What was Black Lives Matter?
Toussaint Losier (University of Massachusetts-Amherst)
On Friday, November 27th, 2015, a development occurred that would have a lasting impact on the character of Black Lives Matter protest in Chicago. That cold, grey morning, dozens of activists from a variety of different religious, community, labor, and faith-based organization gathered at the city’s iconic Water Tower in response to a call by Reverand Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition. In doing so, they drew on the example recently set by protesters in St. Louis to temporarily shut down the Galleria and West County Center Malls. Where that “shut it down” demonstration had followed a grand jury decision not to bring charges against Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown, the protest about to be carried out at stores along the city’s famed Magnificent Mile, a downtown shopping district, called for an indictment of police officer Jason Van Dyke in the shooting death of teenager Laquon McDonald.
In the tense moments before the march towards the ritzy stores along Michigan Avenue was about to begin, a fight broke out. Angry words were exchanged. Fists flew and tremor of fear ran through those assembled. However, this scuffle wasn’t between the protesters and the police, but rather those within the crowd, as members of BYP 100, a queer Black feminist youth organization, clashed with supporters of Voice of the Ex-Offender. Three years earlier, VOTE had helped to spark the campaigns seeking justice for Rekia Boyd and Rickey Bradley, unarmed victims killed in separate police shootings on the city’s West Side. Although rally marshals quickly separated the two sides and protester were able to block retail shopping without further incident, that morning’s clash lingered. Behind the individuals involved lay deeper issues of sexuality and strategy, chauvinism and class status. Despite the best efforts of some of the city’s most well-respected activists to mediate a resolution, the wounds that fight opened would never fully heal.
Referenced roughly two-thirds of the way through Political Scientist Cedric Johnson’s most recent book After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle (2024), the Black Friday protest is highlighted as one moment in which the BLM movement effectively “brought the central contradictions of the policing crisis and of American society more generally out into the open” as determined activists found themselves in direct confrontation not with each other, but frustrated shoppers. For Johnson, “the verbal clashes and person-to-person negotiations between protesters and consumers represent the next frontier for left struggles in the United States if they are to become truly popular in the sense of achieving broad societal consent” (230). Yet while he highlights the importance of this “shutdown” protest in compelling city officials to unwind their cover-up of a police killing, Johnson never poses the questions as to why this tactic has yet to be repeated in Chicago. Over the next decade, the shops along the Magnificent Mile would be the site of rallies, including those that descended into riotous looting. However, due in large part to open wound it left amongst the city’s activists, there would never again be an attempt to leverage the success of the 2015 Black Friday “shutdown” in response to other abuses of police power.
Much like its treatment of this well-organized and largely disciplined nonviolent protest, After Black Lives Matter pays little attention to the contradictions internal to the movement, choosing instead to depict its initial objectives, political trajectory and ensuring demobilization in broad, blunt strokes. And while Johnson’s sweeping account of urban policy and neoliberal governance are striking, his examination of their relationship to the policing crisis is strikingly mechanistic. As a result, Johnson’s book misses the chance to offer a fine-grained assessment of BLM and its limitations, offering instead a critique that while incisive at key points, fails, much like the movement itself, to live up to its full potential.
Anti-Policing Struggle in a Class Society
Whatever its flaws, After Black Lives Matter is to be celebrated for its sincere concern for the poor state of contemporary Black politics. Peering past the euphoria generated by the unprecedented scale of the 2020 protest wave, Johnson suggests that the movement’s fundamental flaw was its inability to effectively contend with the social contradictions of capitalism, namely questions of class. Far from a new subject for Johnson, this topic has been a central focus of his scholarship in monographs, like his award-winning Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), to his journalism published in magazines like Jacobin and the online journal Nonsite.org. To the degree that this problem remains an enduring theme of Johnson’s work speaks in large measure to its intractability.
In highlighting how the successive waves of street mobilizations that became known as Black Lives Matter have remained silent on the question of class, Johnson draws inspiration from Sidney L. Harring’s seminal Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915 (Rutgers University Press, 1983). This classic study of how northern industrialists used urban police to discipline an increasingly unruly working class serves as a rigorous history with clear lessons that still resonate in the post-industrial moment. “In a very real sense,” he quotes from Harring, “class struggle is at the core of the police function” (19). Building on this assertion, Johnson argues that policing now serves to manage those layers of the working class that have been made surplus within U.S. society following the postwar shift to a mass consumer society and the subsequent rounds of deindustrialization that have marked the neoliberal era.
