Praise for
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

 

“Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s searching examination of the social, political, and economic dimensions of the prevailing racial order offers important context for understanding the necessity of the emerging movement for black liberation.”

—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

 

“Class matters! In this clear-eyed, historically informed account of the latest wave of resistance to state violence, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor not only exposes the canard of colorblindness but reveals how structural racism and class oppression are joined at the hip. If today’s rebels ever expect to end inequality and racialized state violence, she warns, then capitalism must also end. And that requires forging new solidarities, envisioning a new social and economic order, and pushing a struggle to protect Black lives to its logical conclusion: a revolution capable of transforming the entire nation.”

—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

 

“With political eloquence, intellectual rigor, and an unapologetically left analysis, the brilliant scholar-activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has provided a powerful contribution to our collective understanding of the current stage of the Black freedom struggle in the United States, how we arrived at this point, and what battles we need to fight in order to truly achieve liberation. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is a must read for everyone who is serious about the ongoing praxis of freedom.”

—Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

 

“Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has a strong voice, a sharp mind, and a clear, readable style that all come together in this penetrating, vital analysis of race and class at this critical moment in America’s racial history.”

—Gary Younge, editor at large, Guardian

“Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor brings the long history of Black radical theorizing and scholarship into the neoliberal twenty-first century with From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Her strong voice is deeply needed at a time when young activists are once again reforging a Black liberation movement that is under constant attack. Deeply rooted in Black radical, feminist, and socialist traditions, Taylor’s book is an outstanding example of the type of analysis that is needed to build movements for freedom and self-determination in a far more complicated terrain than that confronted by the activists of the twentieth century. Her book is required reading for anyone interested in justice, equality, and freedom.”

—Michael C. Dawson, author of Blacks in and out of the Left

 

“From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is a profoundly insightful book from one of the brightest new lights in African American Studies. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor invites us to rethink the postwar history of the United States and to place the actions of everyday people, including the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who participated in the urban rebellions and wildcat strikes of 1960s and 1970s, at the forefront of American politics. By doing so, she offers up a “usable past” for interpreting the current anti-state-sanctioned-violence movement sweeping the United States in the early twenty-first century. This timely volume provides much needed analysis not only of race and criminalization in modern American history but of the specific roles played by a bipartisan electoral elite, the corporate sector, and the new black political class in producing our current onslaught of police killings and mass incarceration in the years since the Voting Rights Act’s passage. Taylor’s fluent voice as historian and political theorist renders legible the accomplishments and, perhaps most importantly, the expansive possibilities of a new generation of black youth activism.”

—Donna Murch, author of Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California

 

“Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has given us an important book, one that might help us to understand the roots of the contemporary policing crisis and build popular opposition capable of transforming the current, dismal state of affairs. Equal parts historical analysis and forceful polemic, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation provides a much-needed antidote to the postracial patter that has defined the Obama years, but it also serves as a proper corrective for the “new civil rights movement” posturing of some activists. Against such nostalgic thinking, Taylor reminds us of the new historical conditions we face and the unique challenges created by decades of African American political integration. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation sketches a politics that rightly connects anti–police brutality protests and a broader anti-capitalist project. Everyone who has grown sick of too many undeserved deaths at the hands of police and vigilantes should read and debate this book.”

—Cedric G. Johnson, author of Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics