AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We end today’s show with journalist, author, scholar Steven Thrasher, formerly the inaugural chair of social justice in reporting at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago. But in 2024, after students set up a Palestine solidarity encampment to protest the Gaza genocide, Thrasher linked arms with other faculty to stop police from violently evicting the students. He ended up brutalized himself. The university then filed criminal charges against Thrasher, which were later dismissed, but the next two years of Thrasher’s classes were canceled, and he was denied tenure. He told Democracy Now! at the time, “What they don’t like is that I am now applying the same social justice journalism principles that I’ve applied to race and that I’ve applied to LGBTQ people, to COVID and HIV, that I was now applying those to Palestine,” he said.

Steven Thrasher is the author of the award-winning book The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. He’s now out with a new book titled The Overseer Class: A Manifesto, in which he explores, quote, “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.” Steven Thrasher is here in New York to present a film series he programmed, inspired by his book, called “Black Cops, Spies and Overseers.” The series will play at the BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn, starting June 5th.

Steven Thrasher, welcome to Democracy Now! How does your own experience link to your new book?

STEVEN THRASHER: I have been reporting on police violence for many years. The first time I was on Democracy Now!, I was talking about the NYPD. And I saw, when I was reporting in Ferguson, a dynamic that I have seen many times, of a Black — of a white police officer either beating or killing a Black person.

And I noticed that as America grew more structurally critical of policing, that I was seeing a figure of Black cops over and over again, that Black cops were appearing in movies, that I was seeing them as talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, and, of course, running for many political offices, Joe Biden choosing two Black women prosecutors as his — on his final list before choosing Kamala Harris. And so, I started thinking about the ways that Black cops are kind of rehabilitating police departments, as are women cops and LGBTQ cops. As Americans were more critical of what policing did and how violent it inherently is, the more often these people were dispatched. And those are the people who I call overseers, the ones who rule between the ruling class and the working class.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Steve, isn’t this essentially a historical problem that has existed not just in the U.S., but in other — in other countries? I think of apartheid South Africa, when many of the troops of the South African minority-white regime were themselves Black and were put to repress their own people, or even in many parts of Nazi-occupied Germany, where the actual people delivering the repression in these various countries were from those countries, even though the Nazis were the occupiers.

STEVEN THRASHER: Well, that’s really an important point, Juan. And I got to travel through Africa, through South Africa and Uganda in the fall. And it was interesting hearing people say, “Why do you in America even think that there would be an alliance between Black cops and Black people? Because everybody here is Black,” and so they don’t — you know, they don’t think of a racial container of solidarity that we often think about here. In South Africa, when I was visiting Prison Four, which is where Mandela was briefly kept before going to Robben Island — Gandhi was also kept there — the tour guide did explain to me that the white guards would walk along the top of the — you know, the perimeter, but it would be Black guards who would be sent onto the yard to do the more intimate policing.

And you’re right to bring up the case of kapos in the concentration camps, who were people who collaborated with the Nazis.

And I’m thinking historically, too, on this. I’m thinking back to when overseers were literally the people who worked on plantations and made sure that enslaved workers worked as hard as they possibly could on behalf of the master. That person was usually white, but they were sometimes Black, and the white overseers often had Black drivers who worked with them. And those were the people that the master exploited the close kinship, the relationship, to try to get a more intimate level of surveillance and to try to get more work and more value out of what they were doing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you posted — during the Gaza campus protest at Columbia University, you said, “going to see Columbia University’s first Arab president work with New York City’s black cop mayor [Eric Adams] [and] with the nypd’s first Latino Chief [Edward Caban] to arrest as many diverse students as possible.” You talk about this first narrative and this individualistic view of how achievement occurs in America. Could you elaborate on that?

STEVEN THRASHER: Yeah. So, what I found in college campuses was that we diversified the disciplinarian apparatus and nothing else. So, I looked — I saw that at Columbia. When I was beaten up at Northwestern, it was the Black chief of police who manhandled me personally. And then I started thinking about how I’d seen Black cops, chief cops, at the University of Chicago, at Northwestern, at NYU, at Columbia. I looked at 22 schools I’d reported on. Nineteen had a Black chief of police. And just looking at those 19 schools, to create sort of a control for the variable, they had 100% Black cops at those 19 schools. They only had about 5% Black students, 6% Black faculty. So, what I saw was that often chiefs of police, deans, middle managers, people with positions of some power, they’re often diversified in this way, and those are the people dispatched as overseers. But they’re not there to help people like them; they’re really there to crack their skulls.

And I certainly saw that that’s an exploitation of identity. You know, it’s Gay Pride Month right now. I could have an affinity with someone like Karine Jean-Pierre, who hailed herself as the first LGBTQ press secretary. But she was also the face of the genocide of Gaza. And she’s been going out on kind of a press rehabilitation tour right now, you know, trying to get back in people’s good graces. Instead of — the overseer dynamic makes it so that we are supposed to feel an affinity with someone like her, because she’s the first to do this. But we could have a sense of affinity with LGBTQ people in Gaza, with LGBTQ people in Iran, with LGBTQ people in any of the countries that have been bombed by the United States. And people in those positions try to allay and obscure the horizontal connection we have to people we could feel solidarity with, and instead want us to feel it for this first person, who’s often suppressing the group that we’re from.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have a minute. Then we’re going to do a post-show, Steven Thrasher. But you, in fact, applied to be a New York police officer back in 2003. Can you talk about what led you to consider that, and your motivations to write this book?

STEVEN THRASHER: And I’m prepared to get canceled for that. But I also want to show people that you can change over time. The reason I applied was because I needed a job. You know, I’d gone to film school. I had a lot of student debt. I wasn’t getting media work. I’d also — I had previously applied to be a teaching fellow. I didn’t get that, and so I applied for this job. And I think when we are critical of the fact that a majority of ICE agents are Latino, we also have to wrestle with the fact that ICE is the major hiring program of the federal government right now. And so, we need to give people options for things they can do for a living, and not just rely on individual moral decisions for how to deal with these systemic problems.

AMY GOODMAN: And in the last 10 seconds, DEI, the Trump administration’s attack on it, and your thoughts on it?

STEVEN THRASHER: I make a critique of DEI that’s different from the Trump administration’s. I think DEI doesn’t go far enough. What the Trump administration is doing is racist.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk more about this in our post-show conversation, which folks can get at democracynow.org. Steven Thrasher, author of the new book, The Overseer Class: A Manifesto. He’s in New York to present a film series inspired by his book, called “Black Cops, Spies and Overseers.” It’s at the BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn starting June 5th. We’ll talk about that in the post-show, as well.

That does it for our show. I’ll be speaking after the showing of Steal This Story, Please! at IFC on Thursday, June 4th, along with the film’s director at 6:30. On Friday, I’ll be in Tampa. We’ll be celebrating WMNF and the screening at Sun-Ray Cinema, and on Saturday and Sunday at the O Cinema in Miami. You can get details at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, for another edition of Democracy Now!