Where popular accounts either have located their origins in antebellum slave patrols to explain the racially disproportionate application of police violence, Johnson argues that their current role in managing society’s most restive members is the best explanation of why certain individuals – overwhelmingly poor and out of work, regardless of race – routinely end up as the targets of police violence. “Policing exists for the defense of property relations,” Johnson stipulates,” for the protection of retail and touristic spaces of consumption and processes of metropolitan real estate valuation and development, and the regulation of relative surplus populations who are deemed threats to this accumulation regime” (20). As such, focusing on the “common class predicament” of those who are overpoliced and brutalized should be paramount (22).
Though a core aspect of Johnson’s thesis in After Black Lives Matter, this diminishment of the importance of racism in shaping the contours of contemporary policing runs contrary to the claims put forward more recently by Harring himself. Writing in the preface to the 2017 edition of Policing a Class Society, heheld that racism did indeed play an important role in shaping the function of policing and other carceral institutions. “The entire criminal justice system, top to bottom, is racist, including the police, prosecutors, and judges, with injustice and violence marking it at every stage,” Harring contended. “Neither the law nor the political order have addressed this, the central issue in American criminal justice.”[1] Yet, where Harring acknowledged the failure of his earlier study to take account for the way in which policing worked across racial difference, Johnson casts explanations of the policing crisis that rely solely on race, as opposed to class, as not simply inaccurate, but the root of any attempt to resolve it.
For Johnson, what renders this approach to anti-policing struggle deeply flawed is that in place of a class analysis it remains tethered to a Black ethnic politics that trades in a species of “racial liberalism” that while militant, remains a political dead end. Curiously, Johnson doesn’t sketch out why he believes this to be the case, perhaps because he offered some of this analysis in an earlier book, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now: (Verso, 2022). In a section titled, “The Movement for Black Lives and the Neoliberal Landscape,” he performs a close read of the 2016 Vision for Black Lives policy agenda that endorses its more progressive and universalistic proposals, while remaining critical of its core political assumptions. Take for instance his treatment of its items related to Economic Justice, where he lauds its support for workers’ rights and progressive taxation, while also dismissing its call for a jobs program targeting the most marginalized Black workers as a “version of identity politics” that “remains narrowly committed to the ethnic paradigm” that is unlikely to gain broad political support outside of the Black community.[2]
More broadly, Johnson argues that “despite its progressive aspirations, the Vision agenda will likely succumb to the same problems as those produced during the Black Power Movement because it proceeds from the specious view that effective politics should be built on the grounds of ethnic affinity rather than discreet political interests.”[3] Not only is the idea of common interests binding Black people together politically foolish, but it also undermines efforts to secure broader support and forge winning coalitions. Instead of a politics treating Black people as a corporate body, Johnson contends that the firmest ground for winning popular support would be to advance policies oriented to meeting the needs of the masses of working people both within and outside of the so-called Black community.
This line of reasoning is central to After Black Lives Matter. For him, this treatment of Black people as an exceptional target of police violence and the dismissal of the need for a broader class analysis are constitutive of a liberal politics; a politics that claims to take up the banner of racial unity while primarily seek to advance the interests of the Black petit bourgeois, or middle class. This element, Johnson contends, is less likely to see its interests in a majoritarian politics grounded in the interests of working people and more inclined to turn to corporate elites to advance their agenda, often through a program of antiracism. “Liberal antiracism,” Johnson asserts,” comes to function as a petit-bourgeois class politics, which elides the social power of class even as it authorizes middle class and corporate brokers as the primary voices of solving the policing crisis” (173).
Over the course of his 408-page book, Johnson highlights the limits of a politics grounded in presumptions of shared interests based on identity, or a vision of racial unity. Perhaps most importantly, he diagnoses how this sort of politics, shorn of a class analysis, can serve as the vehicle for eliding the concerns of poor and working-class constituencies and advancing the interests of more middle-class activists. Yet, his failure to draw on Harring’s more recent insights, particularly the role of racism as a component of class struggle, leads him to rely on a flawed analysis of how policing works and what came to be known as the Black Lives Matter movement first arose to oppose it.
