What is the use and purpose of American political development (APD) in the era of Black Lives Matter? At first glance it might appear that the discipline, preoccupied as it is with apprehending the historical development of U.S. political institutions and the durability of shifts in the governing power of the American state, is perhaps less than agile at analyzing such a new, evolving, and diffuse social movement (Orren and Skowronek 2004). Indeed, as Christopher Lebron notes, unlike the Black Power Movement whose political vision is contained in Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s indispensable 1967 text, Black Power, the Movement for Black Lives has no singular text to provide it with philosophical anchorage (Lebron 2017). And in place of centralized leadership that has been a hallmark of black civil rights organizations since the birth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Movement instead mobilizes in real time based on a simple, urgent claim: that black lives are human lives and should not be subjected to cursory, vengeful or routine termination. These characteristics present challenges to scholars seeking to assess the Movement’s precise impact on state development and state power.

At the same time, however, the precarity of African American lives in the U.S. is not a new phenomenon, nor is mobilization for the protection of those lives. When Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created the Movement for Black Lives, they responded not only to a singular event of violence perpetrated and justice denied – the 2013 acquittal of neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin – but to deeply rooted and deeply historical patterns of racialized state violence in the U.S. As Neil Roberts puts it, Martin’s death “marks a moment in American political life where past and future are mutually determining” (2012).

In this sense, Garza, Cullors, Tometi and the countless advocates of #BlackLivesMatter tread in the tradition of Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and others who have mobilized against the vilification of blackness and for the protection of black people since the end of Reconstruction (Francis 2014; Taylor 2016; Lebron 2017).

Since Martin’s death, the work of the Movement has only spread as the list of names of black and brown men, women, and children subjected to police violence grows longer. A year after Zimmerman’s acquittal protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri in response to officer Darren Wilson’s fatal shooting of Michael Brown. This event crystalized state violence in black communities as a national problem and crystalized #BlackLivesMatter as, in the words of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “a movement, not a moment” (Taylor 2016). In 2016, the Movement articulated a radical platform of liberation centered on the “increasingly visible violence against Black people.”¹ The platform includes the familiar problem of violent policing, but also targets what Juliet Hooker terms “the key pillars of contemporary white supremacy”: mass incarceration, heightened state surveillance of black-centered organizations, the militarization of law enforcement, capital punishment, and economic injustice (Hooker 2017). While #BlackLivesMatter is best known for its attention to policing, the Movement is dedicated to fighting a complex set of interlocking institutions that render black life in the U.S. precarious. In this light, given the longstanding and ongoing nature of the problems to which the Movement responds, the question of APD’s utility in the age of Black Lives Matter actually betrays a prior question that scholars of APD may yet grapple with: What is the use of APD in an age in which African Americans and other people of color are disproportionately subjected to the racialized state powers of surveillance, policing, and incarceration?

In this article, I seek to clarify APD’s role in analyzing the institutions to which the Movement for Black Lives primarily responds – surveillance, policing, and incarceration. In particular, I speak to what the discipline can offer given the challenges of the current Trump era. The rise of Donald Trump to the presidency and the concurrent popularization of white populist nationalism in mainstream American politics presents unique challenges. From his 1989 insistence that the Central Park Five be executed to his suggestion that the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 was attended by “very fine people,” President Trump has owed his political rise in part to a form of open racial demagoguery not seen in a presidential election since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 bid. What was once aberrational in the post-civil rights era is now nearly common. Today, as scholars strive to understand how we arrived, or arrived again, in an era of overt white supremacist rhetoric, APD’s focus on historical institutional change offers necessary grounding. In the case of Black Lives Matter, the discipline fills out the picture of how the U.S. carceral state, encompassing surveillance, law enforcement, and incarceration, became a primary governing institution in the U.S. – and what relation this bears to spectacular displays of white nationalism that are increasingly common today.

Rethinking racism in the age of incarceration

At the height of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump’s then chief strategic advisor Steven Bannon commented on Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of police violence. “In the meantime, here’s a thought,” wrote Bannon, “What if the people getting shot by the cops did things to deserve it? There are, after all, in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive and violent” (2016). Here as elsewhere, Bannon sounds for all the world like midcentury southern segregationists who denounced the Civil Rights Movement and the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education by offering up well-worn images of black criminality.

