The book concludes with a meditation on the movement to remove statues of Confederate veterans and officers from public spaces throughout the South. This development is seen as an extension of the theory of amputation promulgated throughout the book: that removal is both a reminder of a white supremacist past and a repudiation of it, as well as a hopeful projection of an antiracist future.

The book’s epilogue takes the first steps to applying the conclusions of the work to other current social and cultural contexts, like the Black Lives Matter movement and white Christian Nationalism in the United States. After demonstrating the way the book’s arguments help highlight the stakes of these movements, I proceed to question the utility of a martyrdom during our era of ever-increasing global interconnection, and whether it is time to be done with martyrs once and for all.

The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police over Memorial Day weekend ignited sustained protests across the country and placed the issue of race front and center. As we show in this chapter, by September, more than two-thirds of our survey respondents report positive views of the Black Lives Matter movement. While the salience of race began to fade as the general election campaign unfolded, we find that political characteristics of citizens, such as party attachment and partisan media exposure, influence support for the social justice movement and support for law enforcement. Further, psychological predispositions consistently and significantly influence views of social protests and policing. For example, people’s level of racial resentment produces powerful changes in their views of the protests and police from September to October. Finally, attitudes about racial justice and policing influence overall impressions of Biden and Trump, producing significant changes in people’s views of the candidates during the first months of the fall campaign.

Analyzing major and lesser-known utopian and dystopian literature from 1945-present, we define white supremacy as both a regime of exploitation and violence by people of European descent upon others deemed to be outside of whiteness and a process of centering whiteness. We look at the relationship between white supremacy and American culture from the period through two main trends. The first asserts white supremacy in either a default form assuming the centrality of whiteness or an explicit form that calls for white supremacist revolution. Texts here range from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold to McCarthy’s The Road to the notorious Turner Diaries. The second trend directly challenges white supremacy, including some notable texts such as Butler’s Parable series to a flood of post-Black Lives Matter works such as Ruff’s Lovecraft Country to Coates’s Between the World and Me to short works by adrienne maree brown and others.

This chapter examines the past decade of organizing against the carceral state under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” (BLM). It draws on my collaborative research with Color Of Change and the movement for transformative justice alternatives to prison and policing for gendered violence. I look at recent BLM mobilizations through three lenses. One tracks BLM’s macro-level gains for community power at the situational, institutional, and systemic levels. Another documents the micro-level psychological empowerment processes of Black queer feminist approaches that center Black joy, political education, and care for Black women. Lastly, I look at the meso-level organizational settings that bridge individual psychological empowerment and capacity-building with macro-level outcomes like policy changes and culture shifts. Drawing on Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa’s concept of the “prism” (2021), I coin the term “Black prism” to describe organizations like Color Of Change that build political homes to amplify the power of Black constituents.

In this chapter, we presented Black youth’s reflections on summer 2020 and the powerful protest movement for Black lives that reverberated about the globe. Young Black changemakers saw summer 2020 as a watershed moment in which real changes toward racial justice were happening. Summer 2020 connected Black youth’s personal experiences of racism to a historic movement for racial justice, continuing a legacy of fighting for racial justice. Alongside profound joy, inspiration, and hope, Black youth experienced sadness, frustration, numbness, anger, and fear. We captured these youth’s feelings while they were living through this momentous time, and they were still in the midst of processing the moment, their feelings, and their role in the movement. Summer 2020 activated agency, critical knowledge, and action for some, and for others, the movement advanced and solidified their purposeful commitments to racial justice for now and into the future.

The Epilogue links the book to Black Lives Matter activism and engages the work of Richard Hofstatder to explain the importance of thinking through American violence in a systemic manner.

QAnon started in late 2017 but gained traction and attention in 2020 amidst a chaotic social climate which is critical for understanding QAnon and its growth. This chapter presents evidence that QAnon-related traffic on social media increased during the pandemic, both domestically and globally, and offers anecdotal evidence of how QAnon’s messaging has changed as it has spread internationally, adopting nation-specific issues. Next, the chapter offers psychological explanations for these trends. Conspiracy theories flourish in times of uncertainty and group membership can provide meaningful connections that alleviate isolation. Conspiracies are more believed by people who also believe that society’s values are being threatened—an effect called system identity threat. Terror management theory suggests that reminders of death might affect the sentiment of individual people and society in general. Finally, mortality salience can promote following of religious beliefs. As a quasi-religious group, QAnon could have gained support due to mortality salience. The uncertainty and threats of 2020 might have contributed to QAnon’s popularity.

