[Part 2] The Overseer Class: A Conversation with Dr. Steven Thrasher

By Eesha Ramanujam

This is the second part of our conversation with Dr. Steven Thrasher — activist, professor, self-described "itinerant preacher," and best-selling author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, a profound work of scholarship and storytelling excavating the social and economic factors impacting health outcomes. You can find Part 1 of our discussion here. Continue reading after the conversation below for the introduction of a brand new section!

This conversation is a part of Dr. Steven Thrasher’s tour promoting his newest book The Overseer Class: A Manifesto, which will be available May 19th from Amistad. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What do you think is the distinction between the overseer class members that are chosen or elected versus those that are appointed or attain that somewhat independently?

I imagine that the ones who are chosen or elected have a conversation like the beginning of The Godfather where they are told, “You're gonna be put in this position, but someday you're gonna have to do something for us.” And they sign onto that bargain. 

I think the ones that we choose, sometimes either we're playing into a fantasy or we're being lied to. It is interesting to me that you can look at the big cities in America, and there are times where you can see that they hired a Black mayor or Latino mayor in coalition with a rising population that they came from. Mayor Tom Bradley in Los Angeles was elected for the first time [in 1973] at the height of the Black population of LA. He also had a large coalition with the Latinos of Los Angeles. There's a certain electoral political logic there, as the Black power coalesced into the biggest electorate. It's a very different story when Karen Bass was elected in Los Angeles just a couple years ago, and London Breed in San Francisco, also a Black mayor, elected with the lowest population of Black people. And for them, that's not their political base at all. Are they really being chosen by the people? So much of their ability to enter office is because they're getting a lot of money from real estate developers or Silicon Valley or Hollywood, whatever the industry in their particular city.

In addition to police, one of the biggest origins of this book was trying to understand why there was so much Black leadership in cities with a collapsing Black population. There are 14 cities I look at in the last chapter of my book, mostly because they were places I had reported on during BLM that had significant uprisings. Of those 14 cities, none of them had a Black mayor in 1970, and even though they overwhelmingly have had declining Black populations since then, all of them had a Black mayor in 2020. That makes me feel like something is happening with electoral politics that is not actually about the choice of the electorate. Because how can you have an entire Black political class in cities where Black people cannot afford to live anymore?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it also speaks to who they appeal to, and maybe an increase in white populations who want to feel like they're voting for something progressive. That’s all speculative, but there's something there for sure.

I don't think it’s speculative, because that's what my research found!

As it pertains to campus politics, I really appreciated that you talked about campus policing specifically, because it's an underacknowledged aspect of the intersection between the academy and law enforcement. You write in the book about your experiences dealing with gatekeepers in the context of Palestinian liberation movements on college campuses well before 2023, as well as their history of pacifying or neutralizing Black student protests and student organizing. I'm curious to know, how has your analysis of people in these roles and the nature of power at universities changed while writing this book? In these past few years, what have you learned more about, or what have you shifted your understanding of in a way that you would want communities on campus — students, staff, faculty — to learn or take away from your insight?

The biggest issue I see students wrestling with is, “I thought these people would help me.” When I began as a professor at Northwestern, the people I thought I was lucky to have help shepherd me to tenure probably did the most to stop me from getting it. I think a lot more students know that because of the [Palestine solidarity] encampment. They thought somebody would help them who instead was quite harsh to them. 

These structures aren't working. Universities aren't working on multiple fronts and I don't know how to get around that. I do have some sense of how we can educate one another in other spaces. A big part of that role has been filled by people protesting and creating libraries through Occupy Wall Street or the libraries at the sites where Michael Brown was killed, or George Floyd was killed. There are all these ways people are going to teach one another, but that doesn't also provide the economic stability of university professionalization. That's still a big part of the equation to work out.

I've also gotten some insight into the inner workings of direct relationships that are not just theoretical. So at Northwestern, like many universities, there are members of the board who are either previously on the board or even sometimes previously running the board of war makers. In some universities, there is a direct relationship between their R&D and weapons manufacturing. So it's not a theoretical argument about the relationship between the university and the war machine. It's a very transactional relationship. I have a much better insight into why some schools want to put up a pretense of believing in free speech or research, but then a board member will say, I don't want the student or this professor fucking up my day job or where I make my real money.