Popularized in the early twentieth century, the idea of innate black criminality has buttressed a host of urban, state, and national policies regarding African Americans (Muhammad 2010). But in the 1950s and 1960s, the idea hit new heights of popularity as the nation adjusted to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that separate did not mean equal. In September 1956, for instance, two years after Washington, D.C. desegregated its public schools, the monthly publication of the Mississippi White Citizens’ Council ran a political cartoon depicting violence in the capitol city’s integrated schools. In it, a schoolhouse, labeled “the nation’s integrated showcase,” explodes from the inside out, its roof flying off and its doors bursting open to expel white students who run with arms outstretched to the safety of nearby Virginia (The Citizens Council 1956). At the time, Virginia was the home of the massive resistance movement, so called because it sought to resist any desegregation effort in keeping with the Supreme Court’s decision. The message of the cartoon is clear: white students can only be kept safe by keeping their schools free from black students. On this logic, integration and black civil rights are law-and-order issues.

The Citizens’ Council was not alone in this rhetoric. Other southern publications likewise bolstered the supposed link between blackness and violence. Massive resistance literature out of Alabama darkly reported in 1961 that “Negro juvenile delinquency” in Philadelphia escalated due to black and white students attending integrated schools (George 1961). The author, the segregationist crusader W. George, linked this outcome to the “hereditary” propensity of black youth towards crime. Segregationist politicians eagerly dispensed the same rhetoric. In the months before the 1960 Civil Rights Act moved through Congress, for instance, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond submitted a report into the Congressional Record that argued there was an “incontrovertible link” between integration and crime, and accused New York senator Jacob Javits and other civil rights supporters of attempting to “‘export’ New York City’s combination of integration, crime, and racial strife to the South” (quoted in Crespino 2012). But by the time Barry Goldwater secured the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1964, theories of innate black criminality were largely considered out of step with American values, and Goldwater’s bigoted campaign lost definitively to Lyndon B. Johnson’s coalition of liberals and moderates. In place of overtly racist rhetoric that sutured criminality biologically to race, colorblindness came to define the racial rhetoric of the post-civil rights era.

If the idea that African Americans are “naturally” predisposed to “aggression and violence,” in Bannon’s terminology, reeks of old-fashioned biological racism, scholarship in race and APD demonstrates that the expansion of state institutions that disproportionately target, police, and incarcerate African Americans and other people of color elides easy categorization. In fact, the decades of overt white supremacy’s relative absence in national political campaigns are the very decades of the U.S. carceral system’s most rapid expansion. Between Goldwater’s campaign and Donald Trump’s, the U.S. carceral population grew from two hundred thousand to over two million people. Currently, an astonishing 6.7 million adults are incarcerated in prisons or jails or are on probation or parole, and several hundred thousand more are detained in immigration detention centers and juvenile correctional facilities (Kaeble and Glaze 2016). That the U.S. carceral system has a distinctly racial character is undeniable, so much so that Michelle Alexander has termed it “the New Jim Crow” (2010). At yearend 2015, African Americans and Latinos together made up 57% of the U.S. prison population and fully half of the U.S. jail population, far outpacing their share of the general population (Carson and Anderson 2016; Minton and Zeng 2016).

What role did arguments of the Citizens Council and Strom Thurmond play in the creation of the carceral state? Some APD scholarship argues that midcentury southern segregationists played an outsized role. According to these scholars, the rise of law-and-order politics and the subsequent ballooning of the U.S. carceral system is the result of southern racial conservatives working to maintain the violent prerogatives of Jim Crow, white working class discomfiture with the scope of liberal civil rights policy, or the result of Nixonian southern strategists capitalizing on rising white anxieties of “street crime” after the riots of the 1960s (Carter 1995; Beckett 1999; Flamm 2005; Weaver 2007; Alexander 2010).

But while it is possible to draw a line from midcentury southern segregationists’ rhetoric of black “criminality” to the tough-on-crime politics that popularized the War on Drugs, mandatory minimums, “three strikes” laws, and crime control legislation, recent scholarship also cautions that overt racism played only a partial role in the creation of the carceral state. Naomi Murakawa and historian Elizabeth Hinton, for instance, each document the role that liberal policymakers have played in the creation of our now expansive prison system (Murakawa 2014; Hinton 2016). Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Daniel HoSang, and Jordan Camp have separately illustrated the popularization of crime policy in the supposedly liberal bastion of California (Gilmore 2007; HoSang 2010; Camp 2016). Marie Gottschalk highlights, among other things, the surprising role victim’s rights groups played in passing tough-on-crime legislation and the severely limited dent prison reform movements have made in recent efforts to reduce the prison population (2006, 2014). Judah Schept documents the steadfast commitment to prison building in the progressive university town of Bloomington, Indiana (2015). And Michael Javen Fornter and James Forman, Jr. both identify black elected officials as central figures in the twentieth century’s drive to incarcerate black people (Fortner 2015; Forman 2017).

