Class Root of Police Brutality: The Missing Gap in the Black Lives Matter Movement

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the activism of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and argues that the missing link in the movement is the class question, which has impacted on its tactics, strategies, and modus operandi. Since its emergence, the BLM movement has won some concessions in police reforms, defunding of police, policy changes in use of body camera and greater transparency in policing, yet the problems of racism, police brutality, over-policing, and police killings persist. What seems to be problematic is the narrow understanding of the problems and the cosmetic nature of police reforms that have failed to address the capitalist root of the problem. By sidestepping the class question, the movement has failed to understand that racism, police brutality, and police killings are essential tools used by the ruling class and the state in the American capitalist system to sustain its rules, domination, and control. By taking the class question off the agenda, the engagement of the BLM movement has been reduced to the race question and race consciousness, which led to a failure to unpack racism and policing as class questions and draw the tactics of the movement around the class question. The solution to this impasse is to understand black struggle as a subset of class struggle and prioritise the radicalisation of the black working class as a social base to connect with the black underclass and American working class in general and externalise the issues as generic problems facing Americans. The paper concludes that it is the unity of the American working class that can confront the capitalist underpinning of the problems of racism, police brutality, and extra-judicial police killings in American society.

KEYWORDS:

• Class question
• capitalism
• police brutality
• racism
• Black Lives Matter movement

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/. Accessed May 8, 2023.

2 Police killed 1,173 people in the US in 2021. For more details, see https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/. Accessed May 8, 2023.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ayodeji Bayo Ogunrotifa

Ayodeji Bayo Ogunrotifa received his PhD degree in Sociology at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interest includes social theory, sociology of social movement, Black studies, and sociology of race, racism, and ethnicity.