How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement Quotes

“If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.”
― Fredrik deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

“A common saw about current American politics is that the right has political power and craves
cultural power, while the left has cultural power and craves political power.”
― Fredrik deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

“The concept of the end of policing and prisons was not new in 2020. There have been leftists advocating for police and prison abolition for as long as I’ve been politically conscious. Activists demanding the abolition of police had a large corpus of theoretical writing to draw from. But there was usually a key difference between the older school of police and prison abolition and the demands of the most impassioned days of 2020: the former almost always imagined that a world without formal policing would emerge only after other society-altering changes had taken place. Typically, this was defined as the fall of capitalism and the establishment of some sort of socialist system, a system without poverty and deprivation. In other words, the radicals I knew might imagine the end of the police, but they imagined that end would come after the revolution. To debate the concept in 2020 was to skip a lot of steps. This was a general issue in the first year after Floyd’s murder, a sense that people wanted to dodge the hard work that would have been necessary before society-altering changes could take place. In part because of the extremely low odds of success for a police abolition movement, many who supported defunding the police insisted that the intent had never been to abolish the police at all. In this telling, “defund the police” means reducing the budgets of police departments, drawing down their resources, and redirecting some of those funds to other uses,”
― Fredrik deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement