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Democrats have<\/span> a lot to be embarrassed about when it comes to their actions during 2020. Like when Democratic members of Congress, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and then-Sen. Kamala Harris, clad in kente cloth stoles, took a knee on Capitol Hill after introducing the 2020 Justice in Policing Act.<\/p>\n That bill, which contained pretty fangless policing reforms, stalled in the Senate along party lines and never became law. The legislative story was predictable. Law-and-order Democrats genuflecting in kente stoles was laughable and lambasted<\/a> at the time. Or, remember<\/a> when Pelosi thanked George Floyd for \u201csacrificing\u201d his life \u201cfor justice\u201d? Shameful.\u00a0<\/p>\n You could fairly call such gestures \u201ccrazy\u201d if we are relitigating Democrats\u2019 political priorities around that time. These were the scrambling acts of Democratic leaders failing to robustly respond to the largest protests in U.S. history \u2014 powerful uprisings against a system of policing and prisons that treats Black people\u2019s lives as disposable.\u00a0<\/p>\n But when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., quipped<\/a> on Sunday, in an apparent nod to New York City Council Member Chi Oss\u00e9, that \u201cwoke 1 was crazy,\u201d she wasn\u2019t mocking the empty gestures of her colleagues. She wasn\u2019t criticizing the recuperative tendencies of a liberal establishment that treats racism and sexism as a problem of individual performances and representation.\u00a0<\/p>\n There was nothing \u201ccrazy\u201d about more than 20 million people taking to the streets in righteous, militant protests against a racist, necropolitical order.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n She was responding to a question about whether Democrats, herself included<\/a>, who have in the past called to defund the police, still stood by those positions, or whether they went \u201ctoo far.\u201d She giggled, dismissed the idea of defunding police as a part of\u00a0 \u201ccrazy\u201d \u201cwoke 1,\u201d but noted, at least, that \u201cduring Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton Window\u201d on policy considerations, and that \u201cthe discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.\u201d She also said they changed how we talk about crime.<\/p>\n Ocasio-Cortez did not even mention the George Floyd uprisings.\u00a0<\/p>\n There can be little doubt that certain \u201cwoke\u201d tendencies hurt the project of building a powerful multiracial, working-class left. Movement collectives and organizations became mired<\/a> in in-fighting. Too often, anti-racist performances by institutions<\/a> took precedence over building strategies to fight the structures of racial capitalism.\u00a0<\/p>\n Centuries of accumulated material advantages and disadvantages, forged along colonialism\u2019s racial lines, were not undone by social-media shamings, diversity trainings, or pro forma land acknowledgements.\u00a0<\/p>\n But there was nothing \u201ccrazy\u201d about more than 20 million people taking to the streets in righteous, militant protests against a racist, necropolitical order. And it was not crazy that politicians on the left saw good sense in the reasonable demand that the armed forces maintaining this racist order be abolished, or at least that tax dollars go instead to housing, healthcare, and education.\u00a0<\/p>\n If Ocasio-Cortez is running for president, or even just the Senate, treating the serious and significant intervention and event that was the 2020 uprisings as \u201ccrazy,\u201d like it was an overreaching social-media furor, would be an appalling campaign orientation and an unacceptable erasure of historic Black struggle.\u00a0<\/p>\n The number<\/a> of people killed by police in the U.S. every year has risen<\/a> most years since 2020, and a disproportionate number of those killed are still Black. The facts about U.S. policing and prisons have not changed since the heady years of so-called \u201cwoke 1.\u201d It remains the case that police do not stop or prevent<\/a> crime. The mythic alignment of policing with public safety is nonetheless still treated as unquestionable common sense, despite ample evidence to the contrary.\u00a0<\/p>\n White supremacist backlash was aided by liberal cowardice, which softened and then erased the abolitionist calls at the heart of the rebellions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The George Floyd uprisings represented a brief rupture in that flawed common sense. One 2020 poll<\/a>, for example, found a majority of Americans, 54 percent, believed that burning down a Minneapolis police precinct building following George Floyd\u2019s murder was justified.\u00a0<\/p>\n The massive uprisings, in the words<\/a> of writer Tobi Haslett, \u201ccame hurtling into view and exploded against the surface of daily life in the U.S.\u201d They were, however, met with extraordinary repression from police forces nationwide, in both blue and red states and cities.\u00a0<\/p>\n Republicans under President Donald Trump\u2019s first term prosecuted a successful campaign of law-and-order fearmongering. This white supremacist backlash<\/a> was aided by liberal cowardice, which softened and then erased the abolitionist calls at the heart of the rebellions. The fractured left also bears its own responsibilities for failing on multiple fronts to take up and continue the uprisings\u2019 militant challenge to racial capitalism.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Under Trump\u2019s second term, certain Democrats might be willing to call for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) but are silent when it comes to challenging the system of racist policing<\/a> of which ICE is an extension<\/a>. This is not because \u201cwoke 1 was crazy\u201d; it is because the far-right backlash was successful, and centrist Democrats were all too happy to shrink away or fall fecklessly in line with law-and-order talking points.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe least we can do is remember?,\u201d wrote Haslett, reflecting on the rebellions one year later. \u201c[T]o try, after the riots, after the speeches, after the backlash and elections, and after this latest (livestreamed) liturgy of American \u2018criminal justice,\u2019 to recall what really happened, extracting and reconstructing the whole flabbergasting sequence.\u201d AOC is failing at this basic requirement of faithful remembrance.<\/p>\n This may seem minor, but it performs something akin to what W.E.B. Du Bois called the post-Reconstruction \u201cpropaganda of history\u201d \u2014 the erasure of the historical record of Black struggle and power to establish white supremacist rule as some transhistorical, unchallenged norm.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
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