Racial Unity and Class Politics
While incisive in its critique of Black Lives Matter, Johnson’s analysis rest on the assumption that the movement and its politics reflects an internally consistent throughline. In contrast to his prior writings, After Black Lives Matteri includes no analysis of vision documents, press releases, or other materials. Instead, he suggests that what the movement was about to be relatively self-evident. To wit, he variously refers to its politics as “militant racial liberalism” (130) and in other instances, it is little more than “essentially liberal sentiment” (162).
The danger posed by this approach is that it conceives of Black Lives Matter as a cohesive whole, rather than a movement marked by the sort of political diversity and internal divisions that rose to the fore during the 2015 Black Friday protest. Instead, Johnson’s approach is to uncritically cast all anti-police protest activity that occurred since the creation of its twitter hashtag as part of this movement. This begins with a description of the 2012 vigilante killing of Trayvon Martin as marking “the birth of Black Lives Matter” (164) and then the hashtag evolved into “a fully-fledged political slogan” during the response to the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown (167). For Johnson, the context of this period is key, as the emergence of these moments of anti-policing activism are inseparable from the “cultural and ideological consequences of the Obama presidency,” specifically the stark limitations of a lame duck administration unable to make good on its more liberal promises (163).
While an interesting explanation, this account offers little sense of how racial liberalism gained ascendancy in what would become the Black Lives Matter movement. Instead, it reads later politics developments onto to past events. This is most evident in the treatment of the Ferguson protests, which played an important role of the emergence of what would become known as Black Lives Matter, but not quite in the way in which Johnson described. Indeed, one key feature that distinguished it from earlier mobilizations that would first gain national attention in places like Sanford, Florida, North, Staten Island, NY, and Beavercreek, OH, the demonstrations that occurred in Ferguson, MO went beyond simply securing the conviction of perpetrator to raising broader questions of racially disproportionate policing.
This shift would occur in late August 2014 when two St. Louis based organizations, Organization for Black Struggle (OBS) and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) supported a national call to bring supporters from across the country to Ferguson after weeks of protests, most controversially at night, had roiled the working-class municipality. Termed the “Black Life Matters” ride, this national mobilization sought to bring “Black folks and anti-racist allies” to the besieged suburb over the Labor Day holiday weekend as part of a national call to end state violence against Black people.”[4] Casting itself in the hallowed tradition of the Freedom Rides, this national mobilization largely served as a response to the gathering of forces Ferguson as officials brought in first the St. Louis County and Metropolitan Police Departments, then the Missouri State Highway Patrol and finally the National Guard in an effort to suppress these protests.
Far from simply catalyzing the growth of the BLM movement, this call for volunteers to come to Ferguson would cohere much of the politics that would remain core to it over the next half decade. It demanded, for instance, that law enforcement budgets be cut by 50% and those funds to be reinvested in poor Black communities; the demilitarization of law enforcement; and the development of national policy to address what it termed the “systemic pattern of anti-Black law enforcement violence in the U.S.” Curiously, it also demanded justice in the case of Michael Brown and “all other victims of law enforcement and vigilante violence” as well as the release of the names of all officers involved in murdering Black people while on patrol or securing their custody behind bars over the last five years. Fulfilling these demands would strike a blow against racism, as Black people made up a third of those killed by the police while make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population.[5]
This set of demands highlights an important dynamic of the movement that would emerge over the next five years. With its audience little more than a layer of social justice activists and non-profit employees, the caravan’s call to action reflects a mix of broad-scale (“national policy”) concerns and locally oriented interests (“justice for the family of Michael Brown”). Appreciating these distinctions suggests an effort to work across the concerns of Ferguson frontliners and those out-of-towners seeking to stand in solidarity with them. Well before the media attention that BLM would later attract, this framing belies the fact that the invocations of “racial unity” that would later become a ubiquitous feature of the movement were principally concerned with forging solidarity between the city’s struggling residents and the more upwardly mobile working and middle-class visitors. A half decade before, as Johnson claims, the George Floyd rebellion brought the “internal contradictions of Black Lives Matter into sharper relief,” efforts to paper over intra-racial class differences served as the foundation for BLM’s politics (13).
Wrestling with this example suggests that something different than what Johnson identifies as “a politics of elite representation and brokerage” was at work within the emerging movement (169). Rather than externally oriented, this invocation of black unity began as, and for much of BLM, would remain, concerned with smoothing over the movement’s internal class dynamics amidst a period of widening intra-racial class inequality. Rather than binding together all black people in the mold an ethnic politics, this 2014 national call to action suggests that the invocations of racial unity were about crafting a sense of common purpose that obscured differences marking those who participated in its protest activities. While often suppressed, these internal contradictions could explode in public, like during the physical altercation that occurred on the periphery of the 2015 Black Friday Shutdown in Chicago.
