The aff isn’t grassroots activism, it’s astro-turf – premising radical politics on fatalistic structural arguments ensures they’re nothing more than a simulacra of black militancy, ultimately devolving into a hyper-individualistic fantasy that reifies racial neoliberalism and locks in white supremacist power structures

This is not simply a matter of stipulating different criteria for assigning the label “political movement.” BLM’s amorphousness reflects and enables another tiresome political pathology that has become increasingly common in an era when an actually insurgent left is so remote from living memory and cargo-cult politics is so prominent. Activists, typically without visible institutional connections, stage more or less flamboyant events that often evoke nostalgic associations with earlier insurgencies – civil rights/Black Power demonstrations, sit-ins, militant “street action,” even purely rhetorical appropriation of the phrase “general strike” as a reference that sounds appealingly militant, totally disconnected from any concrete practice. Prior to BLM, Occupy and, more cynically, the Tea Party were the most highly publicized illustrations of this phenomenon, which is similar to an ad agency approach to movement-building. The point of these performances is to project simulacra of popular insurgency, which then become justification for issuing press statements and manifestos and, depending on the mood of the moment and skills of the operators, being recognized as spokespersons for the fictive movement. In the public interest world such groups are described as “astro-turf,” as contrasted to grassroots. Proliferation of this Kabuki theater politics among leftists stems in part from the dialectic of desperation and wishful thinking that underlies the cargo-cult tendency; it is commonly driven by an understandable sense of urgency that the dangers facing us are so grave as to require some immediate action in response. That dialectic encourages immediatist fantasies as well as tendencies to define the direct goal of political action as exposing, or bearing witness against, injustice. Occupy, for instance, proceeded from premises at least overlapping a tendency I have described as the Myth of the Spark, the notion that single events or dramatic acts can in themselves galvanize mass mobilization. That was also the dream that too many enthusiasts crafted for themselves about the Sanders campaign. Fetishization of the power of social media feeds the fantasy that movement-building can be automatic and instantaneous. That disposition is exacerbated in a context in which organizing as a project of deepening and broadening an actual base through building solidaristic relationships around shared interests is not part of an activistist culture in which radicalism is more posture and performance than strategic pursuit of a program. The strains of Trotskyism and anarchism popular in some activist quarters are drawn to spontaneist and voluntarist approaches to politics, which fit comfortably as well with the logic of insta-celebrity generated through Potemkin internet and social media campaigns. From that perspective, one of the most revealing and chilling features of the BLM phenomenon has been the unself-conscious clarity with which Alicia Garza and other of its prominent personalities represent, and no doubt genuinely understand, crafting and projecting their individual personae as identical with advancing political objectives.22 The potential for opportunism is great because the inertial material imperatives impel in that direction and unrestrained because the “movement” has no concrete constituency to which its spokespeople are accountable. What we get instead are shopworn calls to distinguish the really authentic BLM voices – i.e., what DeRay McKesson was until he wasn’t – from the fakers and hustlers and those who are genuinely grassroots from those who aren’t. So Birch and Heideman finger McKesson as epitomizing a “black professional class selling a desiccated form of opposition to racism as radical politics.” What distinguishes this “desiccated form of opposition to racism” from the good, radical anti-racism they insist is out there? The only clue we have is that McKesson embodies the former. Yet a year ago he embodied the latter! This kind of political differentiation grounded on claims to racial authenticity rehearses the product cycle in the hip-hop industry in the 1990s, in which an act started out packaged as authentic or hardcore, attained success and became crossover and thence became a target against which those that follow proclaim their own real authenticity. This sort of politics is also, as we’ve seen at least since Black Power, a hustler’s paradise. And all the millennial versions of New Age-y bullshit about leaderlessness and structurelessness obscure the fact that absence of organizational mechanisms of accountability enable anyone to say anything, or deny anything said, in the name of the “movement.” Overestimation of the political significance of protest and a related, all too familiar problem of confusing militancy and radicalism contribute to exaggerating the significance of eruptions like those associated with BLM. Militancy is a posture; radicalism is linked to program for social transformation, and protests do not necessarily challenge power relations at all. In some ways, as political scientists have pointed out for generations, they can validate existing power relations insofar as they appeal to established authority to accommodate their demands and pursue more effective incorporation into extant governing coalitions. Although they are so commonplace now that most people no doubt rehearse them unreflectively, presumptions that protest actions and militant postures are intrinsically radical or follow a natural trajectory leading them toward radicalism depend on the nostalgic wishful thinking and forms of fallacious reasoning I’ve already discussed. But Birch and Heideman’s narrative is also plagued by their utter innocence of the history of the last half-century of black politics, which is truly astonishing, especially in light of their profound self-assuredness, though I suspect the former may be a key enabling condition for the latter. They show no knowledge or understanding of the relation of black political development to the growth of the large national, state, and local public-private anti-discrimination and diversity apparatus, or of the broader incorporation of black people into the various distributive regimes, market-based and not, that constitute and reproduce hegemonic neoliberalism. At this moment, in one tiny illustration of this phenomenon, my