From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a scholar of Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States.

Her book, from #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016.

From Haymarket Books,

The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against Black people and punctured the illusion of a postracial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists.

In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

Study & Discussion Guide

Here is a review from Muse:

FROM #BlackLivesMatter TO BLACK LIBERATION. By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2016.

Similar to Herbert Marcuse's An Essay on Liberation (1969), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's latest contribution is a timely and much needed intervention. Both intellectually rigorous and accessible, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is a historical exposition of the conditions that contributed to the reemergence of Black radicalism in the United States. It is also a persuasive case that #BLM's fight against racism must also be a fight against capitalism.

In chapter one, Taylor looks at the mutually reinforcing ideas of American exceptionalism and "culture of poverty." Through a meticulous analysis of public policy and political rhetoric, she explains that the manufactured connection between Black poverty and Black culture allows conservatives and liberals to portray America as a country where anyone can make it. The oppression experienced by Blacks is imagined as a failure of the Black family and Black role models, not a failure of the state. This absolves the federal government from intervening through social welfare.

In chapter two, Taylor locates the emergence of "colorblindness" as a reactionary political theory. For Taylor, this "ideological tool, initially wielded by conservatives in the Nixon era to resist the growing acceptance of 'institutional racism' as the central explanation for Black inequality," denies structural racism and perpetuates a politics that blames Blacks for their own suffering (17–18). With a careful attention to Black history, [End Page 114] Taylor looks at the ways that this narrative became dominant in the late 1960s after the decline of the radical Black power movements.

Chapter three, "Black Faces in High Places," makes the convincing case that more Black people in positions of power will do nothing to alleviate the institutional racism that permeates America. As she historicizes the rise of Black politicians, police chiefs, and elites Taylor evinces the reality that this "progress" has not blunted mass incarceration, police brutality, the destruction of public housing, and other areas where Black Americans suffer disproportionality. Chapter four elaborates the specifics of "The Double Standard of Justice" that exists in America. While chapter five, "Barack Obama: The End of an Illusion" builds on chapter three with an examination of Obama's failure to address "critical issues facing African Americans" (19). Chapters six and seven look at the rise of #BLM under the first Black president as a sign that Black Americans are again embracing "institutional racism" as a schematic for understanding reality. They are also engaging in forms of activism that diverge from party politics.

A central strength of #BlackLivesMatter is Taylor's meticulous demystification of the meritocratic myth that pervades American culture and politics. Like Michelle Alexander and Cedric Johnson, she utilizes demographic statistics, rhetorical analysis, and comparative-historical analysis to illuminate the new guises of institutional racism. Most importantly, she targets not just conservative politicians, but liberals like Obama and Al Sharpton who propagandize American exceptionalism, "culture of poverty" narratives, and meagre reformist policies that can be assimilated into a political-economy of racism and class privilege. Taylor's intelligent rebuke of prominent antiracist author Tim Wise alone makes her book worth reading.

Ultimately, Taylor makes a compelling final argument that antiracist movements must also be socialist. Capitalism is a system that disproportionality exploits minorities, but it is also a system that exploits people of all races and ethnicities. For Taylor, police are the repressive state apparatus that recreates class power as it systematically disem-powers and persecutes the poor. As Black Americans are overrepresented among the poorer classes, it is unsurprising that they are disproportionality targeted at a higher rate than whites. Yet, while it is important to recognize these disparities, such differences do "not say much about who benefits from the inequality of our society" (212). For Taylor, a political-economy built on slavery, mass incarceration, the destruction of the social welfare state, and wage slavery—"the pivot around which all other inequalities and oppressions turn" (206)—will not be disrupted by Black elites who represent the interests of the ruling class. It will only be challenged by an intersectional politics that sees Black liberation as part...

Here is Taylor, the author, discussing the book on Youtube in Berlin.

Here are notes from librarian, Laurie Taylor,

My brief notes are below on Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. If anyone hasn’t read this book, please, please read it.

I’m 42, and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is the best I’ve read for explaining and understanding where we all are in the world, the lies of neoliberalism, the problems of the past, the promise and potential for the future, and the need to imagine in order to be able to build a better world together. Normally, I blog notes on sections that I’m likely to quote; however, when the whole book is this relevant, this is complicated for notetaking. This post has been updated, and likely will have other updates as I process through this in my way. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is highly readable and incredibly important.

Here is Keeanga's Ted Talk

Below is an excerpt (cross-posted in the Paris Review) from the author from his book, Fifty Years Since MLK,

In a posthumously published essay, Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out that the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

But it had not started out that way. Over the course of a decade, the black struggle opened up a deeper interrogation of U.S. society, and King’s politics traversed the same course.

Indeed, in the early 1960s, the Southern movement coalesced around the clearly defined demands to end Jim Crow segregation and secure the right of African Americans to unfettered access to the franchise. With clear targets and barometers for progress or failure, a broad social movement was able to uproot these systems of oppression. King was lauded as a tactician as well as someone who could articulate the grievances and aspirations of black Southerners. 

But despite the successful example of nonviolent civil disobedience across the South, it appeared to have little, if any, lasting impact on the edifice of racial discrimination that defined black life elsewhere. Indeed, the seeming permanence of black marginalization across the United States produced hundreds of urban uprisings in the middle of the 1960s. If King’s strategic genius in the South was deploying nonviolent civil disobedience to disarm Southern racists while coercing the political establishment into securing first-class citizen rights, it was a strategy that ultimately failed in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. In those places, obnoxious signs of Jim Crow were not the problem; rather, it was the insidious but obscured actions of the real-estate broker, the banker, the employer, the police officer, and other agents that maintained racial inequality.

As King’s attention drifted from the South to the entrenched northern ghettos, he faced denunciations and chastisement from former allies in the North. These people had supported him so long as he confined his demands to ending legal discrimination. Indeed, because Southern racism was rendered as antiquated and regressive, King was celebrated for helping to pull the South toward progress and modernity. But even as the civil rights movement was valorized for its intervention in the South, it was demonized when it brought its call for black power and liberation to the North—a dynamic that continues to the present day.