In my own research, which focuses on the development of state-level carceral policy in the post-World War II American South, I am finding that even in the nation’s most racially conservative region the origins of crime policy are multiple, encompassing Old South segregationist and New South moderate legislative agendas. For instance, North Carolina, long considered the South’s most progressive state, was a pioneer of carceral expansion at midcentury. Between 1951 and 1969, North Carolina substantially revised and expanded its criminal code, increased and professionalized its investigative and law enforcement agencies, increased its capacity to incarcerate juvenile offenders, and doubled its prison population, which would balloon alongside the nations in subsequent decades. African Americans felt these developments most acutely. By 2012, 56% of North Carolina’s 38,385 inmates were African Americans, far outpacing their representation in their overall population in the state (Lancaster and Sullivan 2012).

These expansions took place as North Carolina politicians attempted to rein in both white supremacist violence and black civil rights activism, what politicians referred to as “extremism on both sides.” On the one hand, the new crime legislation and increased law enforcement powers targeted the activities of the United Klans of America, a white terrorist organization who boasted a particularly large membership in North Carolina in the 1960s. Consider, for instance, Governor Terry Sanford’s language in a speech denouncing the growth of the Klan in the summer of 1964:

Even as they outlawed the high crimes of dedicated white supremacists, North Carolina politicians also passed new legislation designed to criminalize the everyday, nonviolent political behavior of black civil rights activists. When the Greensboro Four first sat down at Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960, launching the sit-in movement that would soon spread like wildfire across the South, the governor responded not with the terminology of innate black criminality, but of public safety. He explained to a gathering of black civil rights leaders in 1963:

In sum, the literature demonstrates that the institutional roots of U.S. carceral expansion are multiple and complex, and cannot be reduced to the presence of overt white supremacist logics. To be sure, conservative politicians have been the traditional proponents of tough-on-crime laws. Richard Nixon pioneered “law and order” as a winning political rhetoric in his Southern Strategy in 1968. Ronald Reagan famously insisted that he had an “eighteenth-century attitude on law and order.” And in 2016, Donald Trump accepted the nomination to the U.S. presidency with a direct message: “I am the law-and-order candidate.” But despite the ostensible link between law-and-order Republican leaders, racial conservatism, and crime policy, the institutional history of the carceral system’s development in the last half of the twentieth century is far more complicated. Indeed, the two farthest-reaching crime bills in American history were the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act of 1968 and the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act, both signed into law under Democratic administrations. In the South, law enforcement expanded and new crime legislation passed, both falling heaviest on African Americans, at the very historical moment that Klan activity was outlawed and white supremacy derided as outdated and hateful.

Conclusions

The scholarship revealing the complex racial roots of U.S. carceral state does not stand alone in its attention to race and political development. Scholars of race and APD have for decades labored to reveal the racial underpinnings of the American state. This scholarship spans virtually every aspect of the nation’s political development, and includes uneven processes of regional democratization (Lowndes 2009; Johnson 2010; Mickey 2015), segregation and city development (Sugrue 2005; Lassiter 2006; HoSang 2010; Johnson 2014; Schickler 2016), labor (Frymer 2011), law and civil rights (Brandwein 1999; Novkov 2008; Dawson 2013; Francis 2014; Thurston 2015), the formation of police (Sullivan 2008; Singh 2014), the presidency (Milkis 2008), and the way we count citizens (Thompson 2016). Despite the fact that, as Julie Novkov, Joseph Lowndes, and Dorrian T. Warren have noted, “race is present at every critical moment in political development in the United States,” it is only in the last few decades the precise relationship between race and the nation’s political development has been a subject of serious scholarship (Lowndes, Novkov, Warren 2008). In transgressing disciplinary norms and ideological blind spots that typically understand race, racism, and anti-racist movements as side stories rather than main features of political development, the literature on race and APD has revealed that race is a central feature in the creation, management, and governance of American political institutions.

The form of state power that the Movement for Black Lives identifies as “the war on black people” – the cocktail of racialized surveillance, policing, and incarceration that plagues black communities and other communities of color – can and has operated in the absence of racial demagoguery. To be sure, this does not lessen or alleviate the necessity of eradicating white nationalism, and particularly white nationalist violence, from our current politics, but it does suggest that vanquishing these does not “fix” the problem of racialized state violence. Indeed, if we are to learn any lessons from the history of mass incarceration’s emergence and development from the APD literature, it should be that racialized state power does not require the terminology of white supremacists. In an era of Charlottesville and chants of “Build the wall!” our collective focus is easily drawn to the spectacular and away from the longstanding and institutional, but black and brown lives also depend on our attention to the quieter routines of institutionalized racial violence that have developed in post-civil rights era – even, and perhaps especially, in the absence of overt demagoguery. This is the task of APD in the age of Black Lives Matter: to provide a longer, larger, and more complicated story of the institutions and patterns of governance that render black lives uniquely precarious in American life.