Very recently I learned there was a document dump from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, including text messages from Northwestern. We learned that the then-president of the university, Michael Schill, was trying to get students arrested [in 2024] and trying to rope in the Evanston Police Department, which he previously denied. He also was texting with a university trustee that called me an asshole. That trustee was also a board member of the Obama Foundation. It was kind of revelatory to know who was involved with directly targeting someone like me. I have some frustration when people narrate the repression as a Trump thing, because I'll always tell people, my trouble started under Biden. There's no difference in US foreign policy on Israel going back decades.

I have some tension about this because I understand that Trump is a good figure to organize against, and what he's doing, especially with the explicit violence of ICE is obviously worth organizing against. I want to think about if there is a way, while galvanizing political opposition against this deeply unpopular and very violent person, to also educate people about how this didn't start with him, and that this will go on after him. I think that's very possible, and I feel very heartened when I see that happening.

Absolutely. So one thing I wanted to ask about, related to The Viral Underclass as well — what prompted the choice in both the titles and in your analysis to use “class” as a term to discuss the category of people you were interested in?

So I owe a lot to my agent, Tanya McKinnon, who's always helped me think more theoretically. I had been trying to write a different book project based on my research on HIV/AIDS and Blackness. I also was on the tenure track, so I thought maybe I would have to write an academic press book. Turned out because I was in a journalism school, I could write a trade book, but then [ultimately I didn’t] get tenure anyway. But while I was working that out my first semester of my job, COVID happened. So I talked to my agent. She said, send me your dissertation again. And she pointed to the title of the last chapter, the conclusion, “The Viral Underclass,” and said to reconceive the book based on that.. She said there was probably going to be a glut of books about COVID that weren't very good, or were written very fast. But I’d been doing this theoretical work for a long time. And I wanted to think about the class dynamics I was writing about with HIV.

So there were two predating definitions of “the viral underclass.” One was from an activist named Sean Strub, who gave me his blessing and has been a mentor. And I'm so grateful he let me use this title. He thought of it in terms of legal law and the criminalization of HIV — how a child born with HIV is going to live their entire life under a different set of laws, explicitly separate and unequal. Then I heard activists talking about it in a different way when they were deciding whether to try to abolish HIV criminalization laws or to reform them and saying, well, people take their medicine regularly and have an undetectable viral load and can't transmit. They should not be prosecuted.

But who is detectable and who is not detectable? Again, it's Black people, it's people who are homeless, it’s people who are struggling with addiction who are more likely [to be targeted]. I realized that it was the same map for COVID and HIV. These are not similar viruses; we understand why respiratory viruses like COVID and the flu would move together, but HIV moves biologically quite differently. Yet they were the same maps that I was seeing initially, and it's because of all these social structures. That's why I started using class and trying to write a popular Marxist class critique through thinking about viruses.

For this book, I, again, started out wanting to write about Black cops, and Tanya was like, think theoretically, think beyond the cops. And so then I saw another class dimension and wondered if I could write a sort of sequel to The Viral Underclass. I was on a podcast called Feast of Fun hosted by two of my friends, and one of them said to me, “you went from the abuse to the abusers.” So I went from looking at people who are affected by these class policies to those who enact them.

I don't know if my intellectual project will come back into formal universities or not, but I feel very blessed to have gotten to do a PhD in American Studies where I learned and had a couple years to just read a lot. And I want to share what I learned, either as a teacher or maybe through what I write. A lot of that was understanding that the problem at the end of the day is capitalism. Capitalism not as commerce — commerce has existed for millennia — but capitalism as a series of extractive relationships that alienate us from one another. And I think that viruses can do that. The Viral Underclass, especially the afterword in the paperback, actually ends quite optimistically because viruses also have the power to connect us. But under capitalism, they're often alienating us. I feel the same thing with overseers. This is a form of alienation that is meant to break up solidarity within groups and between groups.

There's also a soul-level alienation that happens for the overseers. They're not happy people. They're alienated from their community. They often feel conflict within themselves, because their project is to keep others from feeling like whole people. They often don't feel like whole people. I think class is a helpful analysis for understanding that intra- and inter-alienation.

