A conversation with the author of The Overseer Class about how people from 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.(Ryan Pfluger)
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
VL: 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.
ST: 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.
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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 now in college. He asked, But somebody has to be in these jobs, so why shouldn’t it be a Black person who’s a prison guard or police officer? I was trying to challenge him on the necessity of having these jobs. Can we create the conditions where policing and prisons don’t have to exist? Does somebody have to be in those positions?
That’s why I quote Toni Morrison.
But, structurally, you’re set up not to be able to do that in overseer positions.
VL: There’s a direct line from overseers and slave catchers to cops, but fewer people connect overseers to media, universities, corporate America, or nonprofits. Can you talk more about overseers in those places and why they are more difficult to recognize?
ST: Media and academia are the two domains [in which] I’ve worked over the past decade and a half.
I had initially thought that people who shared my identity characteristics, particularly Black men, Black gay men, who were administrators, would help me in my career. Soon I found out that they were there to keep people like me in line. When I would push these individuals, sometimes on lessons they had taught me in their classroom, [it became clear] that they’re not here to expand that kind of learning into the administrative domain. They’re here to repress it. And then I got to visit a lot of Gaza solidarity encampments [at different universities across the country]. I went to seven or eight myself. I was reporting on them happening all over the country. [And] I’ve met with students who participated in them on three continents. But it was very disheartening to see, at City College and other universities, the administrators calling the cops on their students to come beat their heads. Sometimes [the administrators] were Puerto Rican liberation scholars, who had participated in anti-apartheid South African protests as college students themselves, but often had a scholarly background very much in the thematic domain of what students were protesting. They were hired into those positions to give cover when the university suppressed dissent. And so that’s how I started thinking of them as overseers.
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I reread Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The president of the college in that book is like the people I have encountered. He tries to suppress the narrator and tries to end his career. I found the overseer a helpful analogy in seeing that when somebody is in a high-visibility position, they can give a face and then repress whoever strays too far from the interests of the corporation or the institution.
I looked at 22 different universities—these are all primarily white institutions—and 19 have a Black chief of security. Then I compare that to their percentages of Black faculty and students, which are very, very low. That’s how in conversation with my friend Victor Ray—who wrote On Critical Race Theory, which I cite extensively—I started realizing that diversity is happening in the disciplinarian domain.
VL: You coin the term “copablanda” to critically examine the propaganda promoting Black police, corrections officers, and other law enforcement. Talk about what copablanda is and how it is different, or similar, to regular copaganda?
ST: I coined copablanda to think about what it means that we are seeing Black cops so often [in movies and TV shows]. This is a response to the Black Lives Matter movement, to the increasing willingness of the American public to question policing institutionally. The American public is increasingly critical of policing and military solutions as the answer to the world’s problems.
One of the most dispatched responses when police are called racist is to trot out Black cops.
When I began reporting in Ferguson, the police force was around 93 percent white even though the city was [nearly] 70 percent Black. Now, it’s a majority Black police department with a Black chief of police and Black mayor. Even as these demographics changed, the level of police violence has not. We’ve had about 10 years of solid data on how many people are killed by police nationally. It has not gone down. It has not gone down in places with more diverse police forces. The figure of the Black cop is a counter to that reality. It’s to say, “Hey, things aren’t perfect, but we’re moving in the right direction.”
Copablanda plays a huge role in getting us not to see other possibilities.
As Thrasher and I talked about copablanda, Kwaneta Harris, a nurse, writer and mother incarcerated in Texas, called my phone. Harris and I had already been in touch for nearly a decade, and she was most recently featured in my book Corridors of Contagion. She said that reading The Overseer Class confirmed her own observations and experiences behind bars. And she had her own questions for Thrasher.
KH: I am surrounded by overseers who look like me, who grew up poor like me, who may even be queer, but who weaponize every one of their identities—their melanin, their gender origin, their working-class upbringing, even their sexuality—to perform a form of solidarity they have no intention of honoring. They wear our culture like a costume to disarm us, to make us lower our guard, and make us grateful for their presence. Then, the moment their bosses need a body to slam, they are the first ones on the scene, deploying our shared identity and betraying their proximity. My struggle—and I say this as someone trying to organize from inside these walls—is that my incarcerated peers are often more committed to protecting the feelings and image of these overseers than they are to protecting each other.
Because internalized hierarchy has taught us to mistake representation for liberation and confuse visibility with safety. Hence, we feel a misplaced racial/gender loyalty to the very person holding the damn key that will never turn in our favor.
Drawing from the theoretical framework of The Overseer Class, how do we develop—specifically for incarcerated people operating inside the most surveilled, isolated, and resource- starved environments imaginable—the Toni’s you describe?
ST: That is such a big problem that we see. We’re encouraged to have our alliance with someone in a position of power. How do we have it with each other?
For example, the Barack Obama Presidential Center [will] open in Chicago [in June]. It’s a billion-dollar center paid for by the Wall Street donors whom he helped bail out when he was in office, and there’s been enormous, enormous harm happening to the people who live around it. The rents are going up. People are getting evicted. They can’t afford apartments that used to be for rent and are now turned into Airbnbs for tourists. We’re encouraged to have a sense of solidarity with the first Black president. But how do we form that solidarity with the people who are being displaced, who are also Black? How do we do that?
KH: Guards will pull me aside, because I’m a maternal figure and I can calm my peers down. [Often] an older Black guard will say to me, “The regional directors are coming around. Keep the girls calm. Don’t make me look bad. I got a kid in college.” And I would do it. Then when something [an incident] happens, they’re the same ones who body slam and tear gas us. What happened to looking out for each other?
We don’t have gangs in women’s prisons. We’re not afraid of one another. We’re afraid of the guards. We stick up for one another. I’ve seen a white woman with a giant swastika tattoo fake an emergency to keep a young Black girl from going into a utility closet with a guard. She was new, and the guard was trying to get her into a utility closet [which has no cameras]. The white woman faked an emergency to stop him.
ST: My job as an educator and a journalist is to point out where our solidarity can lie. I think about the solidarity that Palestinian journalists have, which is so different from how we’re socialized as journalists to be individualistic in the United States.
We have to be in solidarity, not with the desire to have the best paid, safest tenured position, but to make sure our students are safe, our neighbors are safe, that they all feel welcome in spaces of learning, that the learning is not only happening in a racially and economically segregated space, but that it’s shared publicly. So that’s how I think about your question: How do you organize a sense of safety with people who are at the mercy of the violence of the guards? If one of your peers can fake an emergency to stop harm to somebody else, then there are things all of us can do.
The call cut off as we were speaking, because Texas prison calls last 20 minutes. I had one last question. I asked Thrasher, “What do you want readers to take away from The Overseer Class?”
He responded:
Kwaneta talked about what can be done even amongst those who have the least access to safety. She asked, and then answered, that there are things that women in prison can do to protect one another. I observed that from afar in Palestine and firsthand in Uganda, South Africa, and other places where I’ve reported: that people with far fewer resources than I have are able to protect ideas, ideals, and each other collectively in a very different way than we are socialized in the United States to protect ourselves and our own careers first.
If they can protect other journalists, why can’t the US Press Corps? Why can’t US academics?
Victoria LawVictoria Law is a freelance journalist who focuses on the intersections of incarceration, gender, and resistance. Her books include Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms (coauthored with Maya Schenwar), and the forthcoming “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration.