Taming the Revolution

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

Joshua Briond shows how these "colonial lullabies" have shaped US history. Recontextualizing 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 Obama's presidency--he argues that each period produced distinct types of reform, all mobilized to neutralize Black struggles and sustain white hegemony.

Taming the Revolution builds a schematic genealogy of the white power structures' shapeshifting capacity. By addressing the political-cultural technologies of neoliberal reformism in the contemporary moment--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.