I think that connects psychology to power in a really effective way. The more individual framing of enabler or normalizer might have utility in different strategic contexts, but you point to how there are groups and categories in every type of social organization — in the context of viruses, in the context of people who are marginalized under capitalism for reflecting a particular relationship to virality or to viruses generally, as well as in the context of the members of this overseer class. Even if they don't see themselves as members of the same community, they reflect a shared dynamic worthy of analysis.

You talked a little about the transition from writing your first book to writing the next. You write in the introduction to The Overseer Class about a shift from the sensation of grief associated with writing or reading The Viral Underclass to more tangible frustration and anger with The Overseer Class. How did you experience that change? And what do you hope readers get out of that emotional experience?

I wrote The Viral Underclass In the summer of 2020 and the winter of 2021. I was living in New York City at the height of death. At one point, we had 800 deaths a day. One of the most important editors of my life died of COVID. I ended up being one of the people to close out his life and organize his memorial. So that was written in a time of acute grief and a lot of fear and unknown. I really appreciated having an assignment to write through what I was experiencing. Given the amount of structural collective amnesia about the pandemic that is being imposed upon us, I'm proud to have been able to write some of it down so that people will read about what this time was like. There were things that made me very angry while I wrote them, of course, but I would say that the defining feeling was one of grief because of where I and the people that I was interviewing were located.

With The Overseer Class, it was much more of an experience of trying to touch my anger. They're the same project in that a big part of any kind of racism or alienation or homophobia is to make us not feel like whole people, to make us think that there's something wrong with the range of feelings that we have. That we are supposed to compartmentalize ourselves. I have a Palestinian cousin who says that sometimes the best thing is when you move from being sad and full of grief to being angry. And so I'm allowing myself now to feel some anger.

But because of where I'm located, and most of us in the US are located, with many of the themes that I'm writing about in the second book, certainly in regards to Palestine, the feeling is more of anger. I'm not in Gaza with people dying all around me, even though I'm talking to them or seeing it on my phone. So I'm more angry about it. But I think that a lot of the power of workplaces or others that punish or silence us when we talk about Palestine or trans rights or any other injustice is predicated on us being silent about it and not talking about what happened. I think I said at the end of the introduction of the first book that you might need Kleenex, and in this one I said you might need a punching bag. It can be scary or difficult, but I think if I get into a fighting spirit, it might help. I wanted to say that this is exactly what happened to me in these settings — because it's true, because other people might have experienced it and not have known that others went through it, and because the more we talk about it, the less power that it has. You know, if a PhD advisor can't ruin a student's degree or a boss can’t end someone's career in silence, then they might not do it.

I try not to, as an author, predict or hope too much about what somebody's experience will be. But I do hope for readers that it helps them understand power, and I hope that it helps them feel permission to feel the wide range of their feelings and experiences. One of the people the book is dedicated to, his name is Mohanned Shubair. He reached out to me when I had my troubles in 2019 after my graduation speech [about Palestine] and just wrote and said, hey, I'm from Gaza, I wanted to thank you for speaking about us, and people are talking about your speech. We stayed in touch, and we're pen pals. I was very relieved to find out that he had married a Canadian-Palestinian woman and had moved to Canada a few months before October 7th. I was glad he was safe, but both his parents were killed by snipers, and other relatives of his were killed. His father [Dr. Muhammed Eid Shubair] was a professor and a former president of Islamic University. And so Mohanned is one of the people that the book is dedicated to. I hope that for someone like him, it feels like an American is taking responsibility for what's happened and trying to do our part in remembering and thinking of ways to stop this from happening again.

I was thinking about how your book so significantly draws from the sort of thinkers that have influenced you. You quote James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Kiese Laymon, and others right at the start of the book. Are there other thinkers and organizers that are shaping your work now that more people should look at? Who do you listen to or feel accountable to?

