For a moment when he was younger, Steven W. Thrasher thought being a cop was his only option. This is surprising for those familiar with Thrasher’s work — a journalist who has spent the past decade covering, in part, police violence and the racism of police departments across the US. It seems implausible that he once wanted to be a man in blue. “From research I have conducted long after that time, I have learned that I did it for many of the same reasons others do: as a last-ditch chance at stable employment when I couldn’t afford to pay for food, rent, or my student loans,” writes Thrasher. He wondered, then, whether as a Black gay person he could perhaps change the force from the inside.
Thrasher marches out this anecdote in the introduction of his forthcoming book, The Overseer Class: A Manifesto, to prove a point — that for those marginalized or struggling, the police force offers a rare chance to approach power and move a few rungs up the societal ladder. He spends the rest of the book expounding on his later realization of “what a folly it had been to think that a more diverse police force would lead to a less violent police force.”
The Overseer Class is an impassioned, authoritative, and deeply personal takedown of a politics of representation. Thrasher illustrates that the presence of a person from an oppressed group in a position of power — such as a Black person in the police force — does not magically make an unjust system more just. In fact, a weaponization of this presence is often one of the very gears keeping the apparatus running.
As Thrasher puts it, “an overseer class is a phenomenon in which people from marginalized populations amass power not by uplifting people from the communities they come from, but by collectively cracking the skulls of their own.” This class breaks the usual affinities created among the marginalized, makes it slightly more complicated to point to the discrimination inherent to the system, and allows the whole machine to keep chugging and even expand its reach.
Overseers existed on US plantations literally meting out violence, and Thrasher argues today they are a stratum in the US police force, in academia, in the US military, and among our elected officials. Thrasher holds a microscope up to each institution, and to how in today’s world the overseer class uses a “very cynical manipulation of identity politics to maintain class exploitation in America.” The diverse police force still enacts racist violence, the Black woman Secretary of State still approves bombing of innocent civilians, and the presidential candidate lauded for her multicultural background still tells immigrants “don’t come.” In fact, Thrasher says, they do it even more effectively than an overseer without pretenses of progressiveness.
Thrasher is specific about his references, showing again and again the ways that the theoretical and political scaffolding he stands on has been built in the American Black liberatory tradition. He opens his book with a quote from James Baldwin, and closes it with one from Martin Luther King Jr. But he also fluidly shuffles through references to a Mariah Carey viral moment, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the film Shaft, and the drag queen Divine.
The most personal part of the book comes in Thrasher’s description of his interactions with members of the overseer class in his position as the inaugural Daniel Renberg Chair for Social Justice in Reporting at the Medill School of Journalism. With clear eyes and just a touch of bitterness, Thrasher details how colleagues and mentors whom he once trusted — Black and/or queer professors, several of whom were Baldwin scholars — sold him up a creek when he expressed solidarity with Palestine and opposition to the university’s financial support of Israel.
Thrasher found himself shocked by the betrayal, shocked that he was shocked, and at risk of losing his job. These professors, he argues, heeded the marching orders from the top to maintain their spot in the hierarchy, in a way that was implicit in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and made it easier, on the surface, for the university to deny allegations of racism. Thrasher himself refused to fall in line — and thus refused to be an overseer.
The Overseer Class is part manifesto in that Thrasher not only explains his theory, but also calls for combating the overseers and the systems they prop up. He frames his ethics around Toni Morrison’s adage that “your real job is if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
It can be unclear at times when Thrasher is calling for a rejection of the racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, ableist hierarchies in the police force or halls of academia, and when he is calling for the destruction of the institution in its entirety. When is it time for reform, and when for revolution? He both argues that some city mayors can be anti-overseers and raises questions about whether there can ever be an ethical president of the United States. But it seems this is because he concludes that the most vital step is first a faith in each other, a leap to “jailbreak our imaginations,” and see what can then be built.
The Overseer Class is a deeply rooted yet approachable analysis of how race in America is often a telemetric shorthand for class and interest, but remains only a shorthand. That, as Thrasher says, “skinfolk ain’t always kinfolk (and that people who don’t share the color of our skin might still fight for the values of our kin).” That the racism, the various oppressions of today’s world, won’t be solved with one person climbing the ladder to receive the nuclear codes. Instead, Thrasher pushes for a solidarity that is so encompassing, so solid, that the overseer class is rendered impotent and irrelevant.
Steven W. Thrasher’s The Overseer Class: A Manifesto will be published by Amistad on May 19 and is now available for preorder.
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