. What “negative” meant was quite simple: your race could not harm your chances, nor could stereotypes be used to make negative assumptions about you. In Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 affirmative-action case concerning the University of Michigan’s law school, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously expressed the hope that the practice would no longer be necessary in “twenty-five years,” which effectively placed a timer on how long race-based admissions would be around. Affirmative action was toppled five years ahead of schedule, simply because an admissions office clearly relied upon stereotypes—in this case, casting many Asian applicants as hardworking grinds with little personality. (Harvard has consistently denied that this is the case.)

It is almost certain that élite schools such as Harvard will more or less carry on with their diversity missions, albeit with even less transparency than before. On Thursday, the Times published a story about how selective colleges will achieve racial diversity through other means, including teacher recommendations and personal essays. Jeannie Suk Gersen has also argued in these pages that such so-called proxy programs will likely allow these schools to maintain the number of Black and Latino students on their campuses. Such practices, along with the elimination of standardized testing, will probably have the effect of capping the number of Asian students admitted—which means that despite winning a multiyear lawsuit in the highest court in the land, S.F.F.A. and its supporters may actually find themselves in an even more opaque and arbitrary admissions climate than before.

So where did Asians actually fit into this picture, as imagined by the defenders of affirmative action? The word “Asian” appears only three times in Justice Jackson’s twenty-nine-page dissent—once as a footnote, once as part of a list of median household incomes compared across racial groups, and then again as part of the following statement: “a higher percentage of the most academically excellent in-state Black candidates . . . were denied admission than similarly qualified White and Asian American applicants.” The dissent, which details the lengthy history of discrimination against Black people, never mentions the history of racism against Asians in America, whether the lynching of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Exclusion Act, or Japanese internment. If a society should make decisions with a clear eye toward history—a sentiment I agree with—shouldn’t it also follow that a group who was expelled from the U.S. would at least have the right to not be lumped in with the people who kicked them out? Shouldn’t their contemporary claims of discrimination warrant some serious consideration?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent discusses Asian Americans a bit more, and acknowledges they also suffer from racism, but her defense of affirmative action goes further in showing how Asians are shortchanged in the undignified competition to join America’s multicultural élite. “There is no question that the Asian American community continues to struggle against potent and dehumanizing stereotypes in our society,” Sotomayor writes. “It is precisely because racial discrimination persists in our society, however, that the use of race in college admissions to achieve racially diverse classes is critical to improving cross-racial understanding and breaking down racial stereotypes.”

In Sotomayor’s telling, Asian Americans who are concerned about being racially stereotyped should attend “diverse” universities, where they can help dispel people’s misconceptions by simply existing and getting along with their peers. She then goes on to argue that race-conscious admissions allow Asian American applicants “who would be less likely to be admitted without a comprehensive understanding of their background” to “explain the value of their unique background heritage, and perspective” and allow colleges to “consider the vast differences within [that] community.” It’s hard not to read this as a premise for Asian American teen-agers to essentially dance for acceptance, or to try to distinguish themselves from other Asian Americans by explaining to the good people at the Harvard admissions office why, say, a Vietnamese applicant is more valuable to the Ivy League cultural texture than just another Chinese one.

These opinions betray the corruption of affirmative action’s original righteous, reparative promise, and the way in which a program that was designed for a racially binary America never got meaningfully updated for today’s multiracial democracy. After five years of covering this story, I have found very little to admire about how élite colleges played their decadent racial-preference game. While I do believe that most colleges will be able to maintain some kind of racial diversity on their campuses, I have no faith that the processes they use to do so will be any better than the broken system they’re trying to replace. The conversation will not change.

Perhaps more than those of any other network on television, the stars of Fox News are more or less interchangeable.

By Jay Caspian Kang

How do you measure the career of a cable-news man? When considering Tucker Carlson, whose tenure at Fox News ended on Monday, one feels compelled to speak in superlatives. Depending on whom you ask, Carlson was either a wildly popular demagogue who preached a nightly gospel of white supremacy, cruelty, and fear to an audience of forgotten Americans who became more radical, misinformed, and prone to violent insurrection with each passing monologue, or—despite his background as a wealthy, well-connected child of San Francisco—he was the only real populist remaining in a nation that had been otherwise sold out to corporate interests and wokeness.

