Queer Pride, Overseers and the Racial State
Steven Thrasher and Emmaia Gelman in conversation
The Word is Change is proud to host a pride month conversation Thursday June 25th between writers Emmaia Gelman (The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State) and Steven Thrasher (The Overseer Class) about pinkwashing, carceral politics, and organizing for Palestine in the racial state.
The Overseer Class, which explores what happens when members of historically minoritized groups are selected for high-visibility positions of power within existing institutions—but under the conditions of a kind of Faustian bargain.
Our society places so much weight and attention on those who become the first or only of their identifying group that we miss one of the inherent issues in that model. This book is about the kinds of 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, even necropolitical power over who lives and who dies; it’s just 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. But this dynamic does not only exist within law enforcement, it exists in many different spheres and The Overseer Class 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 that dynamic. It is a weighty topic but one that Dr. Thrasher is well-equipped to handle.
The first-ever history of the Anti-Defamation League and its determined, century-long alliance with Western empire.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a major US political organization, yet its politics have gone largely unexamined. While the ADL is often portrayed as a defender against antisemitism and racism, its history shows that it is better understood as a proponent of the racial state and US empire. From "correcting" the embarrassing racial difference of immigrant Jews to policing the leftist politics of Black, Arab, and Jewish groups, the ADL pursued a conservative version of civil rights paired with aggressive anti-communism. Even as it became an authority on white nationalism in the 1970s, the ADL joined with the emerging anti-left, anti-Arab, and pro-Western neoconservative movement.
This history presaged the ADL's work, from the 1980s to the present, in developing the hate crimes framework as a pro-state policing project, which soon merged with the "War on Terror," the "antisemitism scare," and anti-Palestinian racism. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State presents the ADL's history through its conflicts with social justice movements, illuminating the ADL's outsize role in shaping the ideas about race and rights that have underwritten US empire.
Praise from Robin D.G. Kelley
For The Overseer Class: “Steven W. Thrasher’s latest tour de force exposes an inconvenient truth: today’s rising fascism, state violence, campus repression, carceral expansion, and U.S.-backed war and genocide would not be possible without the rainbow coalition of the willing—better known as the Overseer Class. He tells it like it is and has receipts. A fresh and urgent take on what our enslaved ancestors always knew: the overseer is the master’s first line of defense.”
For The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State: “Emmaia Gelman's gripping book sent chills down my spine. In meticulous detail, she documents how the Anti-Defamation League, in the name of combating hate, terror, and antisemitism, has defended Israeli policies of dispossession and ethnic cleansing, attacked the Left, assailed Black, Brown, and queer movements, given cover to US imperial crimes, and become a mouthpiece for neoconservatism. But this is not the tragic story of an organization that lost its way. Rather, the ADL was born of the belief that the best protection from antisemitism was admission into the white racial state and waging a vigorous defense of capitalism, individual rights, and the West against communists and barbarians. And it has never looked back.”
Emmaia Gelman
is the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She has taught social and cultural analysis at NYU and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing appears in Jewish Currents, Boston Review, The Forward, and elsewhere.
Steven W. Thrasher, PhD
is the outgoing inugural Daniel Renberg Chair for Social Justice in Reporting at the Medill School of Journalism. He is the author of the award winning book The Viral Underclass and The Overseer Class, a Bookshop.org nationally top selling book. Dr. Thrasher was a finalist for the 2023 PEN America/John Kenneth Gailbraith Award for Best Nonfiction and a finalist for the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Best Nonfiction Literature. He has won many accolades for his work on HIV criminalization and infectious disease, including winning a Pulitzer Center Global Reporting Fellowship and serving as a national surrogate for the presidential campaign for Bernie Sanders. He holds a PhD in American Studies from NYU.