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

The author of The Overseer Class discusses how people in marginalized groups can “mistake representation for liberation and confuse visibility with safety,” as Kwaneta Harris put it.

“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.

Steven Thrasher wants readers of his new book to become a Toni. The novelist Toni Morrison said in a 2003 interview, “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.”

But as we have witnessed in recent history, 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.

“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.”

Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass, knows this firsthand. 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.

The university filed criminal charges against Thrasher and two other faculty members (which were later dismissed). Spearheaded by the journalism school’s Black dean, who had earlier praised Thrasher’s contributions, the university pursued further charges against him before denying him tenure and canceling the next two years of his classes.

Thrasher’s experiences are no anomaly. University presidents, such as Claudine Gay (Harvard) and Minouche Shafik (Columbia), were both hailed as the first Black and Middle Eastern women to hold positions at their respective colleges. When interrogated by Congress about pro-Palestinian activities on campus, both threw student protesters under the bus, which still did not save their careers.

Thrasher exposes how, even as people of color seem to rise into positions of power in government and military offices, police departments and corporate headquarters, they do so frequently by betraying, exploiting, and sometimes outright brutalizing those from the same demographics.

The Nation spoke with Thrasher about why we need to think past skin-deep identity politics of diversity initiatives and imagine more liberatory roles. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Victoria Law: You write, “May the anger you feel reading this book match the anger I had writing it.” Audre Lorde famously reframed anger as a weapon against oppression. Talk about the anger that propelled you to write this book—and anger as a tool to fuel action.

Steven Thrasher: We are encouraged not to feel anger about injustice. Black people—Black men, Black women, Black queer people—are especially made suspect when we express anger.

I got very good advice from one of my Palestinian cousins, whose father had been exiled from Palestine. My cousin would notice that, when I find out scary news, I would initially feel sad and scared, then eventually I’d feel angry. My cousin said, “You need to get to that place faster because understanding that you have a right to be angry puts you in a fighting spirit, and then you don’t feel so frightened.”

I think that if we’re going to find justice, we have to acknowledge anger as a personal emotion, but also from the Lorde quote as full of information and energy that can fuel what it is that we need to do.

VL: There’s a collective belief that carceral institutions have to exist and it’s better that one of us be in a position of power. Can you unpack how this feeds into the overseer class?

ST: I met a young Black man who had been incarcerated and is........

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