We sit down with Dr. Steven Thrasher to talk about his new book, The Overseer Class; how our police state today evolved from yesterday’s slave plantations; and why Dr. Thrasher has been blacklisted from academia after defending his at Northwestern University during the Palestine encampment movement in 2024.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
So I did stand between the and the cops. I got beat up for it and I survived. It wasn’t that bad at the time and the had an encampment for five days. But then a few weeks later, Congress called our president to the Hill and Congressman Jim Bank showed my photo and demanded why hadn’t I been fired yet? And then the shit really hit the fan. My name is Steven Thrasher. I’m the author of the Overseer Class and I am the Daniel Remberg Chair of Social Justice and Reporting at Northwestern University. Although I am suspended from teaching and in exile for practicing social justice.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Dr. Thrasher, thank you so much for being here and sitting down with me here in the Real News Studio in Baltimore. It’s a real honor to finally get to meet you in person and to talk with you about this really important new book that you’ve written, The Overseer Class. And we’re going to talk about that and so much more, but I want to ask if you could just kind of hit us with the back of the cover description and overview of this book. What is it and why is it coming out now?
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
The Overseer class is about people from marginalized backgrounds who make their bones that make their bread, not by helping people like them, but by cracking their skulls sometimes literally. It began as a book about Black cops and I do write a lot about Black cops in the book, but it evolved into understanding how policing operates in different kinds of institutions. And my naive disappointment at earlier points in my career when I thought as an academic or as a journalist that Black and sometimes Black and gay, which I am Black and gay administrators might help people like me and I realized a certain point, oh no, they’re there to crack my skull and to keep people like me in line. And so the book is hopefully helping people who are being seduced into it, understand it, but also trying to give a language and a voice to people who’ve experienced it.
And as a reader told me, because I never understand why books are about to hear from readers, as a reader told me the other day to help them understand the grief, the grief of what it means to have somebody who thought was a mentor and to realize that they’re actually really there to put their boot on your neck when you’re trying to fly too high.
Maximillian Alvarez:
The thing that you’re putting your finger on here I think really clearly is something that all of us can understand and sense even if we haven’t had a language to talk about it. Let’s talk about language and class and why it’s important to distinguish a class from just a group of people or people in a certain, I don’t know, kind of socioeconomic range. So who and what is the overseer class and how does that fit into our existing conceptions of like, okay, we got a ruling class up here, got all these billionaires owning everything and yada, yada, yada, and we got the rest of us working people down here.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
In that class analysis, they’re the people between the two of us. We can think about managers in a way. I like to think in class dynamics and I don’t mind that there is a tension and I’ve gotten some criticism, all helpful criticisms or critique about how I am moving in the book between the personal and the class. And I think that there are ways that intent doesn’t matter. You can have good intent, you can have ill intent, the class dynamics are going to perpetuate themselves. But I do think we have some agency and I’ve certainly experienced disappointing decisions that some people have made. But I think in class dynamics, I have a background in activism. I did a PhD in American studies, which I think really should have been a PhD in anti-American studies with a-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, that’s what Fox News says it is. It might as well be, right?
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
And my first book, I was really grateful I got to call the viral underclass. I had met an HIV activist who’s still alive. He actually just came to my book launch. His name is Sean Strub. He’s an old school ACT UP activist and he coined a term called the viral underclass, thinking about how and why people who are living with HIV literally live under a separate set of laws. And the extreme dynamic he used, we kind of used different examples, but the extreme dynamic used when he coined that term was that an infant born with HIV is going to live under a different set of laws for their whole life. And usually in the US, not always, but usually in the US we don’t actually write the immutable characteristic into the law. We can see how it plays out, but we usually don’t say, “If you have black skin, if you have brown skin, this is the law.” That was the case with HIV.
If you’re born with HIV, there are all these things that you’d have to do throughout your life differently than a person who didn’t have HIV. And so I thought understanding the class dynamics that in the US about a million people worldwide, 40 million people are living with HIV is helpful to understand the class dynamic. And I was very grateful that he graciously allowed me to use that phrase for my first book because when I was putting that book together, it had begun as a book about the criminalization of HIV, which is still a part of it, but I was trying to sell it right as the COVID pandemic began. And so my wonderful literary agent, Tanya McKinnon and I started thinking about, how do we pivot this? And she had the idea, which I think has been born out and it’s been really nice hearing from people on this book tour, what the book has mentioned them over time, that there would be a lot of amnesia pretty quickly about COVID and that there would be some flash in the pan books about the pandemic, but that hopefully I was coming from kind of a theoretical background.
She was the one that picked the viral underclass as the idea for the book. You’re laughing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
No, I’m laughing because I’m like, yeah, one of those books was mine, baby. I did a book of 10 interviews with workers around the US during year one of COVID.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Who published it?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Or books. That’s right. Yes, yes, yes. And I am incredibly proud of it, but man, did it sink like a stone. So I’m smiling because I’m identifying with your story so much, but please keep going.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Well, I hope, especially after the so- called AI bubble burst that the point of books, I mean, even if we say it sinks like a stone, I’m going through this right now with a new book, that we’re under pressure with commercial publishing, we’re under pressure for all kind of media. But the real beauty of books is that they last for time. And I do honestly believe that your book and Molly Crabapple, who has a beautiful new book out on the Jewish Labor Bund-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Who designed the cover of my book, by the way, I love you, Molly.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Molly’s fantastic and who did art for the viral underclass. She did this amazing series of portraits of people who are frontline workers working in COVID. I think all of this is actually going to be really important for future. And part of what we do as writers is actually not just write for our time, is to write across time. So as I developed the second book, I started having ideas about black police and I was reporting all over the country, including very briefly in Baltimore after the uprising in response to the murder of Freddie Gray and I was reporting in Ferguson. And at the time, Ferguson had a white mayor and an almost entirely white police force. Black people could not become police officers because if you’d even been arrested, you couldn’t be a police officer. And effectively the entire black population- Everyone’s been
Maximillian Alvarez:
Arrested,
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Then no one can be accountable, not even charged, not even convicted, just arrested. And everyone had been arrested. So I started thinking about what it would be like to have a more diverse police force and I started noticing black cops everywhere in the culture and fiction and politics and news. And preparing for my trip here to Baltimore, I do think one of the first times, if not the first time, that I reported on a high profile case that was not white officer, black victim was Freddie Gray. There was six officers and a mixed race, I think black, Latino, and white. And that was a very, very different thing to wrestle with. So I started
Thinking about black cops and then personally we’ll get into this a policing mentality that happened in academia with people who are overseeing me and realizing that they were overseers and thinking about the line between overseers on plantations to cops, but also thinking about the ways that on plantations techniques of dealing with management developed that also affect factories and modern workplaces. And the overseer, if we’re thinking in a class dynamic is there’s the owner of the plantation. We’ll start with the plantation metaphor. And I say this in almost every interviewer when I’m talking publicly because it’s something my agent who’s a black woman and my editor is also a black woman and I talked about a lot, I am never saying that the modern workplace is exactly the plantation, but quite literally the move of overseeing labor and using a whip to using the tools of industrialization actually does come from that process.
And those same techniques theoretically move through how overseers are rewarded, how workers are threatened, even though it’s not the physical whip that’s being used. Oh
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Techniques of control are explored and expanded and handed down over time. So
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
I’m going to jump in a direction I haven’t really talked about in any interview yet, but it seems like a natural place to begin. And then I will go back into the plantation, but one of the TV shows I write about in my book that was my favorite to write about was Severance, which I find such a fascinating show. And if people are unfamiliar with the premise, it’s about a workplace where people have their outside lives and when they go to work, their brain is severed. They go to work and they have no idea who they are outside. When they’re inside, they don’t know who they are outside. When they leave at the end of the day, they don’t know who they are, what they do at work. No one else has written about this to my knowledge, only two people that can move between the severed floor and the rest of the world with their full consciousness intact.
