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Full Video: After Black Lives Matter (w/ Cedric Johnson) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-05-29 21:17:05
Imported:
2026-06
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After Black Lives Matter (w/ Cedric G. Johnson) - FULL VIDEO

Author of "After Black Lives Matter" joins Bad Faith Podcast to explain why the movement fell short, his beef with police abolitionists, and why a class lens is necessary to understand the roots and trajectory of the policing crisis.

Comments

Anonymous

Brie is so pretty

Anonymous

Fascinating interview!

MeatStepLively

Fun interview. I thought the Japan parallel at the end of the interview was hilarious: what if the US was a fascist ethno-state? Wouldn’t that be swell for “social cohesion”?

Anonymous

the video cut off the convo at the end, it was getting really good! guess i’ll listen to the rest lol

Anonymous

Cops are indeed like soldiers. There’s a scene in apocalypse now where an boat of American troops stops a boat of civilians. There’s a miscommunication and all the civilians on the boat are shot and killed. One of the soldiers thought there was maybe contraband on the boat but it was just a puppy. The puppy is probably a metaphor I dunno.

Anonymous

I affirm Aliyah's notice. It seems your conversation was cut off before it concluded. The whole matter of a "military-police continuum" is one of the primal problems with US imperial-colonial culture and society. Unless the legal system and its social base is altered, police violence against poor and other disempowered populations will continue, unabated (as the evidence clearly shows). The problem is the system itself. Perhaps policing in a different social system will be different -- but US history and culture hasn't given birth to that yet. Our organizing needs to be imaginative about possible and desired futures, as well as incisive and clear-eyed about the sickeningly violent and oppressive present.

Anonymous

Man, I wanted to go into this with an open mind, but as soon as ol' boy retreated to the social constructionism argument about race, as if that factoid is at all germane to the reality that race has material force and velocity on folks' lives, it was difficult to try and not check out. Ironically, these class reductionist nearly never make social constructionist arguments about the existence of money when critiquing the stratification of capital; when making arguments for a redistribution of wealth. This guest seems to conflate race centered politics and identity politics, like, for example, the guest's highlight of black folk of both sides of school choice issues. The centrality of race doesn't replace blue no matter who with black even if whack. Instead, race politics takes an empirical analysis of the socio-economic position of one's ethnic group to advocate for one's group from that position. Class politics obfuscates the particularities of those urgencies, like for instance in Chicago, where underclass immigrants are displacing underclass black labor, showing the apparent primacy of race from the State's perspective. These class reductionist always argue against, even the co-centrality of, race by foregrounding the anomalous case--"blank bankers", the "professional managerial class"--as if there's any meaningful size of black folk, especially ADOS folk, in these kinds of professions such that any serious analysis of trends; any serious arguments about a "truer" class tension undergirding police brutality can be made. This is work avoidance

Devren Washington

As someone who led a lot of defund work locally, one aspect of police abolition that is rarely discussed is the power of local police as a government institution. When leftist fight for and pass local legislation, the legal system which is usually the courts, police, DA and a few others like probation and parole have to implement those polices or laws. The implementation process is usually obscured from the public but is where those policies are weakened or defanged. When those weakened policies fail to reduce gun violence and or crime, the police blame the left for being soft on crime. they do this (in philly) by hosting town halls with elderly people across the city, who are scared (often Black and brown folks etc). The media and politicians also parrot this narrative resulting in older Black folks advocating for more incarceration and police. So one of the solutions I've been really interested in is using the budget process to move certain government agencies and functions from under the police department into other parts of city government that are not carceral. Things like 911 and 411 , transferring the deceased to the morgue etc do not need to be executed by the police and the police should not be in charge of their staffing. This allows for the PD to be focused on "crime", while creating more space for transparency in the legal system. That said we just elected a tough on crime pragmatic centrist from the Black leadership class, and first women mayor, who supports legal stop and frisk, so the fight for left policies has to surmount liberal representation politics if we're going to move the needle at all for the next 4-8 years.

Anonymous

Hey Briahna Joy I need you to do an interview with Cerise Castle, who has blown the top off of the Los Angeles police gang scandal. Interview her ASAP.

