Contemporary policing reflects the turn from welfare to domestic
warfare as the chief means of regulating the excluded and oppressed
The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd
transformed the way we think about race and policing. Why did it achieve
so little in the way of substantive reforms? After Black Lives Matter
argues that the failure to leave an institutional residue was not simply
due to the mercurial and reactive character of the protests. Rather, the
core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial
injustice that underpins the crisis of policing: socio-economic
inequality.
For Johnson, the anti-capitalist and downwardly redistributive politics
expressed by different Black Lives Matter elements has too often been
drowned out in the flood of black wealth creation, fetishism of Jim Crow
black entrepreneurship, corporate diversity initiatives, and a quixotic
reparations demand. None of these political tendencies addresses the
fundamental problem underlying mass incarceration.
That is the turn from welfare to domestic warfare as the chief means of
regulating the excluded and oppressed. Johnson sees the way forward in
building popular democratic power to advance public works and public
goods. Rather than abolishing police, After Black Lives Matter argues
for abolishing the conditions of alienation and exploitation
contemporary policing exists to manage.