It is a black man played by Tremell Tillman, I believe his name is, and a white woman played by Patricia Arquette. They’re the only two that can move back and forth and they are overseers. They observe the people at work and they observe them at home and they use their identity in very intimate ways to get close to the families outside. The white woman uses engendered ways. The black man uses in racial ways. I think one of the brilliant things about the depiction of race and severance is none of it is written out. Or I mean, I don’t know if it’s written out in the script, but it’s not written out in the text. It’s completely in the performance in really beautiful and interesting ways. And the black overseer whose name is Mr. Milchick goes up and tortures the black employee the most, Dylan. And one of the things he does is withhold the possibility of food and withhold the possibility of whether or not he’ll be reconnected with his wife and kids.
And that is so much from plantation life, this threat of breaking up your family, this threat of being able to take things away. And here, I don’t feel embarrassed or ashamed to say that using the threats of plantation life are analogous to what happens in the modern workplace. When a manager has the power to say to somebody, “You could be homeless. You will lose your livelihood, your access to food, you and your wife and kids can be broken up. Your kids can end up with CPS and being taken away from you if you lose your job.” When that threat is there-
Maximillian Alvarez:
You violate your parole.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
You violate your parole, you miss a paycheck, you lose your health insurance, your wife has cancer, your kids are sick. The same kind of power control is there. And so the overseers, now I’ll come back to your original question when we think of class dynamics is that there’s the ruling class and they own the means of production. It could be Jeff Bezos over Amazon and you could have a worker that needs to be busted like Chris Malls, who’s union organizer, any of the union organizers at Amazon. I write in the book about my experience of visiting the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, which is the only plantation in the US, at least last time I checked, that is dedicated as a Museum of Slavery. It’s a very, very interesting space. And when I went there, my own family and my father’s side goes back to plantation life in Georgia.
It is so fricking hot. The day I went in June, I mean, I’m just sweating buckets.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I’m a so cowboy like you. So I’m like, “Do people live in this? I can deal with 110 degrees like dry heat, no problem,
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
But I want to die in. ” Yeah, they lived in it and you’re walking through the sugar cane and I had a really great, graphic and disturbing, but really great tour guide was explaining the sugar cane. You run through it, it starts to cut your skin like a knife through a peach and there’s alligators and there’s snakes and it’s so hot. Then they take you into the big house, which has no air conditioning. It’s preserved as it was, but you immediately feel like you’re going 40 degrees cooler because it has high ceilings, completely surrounded by trees and you realize this mofo who owns this house is not going out into the fields to make sure people are chopping down the sugar cane. He’s not going to do it. He’s too hot. They also could all kill him if he went out there. And so you need this person in between them and that’s the role of the overseer.
Historically, overseers were mostly landless whites who lived around and were not enslaved, but were entirely dependent on the person who owned the land around them. But sometimes they were black. Sometimes the overseers had a black assistant who was called a driver and they would be in between the people. And sometimes overseers themselves were black and there are some fictional depictions that come up in films. The one I write about the most in the book is Sydney Poitier plays one in a 1957 movie called Band of Angels where Clark Gable is playing Rut Butler 2.0 and he’s his overseer. And so those are the people that are needed to be in between.
I’m trying to think in the book in responsible ways that not everyone who I’m using this analogy to think about is necessarily an oversteer. I don’t think a black infantryman in the US military is in any way in the same position as General Powell, the Joint Chief of Staff or eventually Secretary of State or National Security Advisor Condoleisa Rice. They’re operating at different levels of power. But I think the dynamic helps us understand how power and how capitalism is maintained through intimate connections and it preys on these relationships. I think that drivers who are enslaved, I don’t think of them as culpable. I think about them as critical, but they are enslaved chattel like everybody else. They have no choice about being there. And some of them, there’s historical record of this purposely become overseers because they want to practice harm reduction and try to protect people in the community.
But that’s where personal intent doesn’t matter because they’re not allowed to do that. Even if they’re maybe one day they’re able to keep one person from getting hurt. They’re
Maximillian Alvarez:
Eventually-
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
But you’re right
Maximillian Alvarez:
About they’re also incentivized to be even crueler than a white person would be in their position,
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Prove
Maximillian Alvarez:
Their loyalty.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Exactly. So that’s where the structure kicks in.
