The legacy of Barack Obama’s presidency and the ongoing tension between a rights-based political strategy versus a platform based on economic and group power underscore the fundamental political concerns grappled with by Deva R. Woodly in Reckoning: Blacks Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements. Woodly offers a thoughtful historical account of the democratic principles fueling Black social movements such as M4BL and sketches out a robust set of political concepts such as healing justice and radical Black feminist pragmatism to dismantle the divide between voting rights activism and structural transformation through economic and political power. One of the most intriguing aspects of Reckoning is Woodly’s retrieval of first-hand interviews and Black feminist writers to expand the terrain on which the reader and scholar might gather knowledge for public consumption. By weaving together interdisciplinary sources, Woodly constructs a formidable argument for the usefulness of social movements to correct or transform existing democratic traditions, norms, and principles. Two principal arguments guide the reader: (1) social movements expose the limits of traditional civic groups and (2) governmental organizations shed light on political activism otherwise ignored by mainline media outlets.
Woodly frames M4BL through the narrative accounts of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the founders of Black Lives Matter, following the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his murderer in 2013. The cry that awakened the nation and world to the ongoing dehumanization of Blacks, like the declaration for Black Power by SNCC members in the late 1960s, serves for Woodly as an epistemic framework for examining the killing of Michael Brown in 2014 and the Ferguson uprising that triggered a national debate on policing, Black suffering, and economic exploitation and neglect of Black communities. She takes a deep dive into the Black political infrastructure in Ferguson and the surrounding cities to showcase the substantive work of Black activism during and prior to Michael Brown’s killing. With this expansive backdrop, Woodly constructs a category through which to understand and analyze state violence against Black and Brown bodies: “recursive trauma.” According to Woodly, recursive trauma is the ongoing ritual of mutilating Black bodies for public consumption. It is performed within the public sphere and imagination as normal and necessary for the safety of the public and protection of the public good.
I wonder, however: do public institutions possess the necessary epistemic and cultural tools to address “recursive trauma?” How might counter-public institutions like the Black church, to borrow from Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, play a substantive role in addressing the varying ways trauma strangles Black communities? It is important to note that Black churches, even as they face rigorous and necessary criticisms from Black leftists, remain firmly rooted in areas abandoned by small businesses and serve as a mediator between “urban” communities and local and state politicians. In addition to the institutional value of Black churches, Black religion and spirituality continue to inform and shape the political imaginary of Blacks, especially within hip-hop culture and Black activism. Additional insight into Black religion and its epistemic role in Black political activism might offer new frameworks for addressing trauma within “public” and counter-public spheres.
Woodly’s theoretical description of recursive trauma implicitly extends W.E.B. Du Bois’s stirring notion of Negro problems, what Lewis R. Gordon characterizes as Du Bois’s effort to expose how nineteenth-century natural and social sciences were retrieved by European scholars to justify racist claims of Black inferiority as an innate problem. Du Bois, dating back to 1897, condemned scholars for wrongly assuming the social and economic problems that plagued Blacks following Reconstruction and during Jim and Jane Crow emerged from their moral and intellectual bankruptcy. At issue is whether or not political actors at the individual or group level possess the political power to dismantle the living legacy of Negro problems. Put differently, beliefs in the inherent criminality, for instance, of Blacks are woven within the law and cultural practices within the United States. Indeed, the sources of recursive trauma are structural. However, as it stands, it appears as if Woodly’s theoretical description of trauma serves as a hermeneutical account of Negro problems. She rightly articulates the “problem.” What is needed is a heuristic category for imagining a society in tension with and beyond Negro problems. I wonder if we can retrieve the category both to describe the social world and to provide fragments for what Du Bois characterized as a striving towards a “truer” democracy and democratic nation. Lastly, Black women’s literature, most notably from Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, offers broad and nuanced analyses for understanding and addressing trauma in Black communities. If political theorists like Woodly turned to “nontraditional” political sources such as Black literature, I wonder how such sources would shift and advance political platforms for addressing oppression and discrimination. In light of the ways Woodly is expanding the political vernacular to include categories like trauma and healing into the public debates on justice and freedom, it seems that scholars will be compelled to appeal to new sources for understanding politics in the post-BLM context.
