Recognition and Redemption: Visions of Safety and Justice in Black Lives Matter

Abstract

In this paper, I recover and appraise the principal ways in which movements motivated by the ideal of racial justice have sought to transform how questions of police and punishment are imagined and acted upon. The focus of the enquiry is the visions of safety and justice found in Black Lives Matter. I offer an interpretive reconstruction and appraisal of the core claims found with the Black Lives Matter movement and their ideological lineage and affinities. The paper seeks to understand those claims anthropologically, from the inside, trying to offer a best-case rendition of their contexts and appeal. It also seeks to situate these claims politically (while recognizing diversity and avoiding the imposition of some spurious unity) with a view to appraising the normative character of the alternative plausible world that Black Lives Matter projects and seeks to usher into being. My claim is that one finds in Black Lives Matter a tension between a politics of self-determination and a wider politics of transformative redemption.

Keywords: Black Lives Matter, Coercion, Harm, Police, Racial Justice, Safety