The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

To motivate migration during the Great Migration, Black leaders and advocacy groups championed the socioeconomic opportunities in northern and western metropolitan and industrial cities as an escape from southern white supremacist terror. These destination cities included “Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Saint Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Phoenix, Seattle, and Portland” (15).

Gentrification, or the renewal of old and poorly invested urban areas at the direction of local governments and developers, is example of institutional racism. While not explicitly racist, urban redevelopment inherently targets and displaces Black and poor residents, replacing them with young, wealthy white buyers. Supporters claim they are reinvesting in these areas, yet the missing funds and taxable incomes that caused the neighborhoods to fall into disrepair are likely a result of white flight, a reactionary migration of white people to the suburbs in response to the Great Migration (96, 100).

The Great Migration describes the period of Black mass migration between 1916 and 1970. During this period, 6 million Black southerners moved in several waves to destination cities dotting the North and West (23). The Great Migration was principally driven by white supremacist terror in the South and the promise of socioeconomic opportunities in the North and West (14).

Institutional racism is the formalized use of political, social, and economic control over groups based upon their race; in the United States it is traditionally understood to originate from the white supremacist structure of society. In practice, this system uses social norms, laws, policies, practices, and other bureaucratic tools to discriminate against, disadvantage, disenfranchise, and kill people of color. Advocates of the system frequently employ disingenuous arguments in support of its outcomes. Blow highlights New York City’s stop-and-frisk program as an example of institutional racism; what should have been ordinary policing instead became a highly skewed program that targeted minority groups over white people (100-01). Blow presents Black regionalism as a potential cure, arguing that a Black bloc would use its power to disassemble the system in their locality and advocate for its destruction across the rest of the country (201).

Jim Crow laws were a white supremacist legal and political system in the American South, lasting from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the late 20th century. Named after a racial caricature, the system actively segregated society through the legal principal “separate but equal,” a now-unconstitutional legal determination from the 1896 US Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. Although explicitly racist in comparison, the system worked similarly to institutional racism.

The Red Summer was a national wave of severe racial strife and violence that lasted 10 months in 1919. During that time, at least 25 major cities—including destination cities—were consumed by violence instigated by white resentment and anger over Black migration (18). An estimated 250 people were killed in the violence, which included 100 lynchings (19).

Restrictive covenants are land and property deeds with expressed contractual obligations that restrict Black homeownership and often Black occupancy (19). These covenants began trending in Chicago after the Red Summer and were adopted in other destination cities before being ruled unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948 (21).

Self-determination is a political and social concept that holds an individual possesses an inherent freedom to action and the pursuit of happiness. This term is attributable to groups seeking or possessing autonomy over their political actions and social freedoms. Blow uses this term to reflect Black Americans’ lacking political and social freedoms, as well as their aspiration to enjoy these freedoms.

Stop-and-frisk was an NYPD policy that allowed officers to make at-will arrests based on little evidence (102-03). Many studies have found the program disproportionately targeted Black and Latino individuals, 90% of whom were found to be innocent (103). Especially egregious is the program’s low rate of discovering illegal contraband and firearms (103). Blow highlights the program throughout The Devil You Know because it is a prime example of institutionalized racism and because it occurred in his home city of New York while he resided there.