The Contributions of After Black Lives Matter to the Study of Urban Politics
Timothy Weaver (University at Albany, SUNY)
In After Black Lives Matter, Cedric Johnson offers a compelling account of urban politics and urban political economy for the contemporary era, “laying bare the central contradictions of neoliberal governance,” drawing in detail on the cases of Baltimore and Chicago. After Black Lives Matter continues in the tradition of Manuel Castells’s The Urban Question (Castells 1977), with its classic structural account of mid-twentieth century urban development; David Harvey’s Marxist urban analysis and emphasis on the right to the city (Harvey 2006; 2008); and, especially, Adolph Reed’s Stirrings in the Jug, which offered a critical perspective on the black urban regimes of the 1970s and 1980s (Reed 1999). A contemporary articulation of this rich tradition, which also includes the work of geographer Neil Smith, and sociologist Loic Wacquant (Smith 1992; Wacquant 2009), After Black Lives Matter both advances scholarship on the neoliberal city and also offers a concrete articulation of the “right to the just city,” a concept which has often proved somewhat ephemeral (see, for example, Lefebvre 1996; Mitchell 2003; Harvey 2008). In this brief reflection, I will explore what I see as Johnson’s key contributions to the study of urban politics and theory and raise some questions about his theoretical perspective and empirical findings.
Whereas Reed (1999) offered a sobering account of the structural and ideological forces that constrained the Black urban regimes of the late twentieth century, Johnson devotes considerable attention to the political economic dynamics of Baltimore (chapter four) and Chicago (chapter five) in the neoliberal era. Baltimore, of course, was the place where Freddie Gray was brutalized by the police, dying from his injuries, which triggered widespread unrest in the city and beyond. Johnson takes us into the world of Gray and considers the political economic foundations upon which such a word is built and reproduced.
Gray’s life “was in many ways typical of many black, working-class men struggling to survive in a context of violence, few jobs and constant police surveillance” (Johnson, 187). Notably, there are commonalities between the plight of the black working class today and the conditions that gave rise to the Black Power movement in the 1960s. A key difference in the Baltimore case, however, is the presence of a black urban regime that has enjoyed power for most of the past 40 years, with the exception of Martin O’Malley’s two terms as mayor (1999-2007). In light of black descriptive representation in places like Baltimore, Johnson seeks to address the point pithily put by Denis Judd in 1999: why African Americans got so little from the Democrats (Judd 1999).
Unsurprisingly, given Johnson’s structuralist orientation, After Black Lives Matter positions Baltimore, and the attendant fortunes of the black working-class, in late capitalist development. As he explains, Freddie Gray’s Baltimore, like many other industrial cities, had “followed what is by now a familiar arch of development, from a Fordist city with a densely populated streetscape of ethnic enclaves through an age of suburban residential expansion and prosperity after World War II, and then into an epoch of shuttered factories and shifting investment to the financial, tourism and media sectors” (187). As in many other cities, deindustrialization and automation disproportionately undermined the black working-class. In a bitter twist of fate, just as black workers overcame barriers of racial exclusion in the labor market, the jobs disappeared. A striking example Johnson offers is Bethlehem Steel whose ranks dwindled from 30,000 in 1970 to just 5,000 three decades later (188). As manufacturing and port-related jobs declined, far less remunerative service sector jobs in tourism increased, as did jobs at the top end of the service sector. The result was widening income inequality and widespread poverty amid spiraling wealth for those working in finance and those holding real estate in gentrifying areas. In neighborhoods like Gray’s, unemployment stood at 24.2 percent and poverty at 35.4 percent, both far higher than the already elevated city levels.
But while these structural forces set the stage for urban politics in cities like Baltimore, After Black Lives Matter does not fall prey to a vulgar Marxism by which political actors are stripped of agency or responsive only to the “imperatives” of capital. Rather, policy at the federal, state, or city levels is a function of political responses to structural economic pressures that interact with the challenges of coalition-building and purposive ideological agendas. Hence, we can understand the adoption of neoliberal urban policies in Baltimore and beyond, such as tax incentives for downtown redevelopment, as the result of the alliance between the black urban regime and real estate and finance. While such an outcome is not altogether surprising, it is not inevitable, but rather one of many possible political configurations. For Johnson, one of the reasons we see neoliberal policymaking is because of the role that racial symbolism plays in securing the support of the black working-class, which tends to accrue the fewest benefits from the arrangement.
