The Overseer Class: A Manifesto
By Steven W. Thrasher
Amistad, 386 pages, May 2026
In The Overseer Class, scholar, journalist and activist Steven Thrasher lays out his theory of the “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.”
For his take on this familiar problem, he draws on contemporary theorists like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, whose book Elite Capture shows how “a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential,” as well as authors James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, whose work and lives were aimed at overthrowing the overseers he describes.
“When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else,” he quotes Morrison telling her students in 2003. “If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
With similar passion, Thrasher offers a powerful cultural and political critique, academic analysis, and — as his book’s subtitle suggests — “A Manifesto.” Almost Chomsky-like both in his explanation of how we are groomed through the media and propaganda, and in his approach, Thrasher provides so many examples to define his terms and their nuances that it becomes implausible to disagree with him (and embarrassing when he names some of your favorite films or TV shows).
Look no further the 2023 news cycle “dominated with a powerful message of state-approved genocide of an indigenous people” in Gaza, Thrasher writes, and how “that lethal message was largely delivered by Black Americans.” Key figures included: White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre; United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and her Deputy Robert Wood, who cast the lone vote in the U.N. Security Council against a ceasefire that December, “acting as a kind of global Black cop for the ruling class.”
While he does call out “overseers who specifically have ill intent,” Thrasher focuses overall on class dynamics. “When it comes to how racial capitalism is maintained,” he writes, “the systemic, economic dynamics of an overseer class of people are indispensable to upholding hierarchies of patriarchy, race and cis-heterosexism.”
He considers “four types of marginalized people who advance into positions of power,” starting with “Uncle Toms,” a term he says is often mistakenly applied to sellouts. The titular novel, Uncle Tom, Thrasher clarifies, is about an enslaved man “whose power came from his attempt to protect other people even at the cost of his own suffering and life.” In contrast, ‘tokens” refer to someone who is “an isolated, minoritized worker with little or no real power and whose identity is subject to heightened scrutiny.” Meanwhile, Thrasher spends the most time describing “overseers,” those who are often a “historic first… but unwilling, and sometimes unable, to expand the number of people like them in their organization.” The type you want to be, he argues, is a “Toni” (named after Toni Morrison), because “a Toni does not want to be the ‘first and only’ and works their ass off to push open the door for other people who have not been welcomed inside.”
The book’s first chapter and many of its examples refer to police, but Thrasher also zooms in on corporate America, the U.S. armed forces, and the mass media, which he says pushes out propaganda, its subspecialty, copaganda and its sub-subspecialty, copablanda” — his term for “Black copaganda, which is meant to make Black cops killing Black people so quotidian and ‘blah’ as to be unremarkable.” Going through the decades, he starts with overseers on slave plantations and continues in through films and TV shows from today.
Thrasher taught social justice in reporting at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago, and draws on his decades of experience that went into his first book, The Viral Underclass, as well as his ordeal of being denied tenure and having his classes cancelled after he supported students who set up a Palestine solidarity encampment in 2024 to protest the Gaza genocide. When Thrasher linked arms with other faculty to stop police from violently evicting the students, he found himself brutalized in the process.
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.”
In the book, he calls out the complicity of Phillip Brian Harper, his professor and former dean of the Graduate School at NYU; Brian A. Lewis, Chief of Police at Northwestern University; and Charles Whitaker, dean of the Medill School of Journalism.
“I used to be naive enough to think that Black university administrations would help people like me to navigate a career in primarily white institutions,” Thrasher writes. “But when I began speaking out against the decades-long colonial war in Palestine, I noticed something. In the same manner in which Sidney Poitier’s Lt. Tibbs is sent to the Black side of town to shake information out of a Black abortionist a white cop could never have gotten [near the end of] In the Heat of the Night, I believe Black administrators were hired into their position to crack our Negro skulls, to beat our critical impulses out of our black asses, and to murder our careers if called upon.”
On his book tour and online, Thrasher continues to call out new examples, noting recently how “Mamdani hired Edwin Raymond as a new sheriff, whose book An Inconvenient Cop I critique extensively in The Overseer Class.”
Thrasher’s book offers clarity at a time when “rainbow capitalism” is not a serious response to the growing authoritarianism of Trump’s billionaire-backed white nationalist regime. Thrasher makes it easier to see how the overseer class “is established at different levels in various sectors of American society, in order to navigate around this present reality so we don’t have to accept it as a certain future.”
In a way, Thrasher has put himself forth as another role model for all of us who refuse to keep our head down as we lift others up.
Note: Catch Thrasher introducing many of the films he programmed in the Black Cops, Spies and Overseers series at BAM, June 5-11.
Renée Feltz is a longtime independent journalist and a former News Director at Democracy Now!