Don Lemon, whose firing from CNN was also announced on Monday, was seen much more as a traditional network puppet. He is attractive and generally affable, and his most famous moments didn’t come from any political stance—save for an embarrassing and frankly bizarre rant, about the Presidential candidate Nikki Haley and what he saw as the “prime years” for women, that may have precipitated his firing—but, rather, his mildly unhinged New Year’s Eve broadcasts and a collection of gaffes that went viral for a day or two. Unlike in the case of Carlson, whose ousting has been the biggest story of the past twenty-four hours, there will be very few postmortems about Lemon’s departure and what it might mean for the future of cable news. But it’s worth asking whether these two TV men were really all that different, not so much in their approach but, rather, in the place that they held within the American imagination. In the telling that has crystallized over the past day, Lemon was just another easily replaceable talking head, whereas Carlson had a transformative effect on the body politic that was particular to his nightly performance. He would speak and viewers across the country would rage, specifically because he told them to.

I’ve always been skeptical about these purported lines of cause and effect, mostly because it’s in the media’s best interest to act as if it influences every part of American life. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, for example, the Washington Post unveiled its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto, kicking off a years-long brand campaign that culminated in a maudlin Super Bowl ad in 2019 that reassured viewers, “When our nation is threatened, there’s someone to gather the facts, to bring you the story, no matter the cost—because knowing empowers us, knowing helps us decide, knowing keeps us free.” This message was accompanied by a slide show that depicted, among other things, a country ravaged by natural disaster and political strife. Good journalism would be the nation’s beacon, shining its truth light all over the lies of the President, and those of radicals of the far right and far left.

The form that all of this democracy-saving took was ideological in its mission and somewhat actuarial in its methods. The press did plenty of important reporting during the Trump Presidency, but its most visible interventions came in the form of endless, and often tedious, “fact checks” of the President’s lies, and a years-long investigation into his ties with Russia. These stories gave rise to a fight against “disinformation,” which, once again, highlighted the need for all those truth lights from trusted media sources. The implicit threat was that, if journalists could not claim their rightful, privileged perch on the airwaves and the news feeds, the racists and the liars would win, converting hearts and minds from the Philadelphia suburbs to Orange County, California.

After Trump lost in 2020, the liberal apparatus of media watchers and fact checkers turned much of its attention to Carlson. In some ways, the transition made sense: Carlson did spread lies on his show, which, on most nights, was just one long racist dog whistle. A Nielsen MRI Fusion study found that, in October of 2021, Carlson’s show was the top-rated news show among Democrats between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four, easily eclipsing every program from MSNBC and CNN. Clips of his monologues were a constant presence on liberal social media, even spawning a crew of people who watched Tucker Carlson as their job. His added value to Fox didn’t come so much from his ability to fire up the racists and send out a call to a forgotten America but, rather, from how effectively he could grab the attention of his ideological enemies. Just as Trump benefitted from the breathless and rightfully fearful coverage that he received from Fox’s news-media rivals, Carlson became the bogeyman for all liberal fears about the fascist future of the country.

But, although it’s true that Carlson was the most watched prime-time television-news personality in America—in the weeks leading up to his departure, he averaged more than three million viewers per night, nearly ten times the number of people who watched Lemon’s “CNN This Morning” in February—critics’ singular focus on his show made it seem as if he were a uniquely malevolent force inside Fox News. It’s easy to forget that Carlson’s ascent to his spot came just six years ago, when he took over for Bill O’Reilly, who was fired after a litany of sexual-harassment claims against him were made public. “Starting this week, a new era for prime-time cable news begins,” the New York Times declared in an article headlined “With Bill O’Reilly Out, Fox Rivals See a Chance to Move In.” The same questions that are being asked about Fox News today were asked back then: How would the network replace the wildly popular host who had departed? Would it clean up its act and maybe pump the brakes a bit on all the racism?

Carlson, at the time, was the replacement for Megyn Kelly, who had once been reformists’ great hope for Fox News to turn itself into a more responsible outlet. To some, Carlson’s ability to take over for Kelly, and then just as easily to replace the older, more established firebrand O’Reilly, might have reflected his talent—his ability to go seamlessly from cartoonishly stuffy conservative to populist demagogue. But, more likely, Carlson’s ratings were already locked in because of the loyalty of the Fox News audience, which, as of the end of 2022, was larger than the combined viewerships of CNN and MSNBC.

