In the wake of Memphis, white progressives in New York City have lost the plot. Last week every white member of the city council’s Progressive Caucus bar one quit rather than sign on:
to reduce the size and scope of the NYPD and the Department of Correction, and prioritize and fund alternative safety infrastructure that truly invests in our communities.
With no mention of “defund” and listed at 6 out of 8, this cautious “principle” was enough to provoke a rush for the exits because it asked the council to “do everything we can.” Isn’t that what principle implies?
To borrow a title from Thomas Frank, what’s the matter with New York?
It was New York that gave the Republicans a House majority in 2022. Instead of contesting the white moral panic over “crime” created by the old-fashioned media alliance of Murdoch’s print tabloids and bottom-feeding local TV news copaganda, white progressives have simply caved.
What could they have learned this Black History Month from Memphis across the three moments of Black Reconstruction?
Black Reconstruction (1865-1877).
Memphis is a salutary site from which to study the long-history of anti-Blackness and its present formation as counterinsurgency. During the general strike against slavery (1861-65), around 16,000 fugitives from slavery took shelter in Memphis, creating what were called “camps,” or shanty towns. Many served in the Union armies as “contrabands,” people who had stolen themselves.
The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis describes how:
In May 1866, the competition for jobs and space coupled with the presence of Black troops from the 3rd U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery regiment triggered clashes that led to a violent racial confrontation known as the "Memphis Massacre." Forty-six Black and two white Memphians were killed, seventy-five were wounded, five black women were raped
As if that wasn’t enough, all the Black churches were burned down. This early paroxysm of what became Redemption was the violent reclamation of public space as white reality. As in the then-contemporary process of Haussmannization in Paris—or today’s gilded urban towers with homeless encampments at ground level—central space was allocated as “white.” Police contained and controlled that space.
Two weeks after the white insurrection, the Legislature passed the Metropolitan Police Bill, giving control of the police to the governor via appointed commissioners. Local Black activists were not confused: “Great efforts are being made to oppress…and reenslave us.” With the defeat of Reconstruction in 1877, W. E. B. Du Bois later agreed it was, as he put it, “back to slavery.” The Confederate statue policed public space adjacent to the courthouse and the jail.
In 1904, at the peak of Jim Crow, a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, slave trader and founder of the Klan, was installed a mile from Memphis’s courthouse and town hall. It took a legal sleight of hand to get it removed in 2017 by selling the land to a non-profit.
Reconstruction 2—the Civil Rights Movement
It was of course in Memphis that Martin Luther King was murdered in 1968 while on a solidarity visit with striking municipal sanitation workers, following the death of two men on the job. In a famous 1967 sermon delivered in Riverside Church, Manhattan, King had seen the connection between the counterinsurgency war in Vietnam and the failure to pursue the “war on poverty.”
As soon as the Second World War had ended, the US and its allies engaged in wars of counterinsurgency from Algeria to Vietnam. Drawing on his “moral vision,” King connected “poverty, racism, and militarism.” Many believe this association may have cost him his life. On March 28, 1968 King marched in Memphis and was met with a police riot in which sixteen-year-old Larry Payne was killed, sixty-four other people injured, and 300 arrested. When he returned in April, hoping to lead a non-violent march, he was assassinated.
Memphis poster held by the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.
The Memphis strike created the famous “I Am A Man” posters, refusing the status of “boy,” one of the most iconic Civil Rights era graphics. The counterinsurgency war in Vietnam entailed the continuation of racism and poverty. Not only did the sheer cost of the war make it seem impossible to support new anti-poverty government programs, its Manichaean counterpoint of good and evil refused any concept of common humanity as communism.
Photo by Richard L. Copley, Memphis, 1968. Walter P. Reuther Library.
In 1994, following the Rodney King trial, philosopher Sylvia Wynter noted that Los Angeles Police department used the acronym NHI when referring to encounters with Black people: No Human Involved. In 2009, the artist Dread Scott brought these histories together in a performance enacted in Harlem. Scott carried a poster reading “I Am Not A Man.” That is to say, people seen by white sight as not-white were not seen as fully human.
Dread Scott, “I Am Not A Man” (2009).
Reconstruction 3—Black Lives Matter (2014—)
In 2023, the city of Memphis has an annual budget of $750 million. No less than $284 million is spent on police. There are 2000 police officers and a fleet of 1700 vehicles is maintained for their use. By way of comparison, there are 18 public libraries in the city, whose budget was cut over $1 million in 2023 to $22 million. The current population is around 633,000 people, 65% of whom are Black and 25% white. No question who is being policed by whom.
Still more public money has been spent installing private Sky Cop advanced surveillance cameras. Sky Cop acts a digital neighborhood watch, say its ads. It does license plate and gunshot recognition, sending information by a proprietary wireless network. Ironically, it was this camera system that detected the police that murdered Tyre Nichols.
Sky Cop camera and license plate reader in Memphis
By this standard, the loudly-voiced belief of the NYPD that they are underfunded might almost seem “reasonable.” New York’s annual budget of $100 billion only affords $10.2 billion to the police, a mere 10%, rather than the 35% spent in Memphis. When the city council did try and restrain the growth of police in 2022, NYPD simply racked up more overtime to the tune of over $800 million.
Restraining cops and corrections officers now appears beyond public authorities in New York. Rikers Island has a seemingly endless history of violence and corruption by corrections officers. When investigators were sent into Rikers Island to look into misuse of sick leave to make long weekends and the like, the investigators had to be suspended for exactly the same offense. It’s hard not to see their action as a deliberate taunt. The former police Mayor Eric Adams wants to keep it open past its scheduled 2027 closing anyway.
In the reinforced segregation brought about by remote working and internal migration—including the departure of 200,000 Black people—New York again appears to white suburbanites as a racial inferno. It suits the cops that they think that way. The New York Post and Channel 7 news will supply a steady stream of stories to make sure they do.
As it has been since the battle of Algiers in 1954, the city is the key “battleground” for counterinsurgents. NYPD acts as if the city’s population are insurgents. Eschewing any “hearts and minds” strategy, force remains the means to achieve compliance. At present, police are notably absent from city streets—although everywhere in the subway and at protests—as if they have decided it is in their interests for crime to appear more visible.
Certainly Mayor Adams rushes to any crime scene to declare the situation out of control. He took a trip to the US-Mexico border to say that the city was at “breaking point” because of the arrival of migrants—total cost is even in his inflated estimate just above 1% of the total budget, also known as a rounding error.
In short, since the 1950s “thin blue line” era, police counterinsurgency has been waged as a proxy for continuing white supremacy. Its surveillance sees white people as the only humans, under threat from the combination of “aliens” and the non-human. When Black Lives Matter talked about a “war on Black people,” they were not wrong.
When the white New York City councilors thought they could attack poverty while hedging on racism and militarism, aka the police, they made a disastrous misjudgment. They can’t. Ron DeSantis was in Staten Island this week denouncing all Democrats as “weak” on crime and “woke.” Both are transparent euphemisms for racializing hierarchy.
Nonetheless, white progressives clearly need to, as we say in NYC, wake up and smell the coffee. Transformative social change is always intersectional—try using your moral vision rather than your white sight, councilors.