Ramón Mercader

April 1^st, 2025 GATT special online-only issue

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has announced the release of a follow-up to her 2016 book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Also published by Haymarket Books, Taylor’s new tome, candidly titled From #BlackLivesMatter to Bougie Living for Me, tells us where the BLM movement wound up a decade later. Taylor celebrates the small handful of Black women activists, herself among them, who have made millions of dollars for themselves through publishing books, getting lucrative speaking gigs, grants, and corporate sponsorship, and presiding over nonprofit empires. From #BlackLivesMatter to Bougie Living for Me is a collective autobiography told from the perspective of those with fancy professor jobs at Princeton and then Northwestern University (Taylor), residing in mansions (Patrisse Cullors), and living lavish off of a Cadillac commercial (Tamika Mallory). It makes clear that the great success stories of the BLM movement are a small handful of individuals who got rich on the backs of those killed by the police, their family members who are still fighting for justice, and the masses who rose up in rebellion against police brutality and the oppression of Black people. A glaring ommission in Taylor’s book is what the movement accomplished for Black lives more generally.

From #BlackLivesMatter to Bougie Living for Me includes a foreword by Angela Davis that highlights how Taylor and the few others made wealthy by the BLM movement follow in the tradition of opportunism by movement elders like Davis rather than the tradition of principled lifelong struggle exemplified by movement elders like Pam Africa or Efia Nwangaza. Like Angela Davis, Taylor is no stranger to opportunizing on the legacy of the 1960s Black liberation movement. For example, in her 2016 book, she tried to make the Black Panther Party’s politics sound like they were in unity with the Trotskyite politics she embraced as a leading member of the International Socialist Organization. What From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation offered in opportunist historical and political distortion, 2025’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Bougie Living for Me gives in guidance for opportunist practice in the present day. Taylor recounts how, when the International Socialist Organization (ISO) faced a scandal for covering up a rape within its ranks, herself and other ISO leaders dodged blame for the cover-up by quitting and dissolving their own organization. This abdication of accountability freed them to pursue financially rewarding careers in academia, with Taylor going on to score paid speaking gigs, Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, and a regular spot in The New Yorker, the most snooty of all liberal petty-bourgeois magazines. Taylor describes the way she fused the milquetoast Trotskyism of the ISO with postmodernist academic theory and woke politics into a package palatable for the liberal petty-bourgeoisie and profitable for herself. By putting her own success story in dialogue with those of Cullors and Mallory, Taylor provides crucial insight into the grifter mindset of the last decade. To top it off, From #BlackLivesMatter to Bougie Living for Me ends with an afterword by Ibram X Kendi titled “How To Be an Antiracist Grifter,” summing up the blueprint behind his own successful career and comparing it with those of Taylor, Cullors, and Mallory.