96  Race & Class 61(1)

In this archive of utopian thought, the reader encounters theoretically rich con-
cepts of freedom and friendship, racism, colonialism and revolution, abolition
and language, fugitivity and surplus, concepts of work, struggle, knowledge and
participation. It is a challenging and adventurous read. At times, Gordon drops
the reader smack into the middle of a debate or controversy that has long been
raging, and the reader has to struggle to find her orientation, to find the contours
and a way in. But then, this is the nature of the archive she is gesturing towards,
and it demands intensely dynamic engagement with the material. It demands the
reader to constantly interpret and integrate form, content and curatorial choice
when thinking about the archive, alongside what Gordon calls the ‘utopian mar-
gins’. In some ways, it is difficult to imagine that a volume with such ambitious
interventions could demand anything less.

Birkbeck, University of London EDDIE BRUCE-JONES

Making All Black Lives Matter: reimagining freedom in the 21st century
By BARBARA RANSBY (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018),
221 pp., £14.99.

One of the most significant books to come out of the US last year has passed
without comment here in the UK. Making All Black Lives Matter: reimagining a
freedom movement in the twenty-first century is history, context and manifesto all
at once. Its author, Barbara Ransby, is Professor of African American Studies,
Gender and Women’s Studies, and History at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, but, more importantly, she is an unflagging activist and determined
feminist. In her previous books she ‘retrieved’ the lives of two key black US
women – Ella Baker and Eslanda Robeson.1 What she does in her latest oeuvre
is to situate Black Lives Matter/the Movement for Black Lives coalition
(BLMM/M4BL), wearing not her academic cloak but in the gilet and hoodie of
a black organiser, as an organic part of the Black Radical Tradition in the US.
But there is of course no one Black Lives Matter movement. As Ransby told us
at a small seminar held at the Institute of Race Relations last year, ‘the M4BL is a
larger rubric under which there are about fifty organisations, most of which have
signed off on a document that came in August 2016, called “A Vision for Black
Lives”’.2
The book, which tries to do justice to a wide cross-section of those organisa-
tions, falls into three parts – Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are about political building
around specific police killings of black young men: Trayvon Martin’s, in Florida,
2012; Michael Brown’s, in Ferguson, Missouri, 2014; Freddie Gray’s in Baltimore
custody, 2015. In the middle section, Chapter 5 is on political formation and con-
tradictions (for example, thrown up by social media, across generations, dealing
with movement sexism, acknowledging class issues) and how they are resolvable
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(if sometimes partially) on the ground. Chapter 6 looks at state violence against
organisers in M4BL; and Chapter 7 examines in detail ‘the political ecosystem’ of
Chicago (the author’s stomping ground) and the achievements of the movement
there. Four more general chapters on organising top and tail the book. Admittedly,
the more general the chapters become, i.e. distanced from the local detail, the
easier it is for us outside the US to relate to their contents.
Ransby is at pains not to rerun the accounts already available in so many books
on Black Lives Matter, to which she pays homage.3 She focuses instead on politi-
cal organisation, and on how political organisers emerged (with whom over two
years she carried out numerous interviews and attended countless meetings and
rallies). Instead of ‘rags to riches’ tales, here we have tales ‘from armchair to activ-
ist’. She concentrates on delineating the political trajectory of individuals, mostly
women, who have led the recent fights over racialised police killings, turning
them from local cases to national cause − Ransby’s (unspoken) riposte to an
empty politics of identity.
But it is the opening and closing chapters where she analyses more generally,
away from the dissection of the hurly burly of the street, that we find the pro-
found political wisdoms that make this book such an important read – yes, even
across the Atlantic. Hers is always a political take, but also a hugely humane one,
in which she picks her words carefully. In the first page of her introduction she
asks how a social media hashtag in 2013 became ‘the battle cry’ of a ‘generation
of Black youth activists’ and ended up resonating ‘as a moral challenge, and as a
slap in the face to the distorting and deceptive language of colorblind and postra-
cialism’ in the US, following Obama’s election in 2008.
Her book then looks at ‘the forces’, ‘the individuals’, and ‘the underlying ideas
that have animated, nurtured, and sustained this movement’. Though she says
the answers are complicated, she comes down quickly on certain truths: ‘Black
feminist politics have been the ideological bedrock’; the movement has addressed
racism and violence experienced by LGBTQIA communities; ‘organizers have
enacted a Black feminist intersectional praxis’ (and this intersectionality is a prac-
tice rather than something learnt through textbooks). Furthermore, the move-
ment has ‘also patently rejected the hierarchical hetero-patriarchal politics of
respectability’, giving primacy not to the so-called ‘best and brightest’ but
‘emphasizing the needs of the most marginal and often-maligned’.
‘This is the first time in the history of US social movements’, she writes, clearly
with some pride, ‘that Black feminist politics have defined the frame for a multi-
issue, Black-led mass struggle that did not primarily or exclusively focus on
women.’ And black people are represented within all the oppressed of the US –
the poor, migrants, the disabled, the working-class, Muslims, and so on. ‘So to
realize the liberation of “all” Black people means undoing systems of injustice
that impact on all other oppressed groups as well.’ For Ransby, the 2016 M4BL
document ‘is not just about black issues in some narrow sense, but includes envi-
ronmental justice issues, feminist issues, labor issues’. BLMM/M4BL is ‘at its
98  Race & Class 61(1)

