What are the costs of enacting “appropriate” democratic politics in the face of systematic racial violence? When white citizens and state institutions betray a pervasive lack of concern for black suffering, is it fair to ask black citizens to make further sacrifices so that white citizens can be comfortable? In her powerful talk on the complex responses to the current Black Lives Matter movement, Juliet Hooker explores the forms of politics that Black citizens can and should pursue.

Hooker explores these questions through meditations on the problem of democratic loss. She begins with Danielle Allen, who argues democratic politics is characterized by loss and that we must manage this loss as citizens. There are always situations in which one must be a loser in democracy so democracies have to conceive of how this plays out. Losses are theoretically justified because they happen “arbitrarily” but in actuality, some groups, like African Americans, disproportionately bear this burden of loss. As a result, Allen turns her analysis to holding up citizens who sacrifice as key to democratic stability. She discusses African Americans who responded to racial terror in the 1960’s through non-violence as exemplary citizens making these necessary sacrifices on behalf of the rest of the population. As you might imagine, Hooker argues that this notion of Black sacrifice is problematic and an unfair burden on Black citizens to make others comfortable at the expense of their own wellbeing and freedom. Furthermore, she argues that the underlying historical and theoretical assumptions on which this notion of black politics as democratic sacrifice is based, does not actually hold up.

Hooker notes that the most popular critique of the current Black Lives Matter protests is that protesters have not always engaged in strict standards of non-violence (as compared to memories of the 1960’s protest movements) as they speak out against police brutality, murder and the racism of the criminal justice system. Yet she discusses how this critique is based on three key problematic assumptions. The first is the reduction of a long history of black activism and black political thought to a very sanitized version of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In this romantic narrative of the civil rights movement, the U.S. is seen as a forward-moving democracy where political relations are always moving towards racial equality. This narrative serves to shift attention away from Black loss and long struggles of racial justice toward the idea that black politics should be about peaceful repair within the same democratic system. In fact, the reason Martin Luther King and non-violence movements made an impact is because they were set up in contrast to Malcolm X and movements like the Black Panthers. Both types of movements were necessary to move towards racial equality but we only remember and honor a romanticized version of non-violence and the people that made up these movements.

The second assumption is a mistaken theoretical account of white moral psychology that assumes that whites experience positive ethical transformations as a result of exemplary forms of political activism (i.e. nonviolence) by racialized minorities as they respond to racist violence. But Hooker discusses the fact that there is no evidence that this is true, particularly in our current “post-racial” society with a high degree of white resentment against Blacks and Latino/as. Even in the case of Black unarmed children being murdered by police officers, there is a need to portray each victim of brutality as innocent and deserving of care and citizenship rather than focusing on these deaths as part of a racially unjust system.

Finally, Hooker discusses the third assumption as a characterization of non-violent protest as sacrifice, which she points out, does not necessarily correspond with the way participants in black protest movements actually frame their own actions as defiance or resistance. She uses interpretations of an iconic photograph of Dorothy Counts, one of the first Black students involved in desegregation, as an example. In the photo Hooker references, Dorothy is walking to the school, followed by a mob of white protesters. Many readings of this photograph have centered on Black sacrifice, assuming Dorothy is afraid as she engages in this peaceful protest by going to school and refusing to engage with the mob. In fact, however, Hooker shares that Dorothy’s own reading of her actions are those of defiance, not acquiescence: “if you look at the picture the right way, you see what I see. What I see is that all of those people are behind me. They did not have the courage to get up in my face.”

At the end of her talk, Hooker connects these problematic assumptions to the real world consequences that Black Lives Matters protesters today face as (too many) whites call them criminals and consider them unjustified in their deployment of violence (and nonviolence). There is no room for Black anger and outrage. Thus Hooker asserts that, in this context, peaceful acquiescence will not in fact do the job of creating racial justice. Instead, riots (she uses the term purposefully to leverage its discomfort), or “fugitive black politics” might be a better form of democratic repair for African Americans. They may not always be a solution to structural problems and institutionalized injustices, but they do allow black citizens to express their pain and make their losses visible, and Hooker argues they can help us to theorize how engaging in a politics of active resistance might be crucial to achieving racial justice. Responsibility for racial justice does not lie with those who suffer from racism and so we must stop expecting sacrifice to be enough.