Politics, Not Apology

My book...is about the social justice movement, the efforts by activists to utilize political power to grow their coalitions and achieve certain kinds of policy ends. The George Floyd protest movement and its associated offshoots, which takes up the bulk of the book’s attention, are filled with people who would be called woke, but the story of that movement is fundamentally not the same story as how (say) Young Adult fiction went insane. The BlackLivesMatter moment of 2020 was an attempt to achieve actual material change for Black people, with a focus on reducing police violence. In the attempt, the movement garnered a level of attention for street protests and associated legislative work that’s probably unprecedented in American political history, at least in terms of scope of media attention and intensity of feeling. The fundamental observation that the book makes is that all of this immense outpouring of good intentions and support, both momentous and ephemeral, came to very little, and the question it asks is why. That’s fundamentally a topic concerned with organizing and activism, with partisan politics, with municipal systems, and with messaging. Correspondingly, the book mentions (for example) campus political controversies only in passing, but focuses intently on Occupy Wall Street, the role of nonprofit organizations in progressive politics, and the labor movement, among other things. These are all adjacent to identity politics, but in a very explicit sense, the book is not about identity politics, not at all.