Maximillian Alvarez:
It seems like because you’re talking about this lineage that from the antebellum slave period, the real life functions of overseers in the slave economy and the sort of historical evolution of that to the police and the sort of contemporary police apparatus that we have in this country. So I guess my question is like, where is it important to draw the distinction that the overseer class, you know it when you see it because they’re there to do X and that differentiates them between like a piece of shit middle manager who’s like acting like an overseer, but really he’s just like the assistant to the assistant manager at the restaurant that I work at.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Yeah. So I think I try to have some compassion. I’ve met redos who have more compassion than me. I’ve met people angrier than me and less angry than me, but I try to have some compassion in thinking that being an overseer is psychologically corrosive and there’s a brilliant, forgive me, I’m forgetting the name of the story and I cite him in the book. He wrote a companion to the 2004 PBS series about slavery and writes about how it was psychologically isolating for drivers and black overseers because they became suspect and hated by the community and the master would maybe give them a bit more food, but that food was based upon doing all these evil things. So there’s nothing happy about it. It’s not a place that one should want to. The closest analogy I think of in the book is Jordan Peel’s concept of a sunken place.That’s where they’re ending up.
I do think there are different hierarchical positions of people and I think of four different archetypes in the book. I bounce off of a film scholar, Donald Bogle, who I took classes with an undergrad who ruts about Tom’s, coons, mulattoes, mammies, and bucks. Just find five film archetypes. And in conversation with those, I kind of developed four of my own that are not just about film that you can kind of see throughout the world and make distinctions between them. So the first one is Uncle Tom’s, who I think Uncle Tom gets a bad rap in the future because he’s come to be seen as a sellout. But the original Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel is actually someone who sacrifices his life. He does not go out in the party that is trying to find the escaped runaway enslaved people and when pressure to say where they went, he won’t and he’s beaten to death.
So he’s actually quite the opposite. One of the most controversial things I worked through with my editor was actually writing about Aaron Bushnell is the most mapped onto person as an Uncle Tom now, like somebody who literally gave his life trying to protect other people. That’s where that type originates.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right. And I guess just for anyone watching or listening, remind them who Aaron Bushnell was.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Aaron Bushnell was air forceman, I’m forgetting his rank, but he self-emulated in front of the Israeli embassy in February of 24 trying to stop the genocide in Gaza and said he was doing this as an extreme act of protest to try to end the genocide. So you have your Uncle Tom’s, you have your tokens, which is a term that comes out of sociology from business sociology from a sociologist named Elizabeth Moss Cantor and her concept, it’s originally a book called Men and Women of the Corporation. And she’s thinking about jobs where less than 15% of the people are women or different kinds of people of color. But the idea of a token is actually they don’t have power. They’re put in a position without any ability to do anything. I think a lot of managers are put in this position. And I think that there I do have some empathy or sympathy or I’m not sure.
I try to think about how there is something very isolating and sad that in those positions they’re loved by nobody. I worked at a Barnes & Noble and I’ve been visiting Barnes & Noble store. I used to
Maximillian Alvarez:
Work at Barnes & Noble too.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Yeah, that was my … How old were you? That was my teen job. I was 16 when I got my first job.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Nice. So yeah, I worked at one in Fullerton back home in Orange County. I worked at the one in Orange and then I worked in the one in University of Chicago, Barnes and Noble Bookstore.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
So I think about that was the longest time I worked in retail. It was not a union shop. But if you are the store manager, you’re like having to give people schedules and whatnot. And in union shops, you’re supervising people who are unionized and they’re all kind of together on the same page and you’re against them. You’re also not ever going to make any kind of the money that the owner is making. And so I think they’re very much put in these token rules because there’s actually not often that much they can do. But then there are overseers and overseers are people who actually have power. They do wield a lot of power. And usually their choice with the power is to do it on behalf of the people above them, to do it on behalf of the ruling class and to report the person taking a cigarette, or more significantly to try to fire the person who’s union organizing.
I write in the book about something called ERG’s employee resource groups and I’ve addressed a couple and those groups are groups of people from marginalized backgrounds, black people, queer people who work in corporations who get together as employees, like many things in America have an incredibly noble origin that has been totally co-opted or largely co-opted by corporate structures.