Perhaps more than those of any other network on television, the stars of Fox News—whether Kelly, whose moderate pragmatism was touted in credulous profiles when she left Fox for NBC, or O’Reilly, with his blustery anger—are more or less interchangeable. Their ratings do not reflect all that much other than their time slot. If you need evidence that O’Reilly and Kelly were just the faces that happened to be on the screen, look at what became of both after they left the network. Kelly’s show on NBC flopped, and she was ultimately fired for defending blackface on the air. O’Reilly is now the star of his own Web site, and rarely finds his way into any national conversation.

Ironically enough, Carlson’s need to rebut every liberal narrative also contributed to his downfall at the network. Carlson was the most prominent Fox News personality tangled up in the recently settled Dominion lawsuit, in which the voting-machine company sued Fox News for defamation over the network’s false claims about tampering in the 2020 Presidential election. His demise could be seen as the ultimate victory of the mainstream media’s fact-checking machine. But, just as was true with O’Reilly, Carlson wasn’t done in by his critics, or some shift in public opinion that finally determined that he was too much of a bigot to stay on the air. Instead, he was toppled by legal actions filed by people and companies that do not readily align themselves with his opposition: in O’Reilly’s case, women who worked at Fox News, and, in Carlson’s, a voting-machine company, which, by the very nature of its work, must remain as politically neutral as possible.

Given that more lawsuits are coming down the line, and that Carlson, according to text messages that have been released over the past months, didn’t seem to really believe the lies that he was telling on the air, it appears likely that executives at Fox News decided that they could just replace Carlson with someone who wouldn’t be carrying the same legal baggage. If the new talking head goes a bit easier on the election-denial claims, doesn’t blow quite as hard into the dog whistles, or shies away from some of the culture-war issues that made up the meat of Carlson’s show—see “woke M&M’s” and his obsession with “gender ideology”—it probably won’t be a choice born of their political convictions but, rather, a set of calculations made by their bosses to find the most legally tenable right-wing messaging that still resonates with the id of Fox’s viewership. They, like Carlson, will be playing a character.

This new host will almost certainly take a vaunted perch in the minds of liberals, especially the media watchers at rival publications and networks who will track every lie, report every bigoted statement, and, through their dutiful attention, inflate the actual influence that this person has on the country. In doing so, liberals will make the same error of scale and target that they made with O’Reilly and Carlson—the same personality-based delusion that led people to believe that Kelly could change Fox News on her own or that her stardom at NBC was all but inevitable. As is true nearly everywhere in the media, but especially at Fox News, a place with no credible competition, the network is the real star.

A new book makes the case for a more pragmatic anti-policing movement—one that seeks to build working-class solidarity across racial lines.

By Jay Caspian Kang

How should we think about the Black Lives Matter movement, now that three years have passed since the worldwide George Floyd protests? In sympathetic circles, the question does not usually inspire a direct answer, but, rather, a seemingly endless set of caveats and follow-up questions. What constitutes success? What changes could possibly be expected in such a short period of time? Are we talking about actual policies or are we talking about changed minds? I’ve engaged in this type of back-and-forth on several occasions during the past few years, and, though I believe the protests were, on balance, a force for good in this country, I wonder whether all this chin-scratching suggests a lack of conviction. Why don’t we have a clearer answer?

In his new book, “After Black Lives Matter,” the political scientist Cedric Johnson blows right past the sort of hemming and hawing that has become de rigueur in today’s conversations about the George Floyd protests. Johnson chooses, instead, to level a provocative and expansive critique from the left of the loose collection of protest actions, organizations, and ideological movements—whether prison abolition or calls to defund the police—that make up what we now call Black Lives Matter. He agrees that unchecked police power is a societal ill that should inspire vigorous dissent. His problem is more with the “Black Lives Matter” part—not the assertion, itself, which should be self-evident, but, rather, how the shaping of the slogan and its main beneficiaries (Johnson believes these are mostly corporate entities) promoted a totalizing and obscurantist vision of race and power.

In his new book, “After Black Lives Matter,” the political scientist Cedric Johnson blows right past the sort of hemming and hawing that has become de rigueur in today’s conversations about the George Floyd protests. Johnson chooses, instead, to level a provocative and expansive critique from the left of the loose collection of protest actions, organizations, and ideological movements—whether prison abolition or calls to defund the police—that make up what we now call Black Lives Matter. He agrees that unchecked police power is a societal ill that should inspire vigorous dissent. His problem is more with the “Black Lives Matter” part—not the assertion, itself, which should be self-evident, but, rather, how the shaping of the slogan and its main beneficiaries (Johnson believes these are mostly corporate entities) promoted a totalizing and obscurantist vision of race and power.