A Little Matter of Impunity
While Johnson is correct in highlighting how BLM sought to recuperate the style and symbolism of the Black Power era, there are several reasons why it’s important to note how its use of identity politics was distinct. In contrast to “the evolution of Black Power as an elite-driven ethnic politics,” BLM’s course was nearly the inverse as its emergence and development was driven by protests and mobilizations, militant confrontations and mass looting. In contrast to the galvanizing role of prominent figures and organizational leaders during Black Power, those prominent within BLM consistently tailed the rhythm and pace of street mobilizations, a dynamic belied by Johnson’s useful conceptualization of the movement’s first and second waves. For even as groups that articulated its politics and trafficked in its sentiments, spontaneity, not organization, dictated the movement’s rise and fall.
This reliance on spontaneity would be implicit in the critiques that denigrated BLM for lacking a prominent leader – as well as in the responses of those who venerated it for being a “leader-ful movement.”[6] Absent from these discussions was not only a class analysis of the more middle-class status of those who got held up as leaders and increasingly sought to direct its development, but also the uses being made of racial identity. Was the idea of racial unity at works in Black Lives Matter, for instance, inclusive of Brentley Vinson, the Charlotte police officer who fatally shot Keith Lamont Scott in 2016? Or J. Alexander Keung, the Minneapolis officer that kneeled on George Floyd’s back in 2020? More to the point, were BLM sentiments extended to Corporal Montrell Lyle Jackson, a Baton Rouge who a shooter ambushed and killed in 2016, presumably in retaliation for the deaths of Philando Castille and Alton Sterling? Or Clyde Kerr III, whose 2021 death outside of the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office is one of the dozens of police suicides detailed in the last chapter of After Black Lives Matter? When it came to police, did All Black Lives Matter?
In fact, these individuals marked the limits of the “racialist thinking” (37) of BLM precisely because the street mobilizations that drove it forward were not involved in a “revitalization of a black ethnic politics” (137), but rather an ideological struggle over the racial politics of policing. As Lester Spence details in Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, racial politics has been a part of the legitimation of neoliberal policies as derogatory attitudes about stigmatized populations repeatedly helped to convince the general society that those on the losing end of these policies “deserve what they get, that they lose not because the deck is stacked against them but rather because they have something wrong with them that can only be dealt with punitively.”[7] In turn, racial politics has also justified the greater reliance on punishment, often by casting the targets of this punishment as deserving of the treatment they receive.
Although After Black Lives Matter attends to policing’s “deeply ideological role in society, actively drawing the boundaries of permissible social and political behavior through the exercise of legitimate violence,” little attention is given to the role of ideology in legitimating the violence of policing (57). For his part, Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, made use of racial politics when he described Michael Brown as looking “like a demon” who seemed to be “almost bulking up to run through the shots” during his 2014 grand jury testimony.[8] On trial in 2018 for the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke also made use of racial politics when describing the Black teenager as “expressionless,” with eyes that “were just bugging out of his head” as he refused to comply with the officer’s commands.[9] In countless instances, the deadly use of force would be framed as the necessary response to an individual with seemingly less than human characteristics that posed a credible threat to an officer’s life.
Far from simply a manifestation of implicit bias, these depictions play an essential role in legitimating the results of these deadly encounters. As Harring puts it, “random police violence, to the extent that it is rarely prosecuted and even more rarely leads to conviction, is de facto ‘legal’. The law simply does not punish police misconduct; and the police know this and act accordingly.”[10] Following landmark decisions like Tennessee v. Garner (1985) and Graham v. Connor (1989), the legality of this violence can only be appraised from an objective review of what occurred from the officer’s perspective. As such, depictions of a victim of this violence that touches on racial narratives are all to convenient in helping to firm up the presumed legality of a use of force encounter.
From the first invocation of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” and “I Can’t Breathe,” to “16 Shots – and a Coverup” to “Say Her Name – Brianna Taylor,” protesters directly challenged the prevailing narratives of these ‘use of force’ incidents. And as the movement’s demonstrations, as Johnson notes, “undermined public trust in official reports that routinely justified legal force,” they struck at the question of police legitimacy (14). Yet this acknowledgement only touches the surface of the relationship between police violence, public legitimacy and the law. For if we are to follow Harring, police kill not simply because of their function in society, but because it is de facto legal and as such, they know that they can. Put differently, if class struggle is at the core of the police function, then the standards established through case law marks the limits of police violence.
