Black Lives Matter, American political development, and the politics of visibility

ABSTRACT

Viewed through the lens of American Political Development (APD), the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement raises several questions about the movement's relationship to earlier movements for social and racial equality in the United States. This essay highlights a mode of politics common to BLM and its predecessors that involves rendering the state’s role in producing racial inequality visible and legible, in order to contest it. This mode of contestation is a product of a “post-racial” era in which the formal colorblindness of government institutions promotes a narrative in which inequalities in outcomes are linked to personal choices rather than political ones. However, a developmental perspective on the politics of visibility also reveals its precursors, for example in early anti-redlining movements.

KEYWORDS:

• American political development
• Black Lives Matter
• housing discrimination
• protest movements
• American state-building

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Roy Wilkins to Stewart McDonald, October 12, 1938, in NAACP Papers (ProQuest), Group II-L-17, Housing – Federal 1938-39, quoted in Thurston (Forthcoming), 133.

2. Memo from Stewart McDonald to Franklin D. Roosevelt, July 7, 1936, in Frankling D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Presidential Papers Official File, OF 1091, Folder: Federal Housing Administration June – Dec. 1936, quoted in Thurston (forthcoming).

3. Federal Housing Administration, Underwriting Manual, April 1936, Section 233. FHA’s early racial practices are now well-known now, but it should be emphasized how uncommon this knowledge was at the time. The Underwriting Manual that the NAACP official had uncovered was serial numbered, as though not intended for general circulation - a fact the organization emphasized when writing in its October, 1938 letter to the FHA.

4. It is not just visibility of the state that movement actors have aimed for, but also legibility. The acquittal of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin became a stand-in example of structural discrimination: stand-your-ground laws may claim to be racially neutral, but if individuals’ perceptions of threat and bodily harm are shaped by racialized constructions of who is considered “dangerous,” then the outcome is a state that provides legal cover for the deaths of those who are constructed as threatening.

5. Movement for Black Lives, “Platform - Economic Justice,” at https://policy.m4bl.org/economic-justice/