Victor Ray is one of the most cited people in the book, and I'm doing an event with him at Politics and Prose. He wrote a book called On Critical Race Theory. We have a lot of analogies in our lives and similar experiences, and I think we're working on a lot of similar theoretical fronts but in different domains. Samhita Mukhopadhyay, who wrote The Myth of Making It. I introduced Samita and Victor, and she interviewed him for her book. She's also doing an event with me. So those are two people that I'm in conversation with a lot and were huge influences on the book itself. Barbara Ehrenreich. I also talk about a group of writers. Brian Goldstone, who wrote a gorgeous book called There Is No Place for Us that's on a bunch of lists right now. Melissa Gira Grant, who writes about sex work. Zach Siegel, who writes about drug use. We're all writing about the same thing, and we have similar analysis. The topic I’ve probably written about the most is HIV, which of course intersects with sex work, homelessness, and drug use. But really, like we're thinking about the exploitation of relationships under capitalism and how can people get to safety if they are not allowed to have health free of stigma and housing? And so, yeah, those are three writers I read a lot. Kendall Thomas is one of the original scholars of Critical Race Theory. I met him in gospel choir in church many years ago, and he's been a real mentor to me. Robin D. G. Kelley, the historian at UCLA. Adam Johnson, a co-host of Citations Needed, who is one of a handful of journalists. I can count on to talk explicitly about everything happening in Palestine. A journalist I admire a great deal named Ahmed Shihab-Eldin was just found not guilty at a tribunal in Kuwait, and will hopefully be getting released imminently. I'm sure I will be sharing his work a lot once he's safe because he's been a real light to me and to many others. I'm very, very excited for everyone else on my tour as well. I'm going to be reading with Donovan Ramsey, who wrote When Crack Was King, an absolutely beautifully written book about a very sad topic. Those are some of the people I'm reading right now.

Great, thank you. We talked a little bit about the collective, and I would love to close on something that focuses more on your own social positioning, the way you discuss others in the book. How do you position yourself now as a scholar and a writer across academia, social movements, practice, publishing, etc.? How do you feel it changing in this moment, if at all?

Right now in this moment, I think of myself as an itinerant preacher. An atheist, secular friend used that analogy once. It appeals to me because I don't have a base in the US right now. Actually, kind of being based in Greece, I think of the Odyssey as a metaphor a lot. Shortly before I began this last year of my odyssey, I was going to the Chicago Temple in downtown Chicago. There was a minister who gave a sermon that really spoke to me called “Food, Water, and a Path to Travel.” What else do you need on God's journey? And so I've tried to keep that in my heart as I’ve moved around. I hope that the writing I do is important or meaningful to people, but I have also learned over the past couple years, especially now that I'm giving talks again regularly, that the importance of the work is in the conversations that you're having with people.

Over the last year, I've been writing about how USAID cuts have affected LGBTQ health and people with HIV. I became really aware of just how sharing those stories between people is so important. Some people would read the article, but many more people would just hear about it on social media or in a talk that I gave. Prior to this series, we had written a story about HIV and Gaza, and somebody who was running out of HIV medication in Gaza let us share their story. And it was really obvious to me how meaningful it was for people just to hear someone talk about the shame they felt and the stigma they felt living with HIV and going from thinking, “How can I be looking for my medication in the midst of a genocide?” to finally saying, “no, I am worth it, I'm going to ask for help to try to get it.” It was almost a movie plot, how many people and how many countries it took to get this person their medicine, but we got it to them.

So yeah, that’s what I think right now, that I’m kind of an itinerant preacher. Some things will develop into writing projects, some won't, many are taking longer than I normally like for things to take as a journalist. But just going from North America to England, to Greece, to South Africa, to Uganda, getting to share about what people are doing to resist and to take care of one another in precarious ways, has deep meaning to the other people that I'm meeting along the way.

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Dr. Steven Thrasher is a journalist and scholar who writes about structural inequality, social justice, and LGBTQ issues, including but not limited to HIV/AIDS, policing, and queer methods.

Eesha Ramanujam is a Project Advisor at the Revival Lab and a media and tech accountability researcher, currently completing a Masters in Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

This section will be an opportunity to share some of Revival Lab founder Brandi Collins-Dexter’s writings, published and unpublished, as well as reflections from those who worked with and learned from her. As we launch this segment today, we are grateful to Dr. Steven Thrasher for sharing some of his thoughts on her work, interspersed with some excerpts we have selected from her 2022 book Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future.

