Steven Thrasher on Why We Must Think Past Skin-Deep Identity Politics

An overseer framework explains how power can accumulate among people from marginalized populations without uplifting their communities. Power may be gained by collectively harming people from the same communities rather than empowering them. Increased visibility of Black and brown people in high places has not improved conditions for marginalized groups in the United States. Toni Morrison’s idea emphasizes that freedom requires freeing others and power requires empowering others. Steven Thrasher’s experience includes social justice reporting leadership at Northwestern University, where efforts to stop police from violently evicting a Gaza solidarity encampment failed. Criminal charges were filed against him and other faculty, and further charges were pursued after earlier praise from a Black dean.

"“When you get these jobs that you have so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”"

"“An overseer framework can be helpful in understanding ongoing structures of power in the United States,” Thrasher explains in his new book The Overseer Class. It is, he writes, “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.”"

"“the increase in Black and brown faces in high places has not improved overall conditions for people of color and other marginalized groups in the United States. And these positions haven't led to the empowerment, let alone freedom, of others.”"

"In 2024, he was the inaugural chair of social justice reporting at Northwestern University, where students set up a Gaza solidarity encampment. That April, he and three other faculty linked arms in an attempt to stop police from violently evicting the encampment. Their efforts were unsuccessful and, under the direction of the Black chief of campus security, campus police brutalized him and his colleagues."

Read at The Nation