Capitalism’s “Overseer Class” Upholds White Supremacy Under Guise of Diversity |
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Journalist Steven Thrasher’s second book, The Overseer Class, begins with a quote by James Baldwin from a 1967 essay in The New York Times, where Baldwin writes, “we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder — on your head.”
To see the continuing relevance of that quote, look to the horrific murder of Tyre Nichols in 2023 — a Black man beaten to death by five Black cops in Memphis, Tennessee. It’s this system of terror that Thrasher exposes in this new book, not just the fact that “capitalism needs Black people as executioners, not as helpers” but the system that produces an overseer class of people coming from marginalized backgrounds who do the dirty work of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy by laundering the violence with the optics of diversity.
Think of Alejandro Mayorkas, championed as the first Latino director of the Department of Homeland Security, policing the border to keep other Latinos out. Or comedian Bill Cosby, using his fame to chastise Black people for not upholding white middle-class values, while drugging and raping dozens of women. Or even Anderson Cooper, a ruling-class gay white CNN anchor, who has proudly worn various shirts that promote the Israeli and U.S. militaries as well as the New Orleans Police Department SWAT team to broadcast the “appropriate” behavior for properly assimilated gay patriots.
Thrasher’s focus in the book is not just on these individuals, but an entire class — from university administrators to celebrities to cabinet members — who climb the social ladder by stepping on the necks of the people demographically like them. The Overseer Class is wide-ranging in its analysis, from politics to media criticism to Thrasher’s own experience with overseers in academia that expands his critiques.
Steven Thrasher is a widely published journalist and scholar whose first book, The Viral Underclass, published in 2022, explores the ways in which stigma fuels pandemics from HIV to COVID-19 and beyond, and how social inequity so often determines who survives and who perishes. In The Overseer Class, Thrasher expands his analysis of the structures of power in bold new ways.
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The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: In 2003, you applied to become a member of the New York City Police Department. While this was driven by economic precarity, you also hoped that as a Black gay cop you could change the system. I love that you reveal this because it shows how much people can change in a relatively short time. I wonder if you could speak to what helped you to go from thinking you could be one of the “good cops” to the abolitionist perspective of the book.
Steven Thrasher: This is the heart of the book and it took me more than 20 years to get it down in words. I am aware that people with the most passing familiarity with my writing will be surprised that I, of all people, applied to be a cop. But I didn’t really want to be a cop. I just didn’t see any other pathway to employment, food, and housing. And as I did research for this book, I found that this is not uncommon: There are a lot of Black cops, and a lot of them never wanted to be cops. It was just a job that was open.
“The right creates jobs for people it is ideologically aligned with. It creates jobs for conservatives, for racists, for........