I appreciate you sharing about grief, anger, and memory [in our interview], because I think that is also such a big part of what we're trying to address with The Revival Lab. Losing Brandi just as she was getting started on it means that grief is very much a part of its story. There's so much about movement work right now that requires processing messy emotions, and I think that while people have every right to keep what they want to themselves, it is really helpful, important, and generous when people choose to share. So thank you for sharing that in the context of the book and outside of it.

I’d love to ask you a couple questions about your impressions from Black Skinhead. I read your Moonlight review from 2016, and you have this line in it: “So often, gay lives in America are coded as white, and the forces that shape the lives of queer people of color — say, how immigration affects being Chicano and gay in California, or how police surveillance affects being Black and gay in New York — are ignored, as gay identity is usually swept up into whiteness. Moonlight eschews this reductivism entirely, brilliantly portraying in a lyrical story how love and connection attempt to take hold.” I appreciate that your work very actively pushes back on dominant or even insurgent reactionary ideas that try to reduce Blackness, queerness, gayness, or any other marginalized identity or community into monolithic characterizations when the reality is messy or potentially uncomfortable. That goal feels really in line with Brandi’s in Black Skinhead. Methodologically, I appreciate how often you draw from media, which Brandi also always loved to do. I’d love to ask what resonated with you when you first encountered Black Skinhead, and if you could share a bit more about your choice to engage with fiction and nonfiction media as a way to understand power relations.

Thank you for that very generous and kind reading of my work. I was aware of Brandi from her movement work, which I had always admired, and then I was so excited to see that she was on my same imprint at Celadon. That was the first book for Celadon that I'd also been asked to ask to read and review, and I just loved it. It was so beautifully written. One thing I want to acknowledge about Brandi’s work in Black Skinhead, because this so often gets swept under the rug or thought of as not that important, is that she was an amazing craft writer. I was surprised to hear from her husband that this was her first book, and that she appreciated my endorsement because she felt nervous as a first-time writer. I never thought of Brandi as a first-time writer. She was such a beautiful lyrical wordsmith. And especially with Kanye on a rehabilitation tour now, the really serious work that she did thinking about his place in the culture and what his music means is more important than ever.

“Kanye West is both unpalatable to the mainstream and irresistible to the masses. That’s because he has a persona that is perfect for the age of internet celebrity. He blurs the barrier between what people think should be private versus public. He does it in a way that feels camp and at times grotesque. And through it all, Kanye gives an authentic, if imperfect, voice to trauma and a disaffected generation. But there can be a cost to breaking decorum.” (Black Skinhead p. 176)

My road into the kind of work I do was very much from pop culture, but for me it was really reading bell hooks and realizing, oh, this is a scholar. This is a professor. This is not written like Elizabethan poetry. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I really loved the way that bell hooks said popular culture is where people are, so that's where the discourse is, and anyone can access it.

I've wanted to take what I have learned and think about it critically, which is an idea I was raised with. My father was a high school history teacher. My mother, who was white, was kicked out of college for dating my father and never finished her degree. She always felt embarrassed about that, unfortunately, not that there was anything to be embarrassed about. But everyone in our family, regardless of their level of formal education, were really critical thinkers. They loved debating ideas, arguing, having long conversations about what was in the news. Even though I certainly took it in a different direction, once I went to film school, I realized I was just reading movies the way that my dad read politics and the way my mom read books. So I’ve loved using popular culture in my work, and I feel like Brandi was a great complementary thinking partner for me, because I don't do that much on topics like hip hop that she was so great on.

“For me, hip-hop culture still feels deeply embedded in that Black experience and feeling of shared struggle. Like sampling in hip-hop — taking pre-existing recordings and layering them together to create a completely new piece of music — Black culture has a wide range of influences and origins. But when woven together, it creates something that is uniquely ours.” (Black Skinhead, p. 118)

I also admired the way that Brandi was a leader in a different kind of career that I'm seeing more people have, where you move between movement work and journalism, cultural criticism, and book writing. We'll see how it works out for some of us sustainably over time. I've struggled a lot in journalism and academia with realizing that they don't want you to take a stand on things, they want you to be neutral. I appreciate people like Brandi, who built careers around their values. And if their values are racial justice and economic justice, then they figure out ways to do that in different registers.