One of the most astonishing moves in Woodly’s argument is the development of a radical Black feminist pragmatism. The philosophy is informed by “social intelligence,” “pragmatic imagination,” liberationist outcomes, and “democratic experimentation.” She builds this theory in conversation with thinkers ranging from Audre Lorde to John Dewey. This account is fueled by inquiry and deliberative interrogation and sustained by the imagination of the lived experiences of poor and working-class Black and Brown people. “This includes not only imagining what could be, but also, crucially, plotting a course and designing the process and means that those involved will use to make strides toward their goals” (p. 53). Woodly insists that her political philosophy rejects “heroic” leadership models of “great men” or “charismatic” figures, a move she says sheds light on the limits of historical methods within political science for documenting social movements and political behavior. Instead, she wants her colleagues to rely on Dewey’s notion of “social intelligence”—the link between individuals and their social and political milieus—as a starting point for re-imagining how scholars account for social movements and political mobilization among organizations. Second, liberationist outcomes are not aimed at political freedom, per se, but are designed to inform hermeneutical approaches of engaging the problem at hand. Put differently, liberation for Woodly “calls for political, social, and interpersonal strategies that take aim at identifying and mitigating the complicated structural and institutional causes and effects of domination and oppression” (p. 62).
Finally, democratic experimentation is a concept designed to encourage organizations to create new organizational structures and outcomes that align with a decentralized leadership model. With this conceptual backdrop, organizations can establish protocols and structural norms that prevent individual leaders from hijacking the organization for individual monetary or political gain. “This approach creates a situation in which decision-makers must adopt the frames and address the concerns present in movement messaging because they are unable to silence the claims or change the subject by wooing individuals with prizes and perks” (p. 60). To this end, Woodly demonstrates how M4BL’s decentralized paradigm created the conditions in and through which new political norms and social concerns could emerge, most notably the growing interest to include trauma and an ethics of care as political matters “because the ways those facts shape our experience of the world and our motivation and ability to organize and become mobilized are considered indispensable information for any political project, especially those that consider justice to be their aim” (p. 85).
Black social movements, according to Woodly, engender new political life into the public sphere by “democratizing” ignored and marginalized people through their participation in civil disobedience and nonviolent protest. This, she astutely argues, lifts the veil to the “submerged state” where structural racism, economic exploitation, and gender oppression form and shape the lived experiences of far too many Blacks in the United States. “In revealing how structural racism constrains the lives of Black people and other people of color, as well as how the intersecting ideological systems of patriarchy and neoliberalism constrain and order people’s lives in a way that perpetuates and maintains ascriptive hierarchy, M4BL has found a way to repoliticize public life” (p. 162). In fact, through interviews and archival research, Woodly offers the reader poignant accounts of how Black women and men retrieved the trauma from the Trayvon Martin killing and subsequent police shootings of unarmed Blacks to advocate for new public policies ranging from police reform and mental health advocacy to public housing improvements. “This assortment of policies springing up like mushrooms all over the country may seem small in their impact, but they are the signs of initial acceptance of the fundamental logic that animates modern abolitionism; that is, if we, as a society, want to make individuals and communities safer, we need to directly invest in them and the provision of basic needs rather than in the apparatus of punishment” (p. 191). At issue is the degree to which “new” political actors may engage institutions at the state and federal level. In other words, many BLM activists who now hold elected seats at the local or federal level have been rebuked by established leaders for pushing against tradition and the power structure. The most popular example of this happened soon after the so-called progressive “squad” of the Democratic Party—most notably Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—voiced concern about moderate Democrats in 2019 regarding the infrastructure bill and its inattention to the concerns of the progressive arm of the Party. I wonder how Woodly might engage these concerns in her next project. The ongoing inability to advance institutional change sits at the heart of Black politics in the late twentieth century.
Woodly’s analysis sheds light on the fierce debate on the future of progressive or radical politics within the United States in general and electoral politics in particular. The Trump era, like Reconstruction in America, catapulted nationwide efforts to suppress voting rights and to limit immigration rights (i.e., the Muslim ban) through legislation designed to restrict political access to nonwhites and non-Christians. The ongoing legal battles at both the federal and state level left many Black activists politically exhausted and full of despair as it relates to the future of electoral politics. Woodley acknowledges the political conundrum facing Black activists but remains cautiously optimistic in “electoral justice,” what she defines as the values of deliberative reflection, engagement, and accountability to those who suffer. Woodly writes that “despite these consequential disputes, there was a critical mass of organizers in the movement who had come to believe that even though electoral politics could not be the only path toward social transformation, it had to be among the tools in the movement’s repertoire” (p. 195). Reckoning compels the reader to imagine political justice beyond traditional racial uplift and accommodationist philosophies to include liberationist ideologies that address mental health and trauma alongside fighting for economic justice and political freedom.