Part Three: “Solidarity/Disavowal,” looks at how Asian Americans developed a distinct political subjectivity during the Asian American movement, against the backdrop of emergent Black Power and the nation’s imminent turn toward mass incarceration. Asian American activists and thinkers denounced white supremacy and expressed solidarity with Black people under the Third World rubric, but they did not theorize structural anti-Blackness or recognize their own not-Blackness. Reproducing the fallacy of minority equivalence, their half-finished critique has hampered Asian Americans’ ability to understand and respond to numerous Asian–Black conflicts that have unfolded in the post-movement era—including the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, the controversy around NYPD Officer Peter Liang’s killing of Akai Gurley in New York City in 2014, and protracted tensions over race-conscious admissions in secondary and higher education, culminating in the anti-affirmative action lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard. With the dramatic rise of a right-wing Chinese immigrant politics that seeks to dismantle affirmative action once and for all, the ethical–political crisis that has always faced Asian Americans—namely, what they should do about being participant–beneficiaries in an anti-Black order—has become more urgent than ever.

The illegal killing of George Floyd led to Black Lives Matter protests around the world and energised the call for discrimination to be addressed in society. In this chapter we explore evidence of mental health inequalities in those from BAME communities and acknowledge that some groups in society, who may or may not identify as BAME, such as asylum seekers travellers and the LGBTQ+ community, also face discrimination. We mention the theory of intersectionality, racial gaslighting and the detrimental impact of austerity on health outcomes. Readers are reminded of the historical reports into the deaths of Michael Martin, Joseph Watts and David ‘Rocky’ Bennett and of the 2002 Sainsburys Centre review which identified a ‘circle of fear’. The finding of the independent review of the MHA and the recently published rapid review of ethnic health disparities by the NHS Race and Health Observatory are highlighted. NHS England and NHS Improvement’s Advancing Mental Health Equalities Strategy, the RCPsych equality action plan, and The Patient and Carers Race Equalities Framework (PCREF) are explained. Stereotyping of black males and the disproportionate use of force (including tasers), is discussed and the authors call for the implementation of mandatory training covering the nature of discrimination.

Social factors affecting pregnancy include poverty, deprivation, ethnicity and refugee status. Drug and alcohol misuse, poor nutrition and obesity also have harmful effects. Reports in the 1930s included information on social circumstances of the women who died but early CEMD Reports contained virtually none. In 1977 the Labour government commissioned an enquiry by Sir Douglas Black into social determinants of health but in 1980 the Black Report was all but suppressed by the new Conservative government. In the 1990s further reports appeared at a time when the future of the CEMD was in doubt because of its focus on clinical care. In 1994-6 the scope of the Enquiries broadened. The Reports stopped blaming women and focussed on barriers to accessing care. Shockingly the Enquiries revealed that mortality rates were much higher in deprived areas and among ethnic minorities, particularly Black women.The data stimulated a raft of well-meaning NHS initiatives but the lofty policy declarations remained disconnected from reality. In 2016-18 three quarters of women who died had pre-existing medical or mental health conditions and 90% were in some measure socially vulnerable.

Alighting briefly once again on Weill’s Symphony No. 2 from the book’s opening, and then turning to consider Florence Price’s Symphony in E minor as a closing case study, Chapter 6 pivots between the early 1930s and the present day to consider the legacies and twentieth-century historiography of the symphonies in the book – their absences and recoveries – and the remarkable persistence of the symphonic genre in the mechanisms of how cultural and political agency is conferred to the present day. The poor reception of Weill’s New York premiere in 1934 comes under examination in light of the discussion in the intervening chapters, raising the question of why, for that time and place, Weill was the wrong kind of symphonist. Then, the chapter addresses the contemporary revival of Price’s symphony in the early 2020s, and it suggests the capacity of symphonies from the tumultuous years around 1933 to invigorate a differently dynamic symphonic landscape and a differently dynamic landscape of selfhood.

This chapter explores the crises of the Roman and American republics. Understanding these crises requires that we view politics as an arena of identity contestation rather than simply interest articulation. What changes in both Rome and the United States is that participants came to see each other as Strangers, no longer sharing the same background assumptions, the same sense of the past, nor the same anticipation of the future. Borne of distrust, norms of getting things down turned into norms of obstruction. This had implications for how politics was experienced. The changes in these norms not only disabled these institutions, making them unable to actualize a future, but also made possible alterations in the political framework that might have been inconceivable before. In particular, one sees the elevation of individuals who offered solutions by promising to bypass those ineffective and unresponsive institutions. That is, as institutions and processes become distant abstractions that no longer answer to fundamental questions of the future of the community, the individual becomes the tangible personification of politics, answering these questions in a singular voice.

To demonstrate the principles of democratic policing in action, this chapter looks at seven cases of policing that incorporates them: (1) Not arresting Black Lives Matter protesters who block traffic during rush hour; (2) Reducing the car stops a police department makes as a way to decrease the negative consequences of this type of enforcement for a community; (3) Sanctuary city policies that explicitly limit police department cooperation with federal immigration enforcement officials; (4) A decision not to voucher condoms as evidence when making prostitution arrests; (5) Not arresting suspects for prostitution when there is cause to believe the suspects are being trafficked into doing so; (6) Not arresting individuals in possession of personal-use quantities of unprescribed addiction treatment medication; (7) Advocating for the redesign of smartphones to deter theft.