mother is engaged in dealings with a black-owned or black-fronted firm – not clear whether it’s for-profit or a non-profit NGO — that is enmeshed in a web of boondoggles outsourced from the Road Home program that the state of Louisiana created and administers in concert with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide assistance to people who suffered property damage in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Granted, the Road Home is an extraordinary policy intervention, and this is a trivial illustration. But this instance’s trivial and quotidian character is in a way the point. This sort of public-private, outsourced, marketized or semi-marketized activity is a node in an ever-expanding and reorganizing array of opportunity structures generated through neoliberalism and that contribute to its legitimation as everyday reality. More accurately, this activity and the individuals and organizations that participate in it constitute neoliberalization as an evolving political-economic, cultural and ideological order. People reproduce their material existence, not to mention pursue the entrepreneurial dreams that attest to the extent of Thatcherite ideological victory, through such nooks and crevices in the social administrative apparatus, whose public and private extrusions become ever more difficult to disentangle. At the same time, those structures and processes of neoliberalization are enmeshed with evolving black politics. The fact is that black people not only have access to these opportunity structures; they also participate in the processes that generate, shape, and legitimize them. The ambiguous relations of many prominent BLM figures and other black antiracist voices to the corporate and nonprofit interests that drive the assault on public goods and working people’s living standards underscore the class contradictions that antiracist politics papers over. The black political regime that emerged out of contestation and negotiation over the terms on which the victories of the 1960s would be consolidated institutionally was rooted from its inception in the dynamics simultaneously articulating market-driven pro-growth politics from the municipal level through national Democratic politics.25 It is not simply that the center of gravity of black politics accommodated to the regime of regressive redistribution and punitive social policy as it took shape and became hegemonic. Race-conscious black political discourse and practice, grounded on underclass ideology and a sharply class-skewed communitarian rhetoric of uplift and self-help and racial redistribution – anti-disparitarianism — as the crucial metric of social justice helped to define the left wing of Democratic neoliberalism over the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, black people participate as active and committed agents in the processes of neoliberalization, public and private – charterization of public education, devolution and outsourcing of the social service sector, direct and indirect attacks on public goods and labor standards in the name of individual enterprise (e.g., Uber, which openly promotes itself as providing opportunities for black Americans) or “community development,” private contracting at all levels, including the rent-intensifying real estate development that is unhelpfully called gentrification. Any serious left critique of black politics has to take those dynamics into account and must proceed from examining the actual complexities and contradictions, including class contradictions, in contemporary black political life. That is why my colleagues and I who authored “On the End(s) of Black Politics” singled out as problematic “the conceptual and political confusion that underwrites the very idea of a Black Freedom Movement.” Formulations like Black Freedom Movement and Black Liberation Struggle suffer from the circularity problem: they posit what needs to be demonstrated through historical and political analysis. This is not simply a formal flaw. Those formulations impose an idealist coherence, what is in effect a racial supra-consciousness or the teleological equivalent of a vanguard party, that obscures the history of political differentiation among black Americans and its significance for understanding both past and present. They posit a transcendent goal – empty signifiers like “freedom,” “liberation,” or “self-determination” — that most crucially unites and defines black Americans’ political aspirations. This presumption that a deeper racial truth, constant across historical and social contexts, guides black politics requires diminishing the significance, and often enough necessitates the procrustean erasure, of the historical specificity of political dynamics involving black Americans at any moment in order to sustain the teleological narrative of fundamental continuity. This problem and its counterproductive implications are apparent in the many versions of tortured analogy – e.g., “new Jim Crow” – purported, ever more convolutedly, to fit contemporary racial disparities into reductionist narratives that reify the white supremacist ideology and practice hegemonic at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth as the essential normative center of gravity of American politics and thus the source of racial disparities in the present. This interpretive commitment hinges on a fundamentally static view of race/racism and the primacy of its social power. Which is to say, this view of race’s primordial force – uniting top-shelf racists like Madison Grant and Charles Murray with earnest anti-racists like Birch and Heideman – may be the one thing in the last century that really hasn’t changed. In response to these increasingly tortured attempts to preserve monocausal narratives stressing the centrality of racism in explaining apparent inequalities, Chowkwanyun and I observe that “they bring to mind Kuhn’s account of attempts to accommodate mounting anomalies to salvage an interpretive paradigm in danger of crumbling under a crisis of authority.”28 The further away we move from conditions under which black Americans confronted officially enforced and tolerated subordination and discrimination on openly and directly racial grounds, the more Rube Goldberg-ish arguments that “racism” nonetheless remains the fundamentally causal force determining black Americans’ and other nonwhite groups’ life chances must become. As I have argued, a key effect of that commitment to race-first political interpretation is to shift the fulcrum of debate from examination of the discrete, contextually specific dynamics that reproduce inequalities to the label we must attach to them.