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Black Lives Matter activists in Mississauga, Canada, protest the death of Abdirahman Abdi, killed by Ottawa police on August 25, 2016. Image credit: arindambanerjee / Shutterstock

The late political theorist Cedric Robinson once wrote that, as it concerns the historical premises and practices of Black struggle, the most important issue is conceptualization: how are we to conceptualize what we were, what we are, what we are becoming? The essay in question is titled Coming to Terms. It is a fitting formulation for considering the accomplishments of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) through the lens of Robinsons query, on the one hand, and on the other, the conceptual rendering of the movement offered by Deva Woodly in her beautifully crafted new book, Reckoning.

In essence, I want to come to terms with M4BL as it has evolved, and also with one of Woodlys key tools of interpretation: what she describes as the canonical thinkers in political theory. The hope is to arrive at a provisional and necessarily incomplete answer to the question that concludes Woodlys text: What shall we do?, a path forward based on what we were, what we are, and what we are becoming.

The we in this context has, I think, a three-fold meaning. It refers, first and foremost, to Black people freedom dreaming on the front lines of struggle, past and present, be that through organized movement spaces or otherwise. In a second sense, it refers to Black academics, and the Negro intellectual, as Harold Cruse once put ittwo groups that include both Woodly and myselfand how we have collectively (and historically) engaged with Black rebellion as a political phenomenon. Finally, this we refers to all of us, Black and non-Black alikea totalizing weand not just people living in the United States, but around the world.

In Emergence, the first chapter of her study on Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, Woodly notes the movement was born twice, first as a hashtag online (#BlackLivesMatter). It was then reborn as a post-Ferguson organizational matrix (M4BL) emanating from a 2015 convening of allied organizers and groups in Cleveland. The two-births thesis, as Ill call it, is a useful starting point, a way of marking where we were.

And if we take the flux of this temporal framing seriously, if we think the movement was really born twiceas we shouldthen the unprecedented global uprisings of 2020 might best be understood as the zenith of the second phase, evidence that the decade to come has the potential to be a moment for reconstruction, just as Woodly hopes.

At the same time, last years Black-led rebellion might also be conceived as the beginning of the end of this second phase, which is where Id suggest we are, marching toward a yet to be determined third phase, which I think represents we are becoming. For the time being and for lack of a better name, Ill assign this third phase the label post-#BlackLivesMatter.

The suggestion we are moving towards a period that could be persuasively described as post- #BlackLivesMatter may seem contradictory. Perhaps it is. The scope of the 2020 uprisings in many ways undermines such a statement. But the destructive and jubilant dynamism seen in the streets, coupled with how the organizational infrastructure of M4BL was able to harness that dynamism and mobilize it further, papers over fractures that, to my mind, inform what post- #BlackLivesMatter might mean and what the praxis of a post-#BlackLivesMatter world might look like.

Put somewhat differently, in noting the ways M4BL has innovatively intervened in American political life through the re-politicization of the public sphere, and the possibilities this opens for the future, as Woodly does in her book, we must also take stock of why 2020 ended up being a watershed moment for a different kind of reckoning. This reckoning, a series of ruptures years in the making, saw organizers in the M4BL ecosystem, along with those observing from beyond, conclude that the movement, as represented by the M4BL constellation of leaders and groups, had lost its way.

Perhaps the most public example of this came in late November of 2020, when a group of chapters affiliated with the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN) publicly broke with the organization. The chapters (dubbed BLM10 and later the BLM10Plus) charged that the BLMGN, as shepherded by Patrisse Cullors, had long suffered from a lack of transparency, principled accountability, and democratic decision making, which was undermining the movement. As the group later described, their concerns were less about individual leaders and more about the ways liberalism and capitalism have manifested in BLMGN and the current iteration of the Black liberation movement as a whole, co-opting and deradicalizing this critical historic moment of revolutionary possibility.

Similar critiques were raised by members of the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), the national, chapter-based organization I was an active participant in, and with which I am still nominally affiliated. But the dissenters in BYP100 also decried the organizations sharpened focus on electoral politics, and what they saw as its structural submergence in the nonprofit industrial complex, allowing for the reproduction of hierarchies and the slow creep of harmful liberal-capitalist logics. Some also critiqued the outsized role the M4BL umbrella organization played in directing strategy, often without the buy-in of grassroots BYP100 members. Consequently, several chapters chose to sunset their involvement with BYP100, concluding that it could no longer act as their political home.

When coupled with recurring attacks on celebrity movement activists and lawyersa group that includes Cullers, Shaun King, Tamika Mallory, and Benjamin Crumpfor what their critics, among them mothers of the dead, have taken to be a crass and disingenuous penchant for profiting off Black pain, a clear but complex picture of where we are emerges.

From the perspective of M4BLs detractors, its original radical promise has been hopelessly compromised. The social forces and material conditions that galvanized the movement in its first phase remain largely unchanged. The organizational matrix, fortified over the course of the second phase, has become well-resourced, and to a degree, politically influential. M4BL has set its sights on winning influence in more establishment venues, while waging digital campaigns to educate, organize, and bring more people into its fold.

But that approachto set ones sights on mainstream poweralthough sensible and pragmatic, doesnt fly if you want the establishment to burn. It doesnt cohere if you believe liberation depends on the end of the world and the creativity that arrives with destruction.

In other words, a number of activists who have defected from the M4BL ecosystem believe that the war against anti-Blackness and its attendant ills cannot be waged and won on the oppressors terms, using the oppressors tools. And if this is the anchor of your analysis, then regardless of shifts in political discourse and public opinion, policy wins, or the salience of slogans like defund the police, youre likely to conclude that #BlackLivesMatter, along with allied groups such as BLMGN and BYP100, have been captured.