And I once addressed a large corporation’s gay group and black group and had a very positive experience, but in the years since have seen that the organizers of those groups who also were agitating against the genocide and for unionization at this corporation have been fired. And so the person, they’re not being fired by the CEO of that company, they’re being fired by an overseer. And often the overseers to keep an eye on those people might also be in the employee resource group because the employee resource group might have very low economic level employees and higher. And so they can put a black spy in there, which is the term I use in a film series I’m curating about this. They can put a spy in there and then that person can put the kbosh in it. And that’s why I’m trying to think in class dynamics because there’s nothing wrong with employees getting together around these issues, but they can and have largely been co-opted and turned into spying operations.
Intercept is done reporting and how sometimes they’re very explicitly seeded into corporations to try to stop unionization efforts.
Maximillian Alvarez:
The interesting dynamic here is like how, again, when I still see and understand the world in terms of class, I think when you’re right, you’re right. And Marx was right that the history of humanity is the history of class struggle. These aren’t just sort of classes that exist out of nowhere. They exist as the sort of product function and entire structure for society that is dominated by the needs and wants of capital against the needs and wants of the rest of us. So you have that sort of dynamic shaping history here in America in such a profound way as like the laboratory of like capitalism in a sort of budding liberal democracy that then gets eaten and overtaken by capitalism and turned into the monstrosity it’s become today. But within that dynamic, the classes are there because there’s a tension. There’s something that the ruling class is taking from the working class and there’s conditions that working people are made to live and toil under in service of their lords and masters and enforced by the overseers at their factories, in their universities, what have you.
So I’m seeing how in terms of the kind of larger economy, there are actual sort of overseers that their job description might as well be, “I need you to be an overseer for this company. I need you to be an overseer.” The Baltimore police hiring posters. It’s like, “Hey, we need overseers.” I
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Mean, there’s posters. New York is kind of my base in the US now, even though I mostly live in Greece or live wherever I’m sleeping that night these days, but whenever I’m in New York, they’re always hiring ads occasionally for the NYPD consistently for the corrections department, all non-white, all non-white people. It looks like a United Colors of Beneton ad. And if you look up, the salaries they’re offering within five years far outpace teachers to be a corrections officer. And I researched this when I was writing the book, the dynamics, the racial demographics of the population on Rikers or any of the smaller jails that they’re getting ready to open around New York City are 80 to 85% black and brown. The corrections officers are 80 to 85% black and brown. So it is very much an overseer dynamic that they’re advertising and relatively speaking, paying well compared to jobs that probably you and I would rather see resources go into like teacher or EMT.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right. And obviously as you’re sort of already saying implicitly, but let’s make it even more explicit is that this isn’t true for every type of overseer position that exists in the year of our Lord 2026 today. But again, as I’m hearing you tell me if I’m wrong, there is still a structure at work that’s been crafted by a history, a very racist history that still enforces and produces very racist effects like you write about in the book, like the phenomenon of like, why am I seeing black cops everywhere? Why am I right now seeing a bunch of Latinos behind those goddamn masks with an ice badge?
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
So the best demographic data available on ICE agents puts them at a slim majority Latino Chicano, about 51, 52%.
Maximillian Alvarez:
You’re helping me see where the overseers that enforce the existing kind of order of things are in our economy, but I also see the overseer mentality everywhere and that is, I think, a much bigger sort of social and existential sickness that we have to deal with in this country. And I’m seeing it play out in all these goddamn Latinos who are joining ICE right now. And I can sort of understand it because I grew up in Orange County, California, like very conservative and very much the kind of would be Trumpian proto conservative who thought it was funny to piss off my liberal classmates and make jokes that push the boundaries of decency and just like everyone made my white friends crack up and there was a cruelty in it, but there was more than anything just like a sort of social politics. As the brown guy buck the sort of stereotypes and sort of assert your own agency and identity, it’s like, “You don’t know who I am just because of the color of my skin.
I can think differently than you might expect me to. ” There’s a lot of that stuff at play too. It’s a struggle for people to kind of like, I don’t know, craft a self that they can live with.