As Johnson stresses, “The role black elites play in promoting nonprofit, privatized solutions to unemployment, poverty, failing schools and socioeconomic inequality more generally, and the effect that identitarian assumptions about political affinity have on public debate, are the most formidable barriers to developing a popular movement capable of confronting capitalist class power, contesting the hegemony of carceral logics and resolving the ongoing police crisis” (185). In Johnson’s lights, therefore, Judd’s provocation needs to be reformulated. For, as he shows, middle-class and elite African Americans have fared relatively well under neoliberalism, relative, that is to the working-class in general and the black working-class in particular. Thus, to avoid hurtling down the blind alley of black power or racial liberalism, Johnson offers a concrete alternative to building the just city.
Drawing on the example of Chicago, where in 2015 progressive forces came together to demand justice in the face of the police department’s racist and murderous conduct, Johnson examines both the limits and possibilities of “progressive and antipolicing forces,” including Black Lives Matter and other allied organizations, like as the Rainbow PUSH coalition, the Chicago Teachers Unions, and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308 (229). For Johnson, there is great potential for a new egalitarian consensus, though it needs to break free from the “essentialist logics of race representation and constituency” and instead “think about the city as a totality…where felt needs and quotidian interests, rather than liberal sympathy, become the basis for building solidarity” (223). Such solidarity, he maintains, can be constructed through appeals to the “right to the just city” (243).
As I have argued elsewhere, some “right to the city” perspectives are overly vague (Weaver 2018). By contrast, Johnson connects this abstract notion to the practical political economic goal of establishing a universal public works program, which he argues would “could undermine the very basis of modern policing by addressing the problem of surplus population and reorganizing labor around use values, thereby ending basic need and the alienation of the broader urban laboring classes” (250). As Johnson explains, “no one should be without a means of subsistence and…care work, transportation, health care, and other needs should not be commodified” (259). As such, an urban public works program would be geared towards publicly funded and democratically administered agencies that would deliver such goods and services. Particularly striking is the argument for the provision of care work, an essential service that is often poorly paid and understaffed. By including these kinds of activities in his rendering of urban public works, Johnson offers a concrete path to well-paid work and critical social provision in a sector of the economy that is not likely to be subject to automation, still less to outsourcing.
Having discussed what I view as After Black Lives Matter’s key contributions to urban scholarship, I now turn to some issues that might generate further debate.
The first has to do with Johnson’s theory of crime. He primarily offers what might be a called a “root causes approach” to crime, which suggests that it emerges from the neoliberal political economy that has created vast pools of dispossessed surplus labor. In turn, economic and social dislocation triggers household and neighborhood deterioration, which results in violence and crime. This position raises two questions. First, even if we assume Johnson is right that most crime is a function of neoliberal capitalist relations, can we really be confident that were a right to the just city secured via a massive public works program, that crime would disappear? To put it differently, while we might anticipate that a lot of petty and even violent crime would be reduced in a more socially just society, is it not reasonable to expect a residual level of interpersonal violence to occur (as it surely did in pre-capitalist societies)? If so, what should we do about that? Johnson himself seems a bit tentative on this point: “Instead of increased funding for surveillance, police, and incarceration…we might achieve public safety thought the guarantee of greater economic security” (271).
Second, given that Jonhson’s solution is necessarily medium- or long-term, what might be done to ensure safety and/or justice in the interim? Would or should the police play a role in this? Johnson is alert to the problem that simply abolishing the police without addressing social and economic matters would likely result in the expansion of privatized forms of security, which would almost certainly be worse than the status quo. Therefore, what should be done instead?
