Description
"The author of the critically acclaimed The Viral Underclass is back with The Overseer Class, which explores what happens when members of historically minoritized groups are selected for high-visibility positions of power within existing institutions. The Overseer Class exposes the compromises made by a small but influential group of people from minoritized groups in the United States as they have entered segregated institutions in highly visible positions. People in the overseer class wield enormous institutional power over who lives and who dies. The problem is that their power is predicated upon repressing other people who look (or speak/have sex/come from places) like them. The most obvious contemporary overseer is the Black police officer. As James Baldwin noted in a 1967 essay, '"If you must call a cop,'" we said in those days, "for God's sake, make sure it's a white one" ... We feared Black cops even more than white cops, because the Black cop had to work so much harder -- on your head -- to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other n******.' This dynamic does not only exist within law enforcement; it also exists in many different spheres. With this work, Steven W. Thrasher explores what it looks like in mass media, universities, corporate America, the military, and government. The Overseer Class aims not only to educate us and start this discussion but to provide a framework for challenging this dynamic." --