Much like Barbara Fields and Adolph Reed, two Black scholars cited in the book, Johnson is a socialist, and his argument is “inspired and informed by the left-wing of antipolicing struggles,” which he takes great care to distinguish from what he sees as the more corporatized and popular vision of Black Lives Matter, and the naïvete of the police-abolition movement. He does not dismiss the pernicious impact that racism has upon the lives of people in this country, but he does not see much potential in a movement that focusses on race alone, nor does he believe that it accurately assesses the problem with policing. He writes:

During the 2020 George Floyd protests, the politics of Black Lives Matter seemed especially militant and stood in sharp contrast to the pro-policing, authoritarian posturing and hubris of the Trump administration. The fundamental BLM demand, that black lives equally deserve protections guaranteed under the Constitution, momentarily achieved majority-national support. Through slogans like the “New Jim Crow” and “Black Lives Matter,” the problem of expansive carceral power was codified as a uniquely black predicament. Police violence, however, is not meted out against the black population en masse but is trained on the most dispossessed segments of the working class across metropolitan, small town and rural geographies.

The police, in other words, enact violence against all poor people, because, in a capitalist country like the United States, the police serve primarily to reproduce “the market economy, processes of real estate development in central cities and the management of surplus populations.” Poor rural whites, Black people who live in the inner cities, Latinos in depressed agricultural districts, and Native Americans across the country can all be tagged as surplus, and Johnson argues that this condition has a much more direct and meaningful impact on how they are policed than race does. He also believes that the focus on race serves bourgeois interests, because it reduces the question of inequality in this country to skin color; this, in turn, obviates any discussion about how an improvement in basic living standards—health care, housing, child care, and education—could make communities safer. If all you have to do is expunge the racism in the hearts of police officers, or, perhaps, just reduce the number of racist patrol officers on the streets, you don’t have to do much about poverty. Or, at the very least, you can pretend that class conflict and racialized police brutality are two separate issues, when, in fact, they are the same thing.

“After Black Lives Matter” should be commended both for the clarity of its message and the bravery of its convictions. Even among scholars on the left who are critical of identity politics, there’s a wide range of responses to popular works such as “The 1619 Project”or Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist series, which seem to focus on race above all other things. Some, like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, level a more capacious critique of identity politics, even in its most crass and capitalistic forms: though Táíwò may object to the approach and analyses of so-called identitarians, he still sees them as his teammates. Others, like Fields and Reed, are far more dismissive. Johnson certainly falls in this second camp. He rails against “wokelords,” who are keen to shame and confront anyone who may offer up a critique of identity politics; he believes that modern racial-justice discourse “prompts liberal solutions, such as implicit bias training, body cameras, hiring more black police officers and administrators,” which, in turn, “erects unnecessary barriers between would-be allies.”

Johnson argues that, although Black Lives Matter may have dressed itself up in revolutionary clothing, it ultimately still followed the differential logic of a corporate diversity training: one group of people is asked to acknowledge another and fixate on points of difference. “BLM discourse truncates the policing problem as one of endemic antiblackness, and cuts off potential constituencies,” he writes, “treating other communities who have suffered police abuse and citizens who are deeply committed to achieving social justice as merely allies, junior partners rather than political equals and comrades.”

What emerges from “After Black Lives Matter” is a type of pragmatism, one that looks to build solidarity across racial lines. White people, especially poor white people, are also killed by the police, as are poor Latinos and poor Asians. Any change—whether revolutionary, legislative, or reformative—will require a critical mass of people who feel that their own interests are at stake in an anti-policing movement. Black Lives Matter, Johnson argues, may have been effective in getting people out on the streets because of its manipulation of digital platforms, but it also had wide appeal because it did not truly challenge the capitalist, neoliberal order. The reason so many corporations, for example, were so quick to offer funds for Black creators or anti-racism efforts wasn’t that they felt intimidated by what was happening in the streets, but because they saw a shift in how the country felt about race and quickly moved to adjust their optics without touching the underlying exploitative practices. In the summer of 2020, oil companies, multinational banks, the C.I.A., the N.F.L. all came out with commitments to Black Lives Matter. Johnson sees this as “an instance of ideological convergence—between the militant racial liberalism of Black Lives Matter and the operational racial liberalism of the investor class.” A truly transformative movement, then, would be broad and inclusive in its messaging, and also radical in its critique and democratic in its methods.