My final observation has to do with the relationship between neoliberalism and conservatism, both of which Johnson discusses in relation to urban political development in Baltimore and Chicago and national-level debates about the economy, crime, and morality. It would seem that neoliberalism enjoys pride of place in the analysis. For instance, Johnson sees “neoliberalization” as a critical stage in urban capitalist development that intensify patters of disinvestment and dispossession that have been evident throughout the post-World War Two period (see 146-149). Indeed, the emergence of the carceral state is understood by Johnson to operate both as a response to the “surplus population” the neoliberal political economy produces and as a facilitator; “a vital dimension of post-manufacturing capital accumulation, where removing the poor and securing the gentrifying zones are requirements for real estate-driven development (189).
If neoliberal motives, methods, and effects, are key drivers of urban politics, Johnson also sees a role for conservatism, though its precise analytical status might be clarified further. It certainly appears that conservatism is critical to the prevailing elite diagnosis of “the problem” and to building political coalitions in favor of punitive policy. For example, Johnson lambasts Barack Obama for his “consistently conservative” positions, such as his claim that critical ingredient for reducing neighborhood violence is “strong, stable families—which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood” (196). Indeed, in Johnson’s view, Obama helped revive the “underclass” idea deployed in the 1960s and popularized in the 1990s: “in Obama’s hands, underclass moralizing achieved renewed hegemony. Obama’s blackness, the powerful optics of his patriarchal, heteronormative family life, and his skill at emoting with black audiences allowed him to restore the legitimacy of conservative ideas” (191). Obama’s conservatism typified views espoused by those at the heart of black urban regimes and even BLM: “Black Lives Matter…inherits the contradictions of institutionalized black ethnic politics as a practical, useful but ultimately conservative means of thinking, articulating and advancing black material interests” (153).
As these quotations indicate, Johnson’s analysis implies that conservatism is distinct from neoliberalism, though the two are often mutually reinforcing. Consider his assessment of Obama, which seem to suggest the dual role of conservatism and neoliberalism: “on matters of contemporary racial and urban inequality, emphasizing dysfunctional behavior of the poor and proffering market-oriented solutions” (191). In my own work, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that it makes sense to separate out neoliberalism and conservatism and think about them as distinct political orders, sometimes at odds; at other moments working together towards a common goal. Although this is implicit in After Black Lives Matter, it would be interesting to learn more about how Johnson views neoliberalism in relation to conservatism.
To take this one step further, given Johnson’s analysis of the strength and limitations of the “progressive and antipolicing forces” in Chicago (222), and his call for a broad coalition to be constructed around a massive public works program that would go some way of realizing working people’s right to the just city, might we even venture that there is a nascent egalitarian political order in places like Chicago alongside the neoliberal and conservative ones? If so, this seems compatible with the kind of multiple political orders approach to cities that I explored in relation to New York City (Weaver 2025). Thus, in light of his attention to conservative, neoliberal, and egalitarian politics, which all seem to be at work in After Black Lives Matter, might there be a compatibility between his approach and a multiple orders analysis?
References
Castells, Manuel. 1977. The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. MIT Press.
Harvey, David. 2006. The Limits to Capital. New and Fully updated ed., [2006 Verso ed.]. Verso.
Harvey, David. 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (September-October): 24–40.
Judd, Dennis R. 1999. “Symbolic Politics and Urban Politics: Why African Americans Got So Little From the Democrats.” In Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality, edited by Adolph L Reed Jr. Westview Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on Cities. Translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Blackwell.
Mitchell, Don. 2003. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. Guilford Press.
Reed, Adolph L. 1999. Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era. University of Minnesota Press.
Smith, Neil. 1992. “New City, New Frontier: The Lower East Side as Wild, Wild West.” In Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, edited by Michael Sorkin. Hill and Wang.
Wacquant, Loïc J. D. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Duke University Press.
Weaver, Timothy P. R. 2018. “A City of Citizens: Social Justice and Urban Social Citizenship.” New Political Science 40 (1): 84–102.
Weaver, Timothy P. R. 2025. Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City. First edition. Temple University Press.
Timothy Weaver is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany (SUNY) and author of Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom and Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City.