Anonymous

This point has probably already been raised in the past but, I think Briahna Joy's tendency to lean on communication/PR arguments as they relate to mass mobilization and societal change cause her to misunderstand certain leftist arguments focused on organizing, particularly of labor, as the root of change. There really won't be major change in the US, in any way, until there is adequate organizing on the labor front. Communications and PR can help, but the organizing work to be done goes far beyond that. The 2020 protests were incredible, but they were not effective because they were not the product of that type of organizing work. I think that's partly why Briahna and Cedric were talking past each other at the end, and where the divide about abolition lies. The grueling work of labor organizing and broader societal change through that will have to come before abolition happens. So, their struggle to understand one another is just matter of emphasis, I think?

Anonymous

Every time this guest talked about qualified immunity I felt like I was taking crazy pills. Does he think police in other countries don’t have their equivalent of swat teams to take down “the baddies”? I really don’t think he understands what qualified immunity means… And if someone “wants to be a police officer” so that they can shoot at people they shouldn’t be a police officer.

Jonathan Kadmon

Adolph Reed plugged the book on Sirota's podcast. Now I *have* to get a copy.

Nathan Ngumi

Very interesting discussion! 1) BLM, like any other mass movement, evolved. It is important to keep this in mind when thinking about its legacy, which Prof Cedric Johnson does in his book. 2) The common argument on the Left that crime is primarily a function of poverty is easy to dispute with publicly available data. 3) The question of why cops go mostly to poor neighbourhoods and not rich ones is disingenuous because crime happens mostly in the poor neighbourhoods, and the cops go where the crime is (that is their job). A hypothetical experiment can illustrate this. Supposing all crime stopped globally one day and this situation was maintained for a long duration, say a decade, before crime resumed. During the crimeless years, if one analyzed the activities of the cops and where they went, one would find that after some point in the period the difference between police presence in rich and poor neighbourhoods would be indistinguishable. If it was just policy that instructed cops to go to poor neighbourhoods and ignore rich ones then there would be no change in police activities when crime disappeared, which would not be the case. 4) From historical data police activities respond to, not cause, changes in population behaviour. Many Black people who grew up in urban areas of USA in the first half of the 20th century described their childhoods as safe - leaving doors and windows open on hot summer days and nights, minimal encounters with cops, never hearing a gunshot, never having to sleep in a bathtub, etc. Any Black person who grew up in an urban area in the 60s and later cannot say the same. What changed?

Anonymous

So there is no official ending? Did Bree and Cedric have some kind of fight at the end?

Anonymous
>>109606764

Solomon, thanks for the thoughtful comment. I would like to understand your perspective better and how it differs from Cedric Johnson's and my own. I agree with you that compared to many other racial or ethnic groups in the U.S., Black people generally need more systemic support to correct past and current injustices. For instance, about 2% of people who identify as black earn the federal minimum wage as opposed to about 1% of White, Hispanic, and Asian workers. However, if we look closer at the data, about 0.8% of black men earn the minimum wage. 1.8% of black and 1.7% of white women earn the minimum wage (so more or less the same). In fact, women of any race are more likely to earn the minimum wage than men of any race. So with respect to the ability to earn a living wage, it seems to me it would be more just to advocate a gender-focused politics rather than a race-focused one. We can go issue by issue in this way and split people up into various arbitrary groups and debate which group needs the most systemic support. For instance, men under 5'6" tall tend to earn less money that men over 6' tall. But I think what might be a better approach, is to advocate for universal programs and policies which will automatically disproportionately benefit those groups that are most in need. So rather than debate race-centered vs gender-centered vs height-centered politics, we instead raise the minimum wage for all people. Then those groups most in need of a raise (e.g. women) will get one, while at the same time not leaving behind the smaller percentages of the other groups (e.g. men) that also need support. And we can go down the list of issues. Police reform (or abolition) will help keep everyone from getting shot, but disproportionately it will help Black men (most likely to be murdered by cops). Universal healthcare will disproportionately help Hispanics (mostly like to lack health insurance). And if it includes mental healthcare will disproportionately help White men (most likely to commit suicide). And so on. As an added benefit, it is easier to gain support for universal programs since the pool of potential beneficiaries is so much larger. What am I, and Cedric Johnson, missing?

