The election of Donald Trump has only made the need for widespread resistance to racist state repression more urgent. The new president rode into the White House on a wave of reactionary populist anger, pledging to restore law and order following the Ferguson and Baltimore rebellions and the rise of Black Lives Matter. Trump appealed to moral panics about race and crime to win consent for authoritarian proposals that promised to protect against a series of purported threats to national security.

His actions so far — from selecting prominent representatives of finance capital for his cabinet to rashly issuing executive orders; from his imposition of hiring freezes in all government agencies besides the military and security forces to his strident immigration restrictions — all demonstrate a willingness to make good on those promises.

In this context, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation could not be more timely. Written in the late Obama era and first published by Haymarket Books in 2016, this volume demonstrates how the Black Lives Matter movement’s resistance to racism and police violence has “morphed into a political crisis” that not yet been resolved. Taylor depicts organizations ranging from #BlackLivesMatter to the Black Youth Project 100, arguing that they represent “a newly developing Black left.” Taylor’s analysis illuminates how this burgeoning movement has ruptured “post-racial” illusions and how their radical critiques of racism, policing, and inequality position black people to “transform social conditions.” In doing so, she argues that they have sparked a long-needed discussion about the unfinished struggle to overcome racism, militarism, and poverty.