I really appreciated how she modeled that and how in the book, she was really thinking about what it meant to be a Democrat. I appreciated her reflection on what it meant to have this alliance with this party that had been a big part of my life. My parents always voted Democrat, and I went out and campaigned for Gore, Kerry, and Obama’s first run before I was a journalist. One of the big political questions of our time is the relationship between Black voters — or even Black non-voters and all Black Americans — and the Democratic Party. It's the only party that has any potential possibility for us, so it can entirely exploit us. I've largely stopped voting on the national level for the Democrats, but I understand why people try to push them. I think that if Vice President Harris had said, I supported my president, but I'm gonna enact an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, or I'm going to deliver Medicare for all, either one of those things, she would have become president. But she didn't. She didn't become president. So there's a very serious reckoning that must be had with the Democratic Party and Black voters and Latino voters, especially when we look at not just the violence of Donald Trump and the ICE raids, but also the history of Obama and immigration.

“In the last several decades, the Republican Party has established itself as the party of grievances, a fear-of-a-Black-planet type of party. Make America Great Again, a tagline that had been successfully deployed both by Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan, had obvious shades of white replacement and was rhetorically tied to the 1920s-era Ku Klux Klan. I wasn’t about to place my allegiances there. But I didn’t want to be held politically hostage by the Democratic Party either. And I knew many other Black voters felt that way as well.” (Black Skinhead, pg. 28)

I think that Brandi gave us honest and useful analysis on how to have this reckoning within ourselves and with our communities, and she really laid out a model for how reflection on popular culture can help us understand that. I felt like she was just getting warmed up as a book writer.

I found the way that Brandi talked about public figures and took the parasocial relationship into consideration to be really useful. With celebrities and artists and sometimes politicians, their choices and their personas often reflect symptoms and an appeal that we can study in worthwhile ways rather than acting like we know them or their intentions.

Thanks for raising the way she helped us think about parasociality, that helped trigger something else for me. Good discourse analysis is about relationships. So capitalism is a series of relationships, and understanding pop culture is about understanding our relationship to the work and who's benefiting or who's benefiting from the affirmation and criticism of it. But parasociality is a really important thing to understand critically.

It's something that I've been thinking about a lot regarding the genocide in Gaza. I think there's a distinction between parasocial relationships of watching journalists or anybody who is not famous get killed, completely different from a relationship with a famous person. When you are tweeting at them and they're responding, that's also different. And there were journalists that I've been in touch with and DMed or emailed or interviewed on Zoom. One of them died, and I felt this real grief and thought about how I never met this person, but we were in touch. And that's an extreme version of so many kinds of experiences that people have now of having some kind of connection. It's not the same thing as in the origins of parasociality like with Walter Cronkite where your brain doesn’t even understand fully that you're not hearing that [in person], but you’re engaging in some way.

Even a figure like Kanye hits “like” or something, and then you wonder, is that a relationship? So Brandi’s work is a really important step in being able to parse that all out. And then, as I said before, coming back to your core values and your core questions and the work you're doing or the way that you're reading and thinking can help ground you. The writer Kiese Laymon, always talks about “this place,” and how, yeah, this place can make you lose your mind. And so reading bell hooks or reading Brandi can help you have some grounding in reality and in being able to think critically about the world so that you can keep coming back to your own values.

The Overseer Class – Steven W. Thrasher Book Events (times local)

If you liked the interview above and would like to hear Dr. Thrasher talk in person, there are several opportunities coming up this month.

• May 19 – w/ Samhita Mukhopadhyay, The Strand, New York – 7pm (RSVP)
• May 20 – w/ Donovan X. Ramsey, Charis Books & More, Decatur, Ga. – 7:30pm (RSVP)
• May 21 – w/ Adam H. Johnson, Pilsen Community Books, Chicago – 7pm (RSVP)
• May 27 – w/ Lisa Snowden, Red Emma’s Bookstore, Baltimore – 7pm (RSVP)
• May 28 – Politics & Prose, Washington, D.C. – 7pm (RSVP)