Anonymous
>>109624274

My brain kind of melted the first time someone asked me, "We have mental health counselors, so why are we sending people trained and armed to storm a beach to help someone suffering with schizophrenia?" I have a feeling a lot of people are like me and just never thought about it much. But once it is pointed out, anyone can come up with a whole list of things armed police should just not be doing (e.g. parking enforcement, dealing with the homeless, collecting victim statements, etc.) So it seems like it should be an easy sell to convince citizens to move the cops off those tasks, but we seem to be having trouble getting it to happen. I also realize the police and police union like to keep themselves as large as possible in order to increase their political influence. Why do you think it seems so hard to move these tasks away from the cops? Are not enough people educated as to the alternatives? Is it lobbying by the police union? Or something else?

Anonymous
>>109606764

a few things: - The cost of living so greatly outpaces the minimum wage such that using the minimum wage as a data point of analysis to discuss poverty is virtually meaningless. - wages is not a meaningful data point in understanding economic stability in the first place, wealth is. COVID unemployment should make this clear; it's not wages that kept food on folks' tables post layoffs, reserve savings did, which is primarily accumulated by invitro-inheritance, not income. - moreover, wages is not a meaningful data point in understanding economic inequality across race, wealth is. For example, the average ADOS college graduate has about $70K less net wealth than the average white high school dropout, despite often earning more than twice as much in wages, showing nakedly that - the ADOS-white wealth divide is not a product of class tension. The socio-economic position of ADOS is centuries-long domestic policy that targets, in the aggregate, ADOS people for exclusion for wealth building government subsidies, and targets ADOS people for wealth extraction to the benefit of white wealth. - in addition, wealth accumulates to the total household. That women, particularly white women, earn less wages than their men doesn't let us know how much wage is being contributed by their men, nor does either wage correlate to how much wealth is available to the total household. - and finally, none of this is germane to the central discussion: how and why police target black people. The mandate of police anywhere in the country is to pursue the law enforcement priorities of the community, one main such priority being: contain the Negroes. If class tension were relevant to how and why police target black folk, there'd be no beer summit with Henry Louis Gates at the white house.

Anonymous
>>109606764

Thanks, for the response. I agree with everything you said about wealth vs earnings. I selected the minimum wage because it is easy to find reliable data. Looking at wealth, is similar though: Transgendered people are more likely to live in poverty than any traditionally defined racial group. Economics aside, my point was to question whether starting politics by sorting people into arbitrary groups is the best way to go about politics. However, I apologize, I didn't realize you were referring only to issues around policing in your comment. If we agree to divide people into U.S.-born ADOS and U.S.-born non-ADOS, then I obviously agree that U.S.-born ADOS are the group more likely to be targeted (and murdered) by police and incarcerated. So I can understand why you would want ADOS-centered politics on that issue. I guess I am a little fuzzy on what ADOS-centered, or any race centered, politics is. Are you proposing we provide some sort of legal support to ADOS folks exclusive of other people that are targeted by police? If so, what policies are you proposing? Or are you saying that ADOS folks must be the leaders of the political movement that seeks to liberate them? Or is it something else entirely? Also, thanks for teaching me the term ADOS. I, obviously, already find it useful.

Anonymous
>>109606764

I'm saying that equalizing the readiness with which one is able to mount a legal defense to criminal charges may be a class issue, but it isn't primarily relevant to understanding how and why police target ADOS people for crimination in the first place (Johnson tries to conflate the two in order to legitimate his class claim). Getting rid of qualified immunity as was discussed in this episode may have some positive affect in the way of incentivizing officers not to violate 4th amendment protections or abuse citizens. However, it's not altogether convincing to me if codifying a ban on QI would largely work given QI itself is jurisprudence wholly manufactured by the court, and doesn't exist legislatively in the first place. In other words, QI exists in an American context for which the justice system is proactively oriented to the particular disenfranchisement of ADOS rights and protections, such that this kind of class-based solution alone leaves too much workaround to carve-out ADOS. Now a ban on QI in conjunctions with designating ADOS a "protected class"; in conjunction with an ADOS hate-crime bill that includes explicit standards for police malfeasance--then we're takin'.