heart, a visionary movement calling not only for reforms but for systemic and
fundamental change’.
Where did it spring from? Of course, it did not spring out of thin air, explains
historical materialist Ransby. It had its roots way back: in the 1990s in the way
Black gay men and women had to organise against the HIV/AIDS epidemic; in
the 2005 hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans and the way it and its after-
math affected its ‘Black folk’; in the launch in Chicago in June 1998 of the Black
Radical Congress (BRC) – ‘a coalition of Black left organizers and intellectuals
responding to the devastating impact of neoliberal policies on the Black com-
munity, and to the dearth of responsive Black leadership’. The BRC, of which
the author was a part, signalled ‘the re-emergence of a new Black Left’ and its
feminist caucus ‘represented a coming together of an amazing intergenerational
group of Black feminists’ many of whom became mentors, teachers, advisers
and supporters to M4BL organisers in the 2010s. And there were two other
organisations led by Black women and Women of Colour activists which
strongly influenced the ‘new’ movement – the prison abolition movement
Critical Resistance (CR) founded by Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and
Rose Braz in 1998 and INCITE, on domestic and state violence. As mass incar-
ceration of black people signalled the aptness of CR’s description of the Prison
Industrial Complex, black Americans had also become painfully aware that
having black policemen, black mayors, or even a black president did not protect
poor black young men on city streets. And then, outside of black politics, there
was the Occupy Wall Street movement which challenged the tyranny of the
super-rich and capitalism overall, and revived tactics of direct action and civil
disobedience.
What is so stimulating about the book is that it is introspective in a completely
fresh way, inward-looking of organising, and, without ever betraying people and
issues, it draws out universalist truths on everything from dealing with move-
ment contradictions to taking on state power. In that sense it is almost a toolkit for
the new organiser. Chapter 8, for example, examines the roles played by Black
Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), Blackbird and the Black women-
led BlackOUT Collective in providing ‘modern maroon spaces’ where organisers
can come together, fortify themselves and forge new levels of trust and consen-
sus. ‘None’, she concludes, ‘are base-building or mass organizations’, but they
provide the essential connective tissue to bind the different pieces of the move-
ment into a whole – they are ‘the political quilters’.
Where now? Heeding a warning from Ruth Gilmore, Ransby argues that
M4BL, a ‘Black-led class struggle – informed by, grounded in, and bolstered by
Black Feminist politics’, has to resist attempts to narrow its goals or ‘to decontex-
tualize them from the larger political landscape of racial capitalism’. There is, she
adds, a symbiosis between ‘US and European capitalism, empire, white suprem-
acy, and hetero-patriarchy’. And this is in fact a basis for unity not fragmentation.
If the white-led Left and labour organisations could internalise the connections
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and truths emerging from the new movement, ‘the political possibilities would
be enormous’.

Institute of Race Relations                 JENNY BOURNE

References
1 Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North
Caroline Press, 2003); Eslanda: the large and unconventional life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (Yale
University Press, 2013).
2 See https://policy.m4bl.org
3 Jamala Rogers, Ferguson is America: roots of rebellion (Jamala Rogers, 2015); Keeanga-Yamahtta
Taylor, From#BlackLives-Matter to Black Liberation (Chicago, IL: Haymarket books, 2016); Angela
Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the foundations of a movement
(Chicago, IL: Haymarket books, 2016); Jordan R. Camp and Christina Heatherton, eds, Policing
the Planet: why the policing crisis led to Black Lives Matter (London and New York: Verso, 2016);
Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, When They Call you a Terrorist: a Black Lives Matter
memoir (New York: Macmillan, 2018).

Media, Crime and Racism

Edited by MONISH BHATIA, SCOTT POYNTING and WAQAS
TUFAIL (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 400 pp., Paper £24.99.

It is not easy to demonstrate how media reporting has violent, material effects on
communities, and analysis of the media that just focuses on the visual details or
the language leaves you wanting more to connect the dots between media and
society. But this welcome co-edited collection of essays, Media, Crime and Racism,
offers engaged scholarship that explores the complex processes through which
the media racialises crime, and criminalises race, and the impact this has.
Arranged into eighteen chapters, which cover a range of issues, including child
sexual abuse, terrorism, policing, the refugee crisis and Islamophobia, this path-
breaking book reveals the systemic processes of racialisation that exist across dif-
ferent national contexts.
One of the critical issues unpacked is the racialisation of sexual abuse in the
media, and the impact this has on victims of sexual violence and local Muslim
communities that are collectively blamed for the crimes. An issue that the far
Right has been increasingly co-opting to push an anti-migrant, anti-Muslim
agenda,1 it is of crucial importance that we have this kind of rigorous scholarship
to dismantle its arguments. One of the editors, Waqas Tufail, contributes a crucial
article on the racialisation of child sexual abuse in Rotherham, a postindustrial
northern town in the UK. ‘Local media discourses and state and institutional
actions (or inaction) shaped the racial landscape of Rotherham’, he writes. The
focus in the local media on ‘Asian grooming gangs’, with a supposedly hyper-
masculine and ‘backwards’ patriarchal culture, obscured the local dynamics of
power and exploitation that enabled the conditions for sexual violence to occur in