When assessed against this line of reasoning, certain questions emerge about the central argument in After Black Lives Matter. If, as Johnson contends, the current mode of policing exists to manage those populations made surplus through the neoliberal restructuring of urban America, is it possible to demonstrate the facticity of this contention by showing how now frequently police killed civilians prior to this transformation in contrast to what has occurred during the period since? Indeed, if Johnson’s argument is correct, shouldn’t this be reflected in statistics that show the growing lethality of police as conditions deteriorated? Even though the answer to these questions cuts to Johnson’s central claim, there is no evidence to offer in response because the police use of force was considered ‘de facto’ legitimate and as such, there were no substantive effort made to collect data on it until the Black Lives Matter achieved national prominence in 2015.
The absence of any sort of data to ground its core claim suggests that beyond a lack of falsifiability, After Black Lives Matter relies on a somewhat mechanistic conception of the policing crisis. If greater public safety can be achieved through “public works and the decommodification of basic needs, infrastructure and amenities” (33), what will prevent police from continuing to roughly arrest, violently subdue, or even kill these now more economically secure members of the urban working class? Even if use-of-force policies are revised, as Johnson proposes, what will ensure that these policies are followed? Put another way, what will prevent police from using violent force to secure the compliance of an individual experiencing a mental health crisis, or apprehend a fleeing subject, or subdue someone suspected of having a deadly weapon, if, following Harring, they can still do so with impunity?
Notes
[1] Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915 (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017) xv.
[2] Cedric Johnson, Cedric Johnson, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now: Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter (New York, NY: Verso, 2022) 38.
[3] Johnson, 39.
[4] Black Lives Matter, “About,” Black Lives Matter Blogspot, n.d. (accessed December 15, 2025): https://web.archive.org/web/20150209191824/http://blacklivesmatter.blogspot.com/p/about.html.
[5] Black Lives Matter, “About.”
[6] Laura Barron-López, “Why the Black Lives Matter movement doesn’t want a singular leader,” Politico, August 22, 2020 (accessed on December 12, 2025): https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/22/black-lives-matter-movement-leader-377369.
[7] Lester Spence, Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics (Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2015) 22.
[8] Jessica Glenza, “’I felt like a five-year old holding on to Hulk Hogan’: Darren Wilson in his own words,” the Guardian, November 25, 2014 (accessed on December 12, 2025): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/25/darren-wilson-testimony-ferguson-michael-brown.
[9] Darran Simon, ”What we learned from Chicago police officer Jason van Dyke’s testimony,” CNN (accessed on December 12, 2025): https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/03/us/jason-van-dyke-testimony-murder-trial.
[10] Harring, xvii.
References
Barron-López, Laura. “Why the Black Lives Matter movement doesn’t want a singular leader.”
Politico, August 22, 2020. Accessed on December 12, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/22/black-lives-matter-movement-leader-377369.
Black Lives Matter, “About.” Black Lives Matter Blogspot, n.d. Accessed on December 15,
202. https://web.archive.org/web/20150209191824/http://blacklivesmatter.blogspot.com/p/about.html.
Glenza, Jessica. “’I felt like a five-year old holding on to Hulk Hogan’: Darren Wilson in his own words.” The Guardian, November 25, 2014. Accessed on December 12, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/25/darren-wilson-testimony-ferguson-michael-brown.
Harring, Sidney L. Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915. Rutgers University Press, 1983.
Johnson, Cedric. The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now: Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter. New York, NY: Verso, 2022.
Simon, Darran. “What we learned from Chicago police officer Jason van Dyke’s testimony.” CNN. Accessed on December 12, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/03/us/jason-van-dyke-testimony-murder-trialhttps://www.cnn.com/2018/10/03/us/jason-van-dyke-testimony-murder-trial.
Spence, Lester. Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2015.
Dr. Toussaint Losier is an Associate Professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies and Director of the Social Thought and Political Economy Program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is co-author of Rethinking the American Prison Movement (Routledge, 2017) with Dan Berger and completing a book manuscript titled, War for the City: Black Liberation, Street Organizations, and the Consolidation of the Carceral State (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).