"The Overseer Class": Steven Thrasher on Black Cops, Pro-Palestine Protests, DEI & More

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AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We end today’s show with journalist, author, scholar Steven Thrasher, formerly the inaugural chair of social justice in reporting at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago. But in 2024, after students set up a Palestine solidarity encampment to protest the Gaza genocide, Thrasher linked arms with other faculty to stop police from violently evicting the students. He ended up brutalized himself. The university then filed criminal charges against Thrasher, which were later dismissed, but the next two years of Thrasher’s classes were canceled, and he was denied tenure. He told Democracy Now! at the time, “What they don’t like is that I am now applying the same social justice journalism principles that I’ve applied to race and that I’ve applied to LGBTQ people, to COVID and HIV , that I was now applying those to Palestine,” he said.

Steven Thrasher is the author of the award-winning book The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide . He’s now out with a new book titled The Overseer Class: A Manifesto , in which he explores, quote, “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.” Steven Thrasher is here in New York to present a film series he programmed, inspired by his book, called “Black Cops, Spies and Overseers.” The series will play at the BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn, starting June 5th.

Steven Thrasher, welcome to Democracy Now! How does your own experience link to your new book?

STEVEN THRASHER : I have been reporting on police violence for many years. The first time I was on Democracy Now! , I was talking about the NYPD . And I saw, when I was reporting in Ferguson, a dynamic that I have seen many times, of a Black — of a white police officer either beating or killing a Black person.

And I noticed that as America grew more structurally critical of policing, that I was seeing a figure of Black cops over and over again, that Black cops were appearing in movies, that I was seeing them as talking heads on CNN and MSNBC , and, of course, running for many political offices, Joe Biden choosing two Black women prosecutors as his — on his final list before choosing Kamala Harris. And so, I started thinking about the ways that Black cops are kind of rehabilitating police departments, as are women cops and LGBTQ cops. As Americans were more critical of what policing did and how violent it inherently is, the more often these people were dispatched. And those are the people who I call overseers, the ones who rule between the ruling class and the working class.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Steve, isn’t this essentially a historical problem that has existed not just in the U.S., but in other — in other countries? I think of apartheid South Africa, when many of the troops of the South African minority-white regime were themselves Black and were put to repress their own people, or even in many parts of Nazi-occupied Germany, where the actual people delivering the repression in these various countries were from those countries, even though the Nazis were the occupiers.

STEVEN THRASHER : Well, that’s really an important point, Juan. And I got to travel through Africa, through South Africa and Uganda in the fall. And it was interesting hearing people say, “Why do you in America even think that there would be an alliance between Black cops and Black people? Because everybody here is Black,” and so they don’t — you know, they don’t think of a racial container of solidarity that we often think about here. In South Africa, when I was visiting Prison Four, which is where Mandela was briefly kept before going to Robben Island — Gandhi was also kept there — the tour guide did explain to me that the white guards would walk along the top of the — you know, the perimeter, but it would be Black guards who would be sent onto the yard to do the more intimate policing.

And you’re right to bring up the case of kapos in the concentration camps, who were people who collaborated with the Nazis.

And I’m thinking historically, too, on this. I’m thinking back to when overseers were literally the people who worked on plantations and made sure that enslaved workers worked as hard as they possibly could on behalf of the master. That person was usually white, but they were sometimes Black, and the white overseers often had Black drivers who worked with them. And those were the people that the master exploited the close kinship, the relationship, to try to get a more intimate level of surveillance and to try to get more work and more value out of what they were doing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you posted — during the Gaza campus protest at Columbia University, you said, “going to see Columbia University’s fir…