And I think for a lot of Latinos, you’re chasing acceptance from the white culture and power structure, but more than that, you’re trying to chase purchase on whiteness as if you get a little more of a claim on whiteness and the benefits of white dominant power structures that you get to then sort of wield against others and that in turn proves your deservingness. Again, I can envision a past where if life hadn’t gone the way it was, I would’ve stayed a conservative Mexican-American kid who thought that was totally fine and was encouraging other people to do it.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
It’s very seductive and that’s part of why I’m trying to use a class dynamic. I try to cancel myself or make myself available for cancellation And not that I haven’t been at other ways. And thinking one about how I criticize the New York Times all the time. I blast them on social media all the time. I also would’ve loved for them to have reviewed my book and they didn’t. And then I realized, why do I feel that way? Why do I want acceptance from this place that I’m boycotting the opinion page and I’m leading letter campaigns against their trans coverage and their Gaza coverage? And yet there’s this way, and I start with the book with three epigraphs once by my rock, Kiese Leman, who’s I think of as one of the great leaders of American letters right now. He writes this quote about, “We know these places hate us.
We know that they cannot see us, that they’re white supremacists, and yet we still want to get chosen.” And some of that’s personal interrogation, some of that’s structural because you’re also drawn to where the opportunities are. I know that there is a purchase on whiteness and there’s a purchase on the market that if you get these certain things, maybe you’re going to get to keep doing your work.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. There’s also a $50,000 signing bonus for ice right now.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
So I admit in this book, I once applied to be an NYPD cop, which I think to me that’s the big reveal of this book. And I cannot imagine myself being a cop now. I couldn’t really have imagined it even then. But when I look back at why did I do it? It’s because I had no other opportunities. I’d gone to film school. Film work is hard to get in the best of circumstances. There was the year I got out. I worked for about a year, but then there was a big kind of union busting move to Canada and I tried to get into teaching fellowships. I didn’t get those. Eventually I applied to be in the COPs. And I found when I was doing historical sociological research that many people became cops, not because they necessarily wanted to, it was a job. And so I do think that there is a moral question about joining ICE and I know there are many people who would never do.
So even people, even Latinos who are incredibly poor or don’t have other opportunities. But I do think the right has a much, and this is shameful, this is embarrassing. The right has a better sense of jobs programs. If you get canceled for something on the right, they will find you a job. They will promote you, they’ll give you money. And on the left, there’s really nothing for you. I’m very much now, as I write about in great length of the book, I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but I’m basically blacklisted for academia. I’m one of many professors and who’ve been pushed out on my job. I’m still drawing a paycheck. A huge amount of it’s gone to lawyers and psychiatrists over the last couple years, but I’ve not been allowed to teach for two years and I doubt I will probably work in academia again.
And I’m having a hard time finding work in the formal economy at all. I know many people are in this position and there’s just nothing for us. And I was hosted at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago, fantastic bookstore, co-op. And one of the co-op leaders, we had crossed paths in New York barely. They finished their PhD as I was arriving, but they spent a year working in Florida and were purged. There was this anti-critical race theory hysteria that happened, at least that I know of a hundred professors lost their jobs.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I’ve talked to some of them.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
And I don’t think any of them got work or very, very few of them. There’s
Maximillian Alvarez:
Tom Altman at Texas. I
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Interviewed
Maximillian Alvarez:
Him here at The Real News. I’ve spoken with at the University of Michigan who were surveilled and followed by private security,
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Hired
Maximillian Alvarez:
By the university, grad like homes raided by the FBI. We’ve had Mahmoud Khalil’s, one of his lawyers on this network. I don’t think people understand just what the hell is happening in the world of higher education right now. And this is actually a perfect bridge to, I think, sort of talking about that because I wanted to ask if you could talk more about why you were blacklisted because we covered the student encampment movement here. I talked to a bunch of from different encampments. I mean, people who watch this network are going to be interested in this story, but it also really shows a lot of what we’ve been talking about and a lot of the way the overseer class exists in the world of higher education today. I wanted to ask you, Dr. Steven Thrasher, why you are effectively blacklisted from academia today and what happened at Northwestern?