Johnson’s pragmatism also extends to the debates around defunding or abolishing the police. He reminds the reader that, at certain points in American history, “state coercion was necessary to secure racial justice.” Desegregation, for example, required the support of federal marshals and National Guardsmen, even if it also was opposed, violently, by the local law enforcement. Johnson advocates, instead, to “right-size” and “demilitarize” the police, but argues that “it seems rather naive to think that a complex, populous urban society can exist without any law enforcement at all, especially in those moments when forces threaten social justice and even the basic democratic rights of citizens.”

Johnson’s own prescription is to “abolish the class conditions that modern policing has come to manage.” He argues that any real change to policing will not come from a “mass rejection of racism,” but instead a “shared vision of the good society.” Eliminating racism, Johnson concedes, is a worthwhile goal, but the essentialist vision of race and the way that it narrows down the conversation about change in society down to one group—namely, Black Americans—will always be limited to the oppressed-and-ally relationship, which creates barriers instead of searching for common grievances. The alternative, Johnson argues, is “broadly redistributive left politics centered on public goods” that would ultimately allow for “powerful coalitions built on shared self-interests” to emerge.

I am sympathetic to Johnson’s critique, not only because I also see the limits of identity politics but also because I have seen the needlessly divisive and dispiriting ideology of racial essentialism in action at protests around the country. I’ve written about many of these instances in the past, whether the “wall of white allies” I saw in Minnesota or the harsh reprimand a white protester received from a Black organizer for daring to talk to a reporter. (Her offense, as far as I could tell, wasn’t speaking to the press, but, rather, “centering herself.”) These types of instances, which weren’t exactly common, but did recur during my years of reporting on protests, may have been interesting on an intellectual level—seeing theory in action is always a bit thrilling. But they also convinced me that not much action could come from a movement that endlessly polices its own “allies.” I do not think people stay allies for very long, but I do believe that they act in their self-interests for a lifetime. Therefore, if one is committed to profoundly changing policing, the work will require convincing as many people as possible that they, too, can be abused and killed by the police.

But there’s also a profound contradiction that I haven’t quite been able to square in my own head, and perhaps never will. Johnson is correct in saying that Black Lives Matter, by explicit design, elevated the concerns of Black people over those of others who may have been targeted by the police. But it was this message, and not a broader anti-capitalist critique, which has captivated millions of people for almost a decade now. This message was the one that ultimately resonated, not only in the United States but also in protests around the world.

There were people I saw in every march I attended, from Ferguson to the Floyd protests, who truly did believe that they were doing revolutionary work in the name of Black Lives Matter. In the summer of 2020, I saw nervous first-timers who had no love for corporate remediations on race and were ready to leave their homes and march out into the streets. It is the job of scholars and critics, like Johnson and me, to think about what it all might have meant, yet I don’t think it’s really possible to take an event as large as the summer of 2020 and make such a broad, declarative assessment of the political motivations behind all of it.

Early in the book, Johnson makes the distinction between organized power and mass mobilization. The sheer size and diversity of the Floyd protests pointed to the latter—something he says is “much easier now with the endless opportunities for expressing discontent provided by social media, online petitions, memes and vlogging.” In describing the difference, Johnson is asking the profound political question of the past twenty years: Does the ephemeral nature of social media dilute the power of street protest? Does it turn everything into online symbology, and give the people who show up a false sense that they have accomplished something real?

I wonder, perhaps naïvely, whether we simply need more time to accurately gauge the gains of the summer of 2020. A group of unpopular activists was able to overturn Roe v. Wade after fifty years of planning and organizing. The actual mechanisms for change may have wound through the courts, but anti-abortion activists still had to create the circumstances, whether by influencing conservative legal scholars, fostering their own like Amy Coney Barrett, or even just keeping things together through decades of opposition.

On the left, social movements find their inspiration and fuel from protests, and it’s worth giving credit where it’s due: if not for Black Lives Matter, millions of people might not have explicitly come out into the streets of America to protest the conditions that give rise to police violence. And the demonstrations of 2020 also gave rise to other forms of solidarity. Under the banner of the George Floyd protests, many labor unions, including the Oakland chapter of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, staged their own actions. These exposed attendees to the differences between working-class solidarity and the types of neoliberal identity politics that only ask for small reforms that do not challenge wealth inequality or even the criminal-justice system in any profound way. Perhaps there is a way to excise the bad part of these mass protests from the good, and still maintain a mass presence on the streets. But, if there is, I have yet to see it in action.