Whether or not you consider capture to be the appropriate term to describe what has happened in M4BLs second phase, aspects of the movement have unquestionably become institutionalized. This has happened in a manner that not only more directly engages the state, especially on the federal level, but also helps to normalize the movements presence withinrather than stridently againstAmerican liberal institutions. In some respects, an argument can be made that the M4BL umbrella organization has become like an oppositional tendency adjacent to the Democratic Party, gunning for a seat at the table. And it is precisely this kind of strategy, and the kinds of practices and tactics it produced, that caused a rupture in the shadows of the 2020 rebellion.

Its possible that some sort of schism was inevitable. I certainly could see the seeds of it being planted as far back as 2016, and the fact is, channeling the benefits of nonprofit status, and effectively changing public policy, were always among the explicit goals of organizers in the M4BL ecosystem. Its also the case that the radical energy that inspires the creation of radical movements comes and goes, as do movement organizations more generally.

When organizations survive, they often moderate their strategies, if not their objectives, in accordance with whatever their current leadership thinks the moment requires. From this we might say that theres a dialectical relationship between what we are becoming and the question what shall we do? Our understanding of the former impacts how we respond to the latter, and vice versa.

Which brings me back to the issue of conceptualization.

If were headed towards a yet-to-be-determined third phase, a post #BlackLivesMatter world, it wont be one where the current constellation of movement organizations simply disappear or become ineffective in their attempts to bring Black people closer to liberation. Instead, it will be a world where movement ideas and principles are taken up anew and materialize in novel forms designed to resist the pitfalls of institutionalization. After all, the objections raised by M4BLs critics were never about political beliefs. The dissent was about how those beliefs were put into practice, driven by a desire to ensureas the critics in BLM10Plus put itthat capitalism and liberalism would be unable to co-opt or blunt this critical historic moment of revolutionary possibility.

So, if this is one possibility of what we might become, then how are we to conceptualize and make sense of the political horizons of a post #BlackLivesMatter world? Will the key organizers in that world build on the radical spirit of the protesters who burned the Minneapolis Third Precinct to the ground at the onset of uprisings in 2020? What are the interpretive tools we should use, and importantly, how should we wield them?

These questions are especially urgent for Black academics and intellectuals committed to Black struggle.

Woodlys answer to the question of what conceptual tools we need is radical Black feminist pragmatism, a political philosophy through which one can view all of the forces that inhibit Black peoples ability to live and thrive. Guided by a carefully considered encounter with the words and lived experiences of movement leaders, her extended theoretical engagement with M4BL through the prism of radical Black feminist pragmatism is a testament to the love she has for Black people.

It also shows her deep admiration for the movements approach to what she terms the art of organizingthough she is equally clear that M4BL is a work in progressand her well founded intuition that the ideas present in this movement are offering the substance, the matter, that can help us to craft a new era . . . that has not yet been named.

A similar sensethat a new era of possibilities had dawnedwas indeed one of the reasons critics of M4BL concluded that the movements institutionalization was evidence it had lost its way.

But Woodlys text has another stated objective: to demonstrate M4BLs usefulness to canonical political and social thought, and in doing so, disrupt, challenge, and revolutionize canonical thinking. This goal partially explains why, throughout the book, many of her theoretical interlocutors come from the white western canon of political theory rather than the trove of Black thinkers who might be equallyif not betterpositioned to conceptualize our historical moment.

For example, Woodly draws on John Deweys notion of social intelligence, which she says the movement uses, in part, to press foundational American ideals into service to salve and correct the structural conditions that enable domination and oppression in present day.

Deploying the term social intelligence to describe M4BLs approach to problem solving is one thing. But its hard not to see her framing as rephrasing a redemption narrative that is all too familiar, whereby the ideas and innovations of Black movements, born out of the pain of Black struggle, are placed in the service of correcting, but ultimately upholding the American project.

We must reject this narrative: neither America, nor any other nation-state, can be redeemed.

Furthermore, the idea of pragmatism itself has its own genealogy in Black feminist thought, one that, like Woodlys interpretation of M4BL, is grounded in pragmatic activism, as Stanlie James put it, and that similarly understands that the future is something to be pondered and set as a goal for today in our theories and in our practices, to borrow from V. Denise James. In this genealogy, the use of the term pragmatism, as a way of naming the nature of the work, emerged independent of any explicit engagement with Dewey, even if scholars like V. Denise James later sought to explore how Dewey might supplement Black feminist theorizing.

The point is this: relying on the canon to help interpret Black movements, and explain their contribution to mainstream political theory, does more to reify the canon than it does to disrupt, let alone revolutionize it. This is a version of being on the oppressors terms and using the oppressors tools, all for the sake of legibility to a canon that has never really concerned itself with Black life.

Reification is obviously not Woodlys intent, and her desire to champion the movement is clear. She is also not alone in explicitly adapting Deweys pragmatism and applying it to an analysis of Black life. Cornel West laid out the argument decades ago, and more recently, Eddie Glaude Jr. comes to mind.

But what we are and what were becoming might require something different from us now, something more. Perhaps thats among the things we need to come to terms with, as the uprisings and internal ruptures usher in a new, post #BlackLivesMatter phase, in Black struggle.

Click here to read an excerpt from Reckoning, courtesy of Deva Woodly and Oxford University Press.

Christopher Paul Harris is an assistant professor of Global and International Studies at University of California, Irvine. He holds a PhD in politics and historical studies from The New School for Social Research.

More:
On Coming to Terms - publicseminar.org