Taming the Revolution: White Power and the Fear of Black Freedom

Since the founding of the United States, the white power structure has engaged in an unceasing effort to ideologically and politically disorganise and sedate its Black population through incremental concessions and symbolic gestures.

Joshua Briond shows how these "colonial lullabies" have shaped the course of American history. Recontextualising major historical events—from the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, through to the civil rights movement, the expansion of the carceral state and even the Obama presidency—he argues that each period produced distinct types of reform, all deployed to neutralize Black struggles and sustain white hegemony.

Taming the Revolution builds a schematic genealogy of the white power structures and their shapeshifting capacities. By addressing the political and cultural technologies of present-day neoliberal reformism—an ever-evolving toolkit of pacification, domestication and cooptation—Briond demystifies different forms of state and extra-state adaptation to the insurgencies of oppressed peoples.