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
Well, too, right before I get into that, just to close up on the ICE element, people have to work doing something. And so if the only jobs available are things like ICE, people are going to draw that. That’s why prison abolitionists fight for moving resources away from police. My Northwestern story really begins at NYU and people can learn much more detail about the gory parts of all of this in my book. But when I was a graduate student, I was asked to give the graduation speech at NYU for the PhD by a mentor of mine who was a black gay ma was on my PhD committee and had recently become the dean and all this shit went down between the time I was asked and when it actually happened around protesting around Israel. NYU had opened up a campus in Israel. My department said we wouldn’t participate because we knew that many scholars would not be allowed to go to conferences and whatnot there.
Student government took a BDS resolution or grad student union took a BDS resolution. Student government tried to honor JVP and SJP. That blew up. So people assumed I would address it and I did and I did not put the remarks in my speech. I added a few sentences off the cuff and that brought the hammer down on my head. And the person to do it was a black gay man named Phil Harper. And he had warned me casually just a couple of days before not to talk about Israel out of the blue. And so that to me was a peek behind the curtain and I can’t speak to his intent. I don’t know why he did it exactly. I’m putting in all the lawyerly language, but that was such a shaking moment for me when he brought up not to talk about Israel. I was like, “Oh, I thought you were here to help me and I realized you are here to make sure somebody like me doesn’t do certain things.” And this has spiraled way out of control.
I’m sure your readers have seen this, but I will mention two examples from NYU since then. I’m sorry, in 2025, another black trans student talked about Israel and their graduation remarks and they were not given their diploma. Their name was Logan Rosos. And I think they were actually far more brave than I was as a student because they had seen a year or two years of this already happening and still used their moment to talk about. So NYU has now made no graduations. They all have to be recorded. Nobody can talk live anymore. And then we’ve seen this happen at multiple universities. They canceled one at Rutgers. The professor talked about it at Michigan, they punished him. It’s happening again and again and again. So that’s kind of the background. But I think I really understood the overseer position through that experience where I was even before I was sort of punished publicly and all of that and this dean published a letter about me or NYU published a letter that he wrote about me online for anyone in the world to see.
I started to really understand that this was an overseer dynamic because they were trying to make me … They’re trying to stop what I could potentially say. Then I hoped when I went to Northwestern that there was a black provost and a black dean of the journalism school that those people might help me. They would not. And that started to become clear to me before I arrived in this situation, that they were also there to make sure that I didn’t get out of line. And so when the student … I had fits and starts of good times at Northwestern, but was widely championed by the university because I was very good at my job. And I also happened to be developing and then write this book, The Overseer Class, I’m sorry, the Viral Underclass. That’s what happens when you name your books too close to each other.
I wrote the Viral Underclass and I went out on behalf of the university about COVID. I was parts of Cook County, New York City national and international response teams around the COVID pandemic and again around the Mpox epidemic. And I started to have some overseer vibes when the university kept sending me out to talk about stuff. And then when MPOX came out, which was it’s an orthopox virus that has had many outbreaks in Africa, that the world outside of the 10, 15 countries affected haven’t given much of a shit about. But when it started to move around the world, of course, there was more interest. It was almost exclusively happening amongst men who have sex with men. And this is something I felt no shame or embarrassment about as a gay man myself, but also as a social epidemiologist. And so my university first was sending me out to do stuff and I helped organize a vaccination clinic.
I could immediately see that there were really discriminatory things that were happening. For instance, employees could get time off to go get a COVID vaccine. They could not to get an Mpox vaccine. And then I was part of a symposium where we outlined quite clearly why we thought this should be treated as a sexually transmitted infection. All the evidence was there. Really the evidence shows that it was happening around unprotected anal intercourse. And then the university was like, “No, no, we don’t want to say anything about sexuality. We’re just going to say you get it from close contact.” Which was one, incorrect. Two, creates all this panic because it creates the conditions for when say a straight roommate could be like, “Oh my God, I have a gay roommate. I could get empox with them.” And it’s inaccurate. So they started to distance themselves from me then, but then everything happened with October 7th and the response to it.
