From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation

The American Dream is a concept popularized in the 1930s. In conjunction with its sister myth of American exceptionalism, it promotes the idea that through hard work and perseverance anyone can achieve economic success in the United States. Taylor discusses the American Dream myth in Chapter 1, but it continues to play a central role throughout her discussion as she notes the contradiction between the myth of meritocracy and the economic inequality that permeates American society.

Black Codes refers to “a series of laws, rules, and restrictions imposed only on African Americans [that] criminalized poverty, movement, and even leisure” (109), thereby conflating Blackness with criminality. They were instituted across the South following Emancipation and provided justification for the re-enslavement of Black people through the convict-leasing system. Taylor discusses Black Codes in Chapter 4 to explain the origins of the modern police and their role as agents of the state to police poverty and provide a steady labor force for the capitalist class, predominantly through the incarceration of Black Americans.

Capitalism is political ideology and economic system defined by unrestrained profit accumulation and private ownership of the means of production. While private ownership, and therefore wealth, is limited to relatively few individuals within the capitalist system, the system relies on the labor of a worker majority who does not have any ownership in or gain profit from the means of production. In Chapter 7, Taylor refers to capitalism as “an economic system based on the exploitation of the many by the few” (205). Capitalism is a central focus in the book because it constitutes the political economy of the US and is intimately bound with racism. The relationship between class exploitation and racial oppression provides the basis for multiracial solidarity in the struggle against police violence and the larger matrix of structural inequities to which police violence is connected.

Colonialism refers to a system of political and/or economic dominance over a previously sovereign people through the plunder of those people’s resources and the imposition of the colonizer’s culture, language, history, and ways of being over the colonized. It is a point of discussion in Chapter 7 where Taylor notes that the radicalization of Black America coincided with the “global rebellion against an old colonial order” (195). The connection between the Black American resistance movement and the decolonization movement among African peoples and people of color elsewhere brought socialism back into the Black American resistance movement as a viable alternative to capitalism.

Colorblindness refers to the idea that the absence of racism in the formal law means that racial equity has been achieved and that the United States is a “postracial” society where anyone can achieve success regardless of race. In Chapter 2, Taylor discusses colorblindness as one of the means by which politicians rolled back the welfare state.

Communism is social, political, and economic ideology based on state ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. It was developed by Karl Marx, in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, in response to the Industrial Revolution and has socialist ideological underpinnings. However, it is distinct from socialism in the fact of state ownership rather than common ownership by the people. Taylor discusses communism in Chapter 7 when she emphasizes the centrality of socialism to Black resistance movements, as well as Black involvement in the Communist Party from the 1920s to 1940s. She also discusses communism in Chapter 1 when she notes the role that the ideological battle between communism and capitalism played in the US taking a formal stance against racism.

Culture of poverty is a term coined by liberal anthropologist Oscar Lewis in 1959. In Chapter 1, Taylor explains that the theory describes “psychological and behavioral traits” (36) shared by poor people around the world, including but not limited to “resignation, dependency, present-time orientation, lack of impulse control, weak ego structure, sexual confusion, [and] inability to delay gratification” (36). The culture of poverty theory is one example of a broader tendency to blame poor people for their impoverished conditions by locating them in cultural and behavioral deficiencies rather than the political economy of capitalism.

Institutional racism is a term coined by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in 1967 to emphasize a structural critique of racial inequality. In the Introduction, Taylor defines it as “policies, programs, and practices of public and private institutions that result in greater rates of poverty, dispossession, criminalization, illness, and ultimately mortality of African Americans” (8). It is a critical framework for understanding Black deprivation in the US and refuting the idea that inherent Black inferiority is to blame for Black people’s hardships.

Meritocracy is the idea that people gain success and power based on their abilities or merit. The idea undergirds the American Dream myth and the belief that success and social mobility within capitalism is based on hard work and perseverance and available for anyone to achieve. The idea is central to Taylor’s discussion throughout the book, but especially in Chapter 1 where Taylor emphasizes the American Dream myth and the way that it is perpetuated by shifting attention to Black people’s individual and cultural behaviors as the explanation for their hardship.