I happened to be teaching a class called Sex in the American Empire Journalism and Frames of War. And it was a class that was really a media analysis class, American studies and journalism, understanding the American Empire through these dynamics. How is the American Empire created through race and nationalism? How does it happen with sexuality? How are these things policed? So we would read Judith Butler’s Frames of War, read How to Hide an Empire. We read and learned about concepts like pinkwashing, homonationalism, imperial feminism, the ways that what I now would call overseer dynamics are played out and how media covers them. And so October 7th happens October 9th, I have planned six months in advance, years in advance, really because I’d used the syllabus before. I had a planned three week study of Chomsky and Herman’s manufacturing consent. So even though I changed nothing in the syllabus for the , I knew that all of my, what I did as a journalism professor and an American studies professor, I knew that, okay, the media analysis we’re going to be talking about is what’s unfolding, which is what I would do in any news situation.
So I immediately started talking about the framing of the news and the way that it was very explicitly as our mutual friend, Ana H. Johnson, who I was in conversation with and proceeded me at Red Emmas as he’s documented in painstaking detail, you could see this quantifiable. I was just showing the illustrations the second they came up and I started getting pushback on that. And then eventually the went on, they started an encampment and I had seen by then how much violence was happening. I’d started reporting, I’d gone back to Columbia where I did classes as a grad student myself. I reported from there, I found nothing was anti-Semitic. This was a very multi-faith anti-imperialist student movement. And I’d been quite disturbed as I’d seen the amount of violence were encountering at other places. And so I kind of made a pact to myself that if I’m in a position to intercept between and police, I will put my body in that position.
And then the contacted our faculty in Justice and Palestine group and asked for us to ask for there always to be a professor there. We arranged that there always before and I just happened to be on the first shift because I wasn’t teaching that morning when the shit hit the fan. So I did stand between the and the cops. I got beat up for it and I survived. It wasn’t that bad at the time and the had an encampment for five days, but then a few weeks later, Congress called our president to the Hill and Congressman Jim Bank showed my photo and demanded why hadn’t I been fired yet? And then the shit really hit the fan.
Maximillian Alvarez:
We’re seeing this kind of thing just turn higher ed in America into just something completely different from what we imagined it to be just a few years ago. And I guess as two people who have occupied many different positions in that higher ed structure and you achieving much higher positions in it, but we’ve experienced the sort of overseer structure of higher ed, just like American democracy itself, the sort of higher ed institution of your, right, of 40 years ago, it doesn’t exist anymore. It has been sort of eaten by termites and re-fashioned into something that was so susceptible to like an authoritarian crackdown like the one we’re seeing happening from Trump and the federal government now and this sort of like relentless, repressive pushback against the for Palestine movement that like after those encampments, after those different forms of protests and like all the organizing and that have been doing faculty grad over the course of the unfolding genocide in Gaza ever since October 7th, that has now been turned into a reality where and everyone are being surveilled on campus all the time.
There are cameras everywhere. Columbia University, you got to go through like an airport security system to get on the damn grounds of the campus now.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
And then there’s like a pinkerton guard behind every bush at Columbia too.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. And so I want to ask again with what you experienced firsthand, you and folks like not just in this current wave of repression against the for Palestine and the stop the genocide in Palestine movement in all its forms, but even people like Steven Saleda 10 years ago and the BDS movement preceding this, he got blacklisted the way that you’ve been blacklisted. So I wanted to shut up and ask where that power structure comes from in the context of today’s higher ed and how it reproduces itself in sort of like the culture and professional incentives of the people in higher ed.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
There were a lot of very dangerous things about the encampments, none of them physical, none of them about antisemitism, but I’m thinking about the words of Rafah Alarrea, the poet who’s most known for writing the poem, If I Must Die. And one of the things he said in a Democracy Now interview shortly before he died or before he was killed was that a lot of us who are writers want to have it both ways. I mean, he was talking about the context of poets, but I feel the same way as a journalist. He said, poets won’t want to say, “Oh, it was just a poem. Why are people coming after me? ” He’s like, “We have to own that poems are dangerous, that the ideas that we present are dangerous and they have power. That’s why they want to suppress them.” So the encampments were very dangerous in that they were creating a different framework.
They were tearing down walls. I read about this a lot in the book. Even Samuel Jackson talked about this when he was understanding when he was a student protestor in the 1960s, that the universities want these divisions between the communities and the inside and the outside. When I was at Northwestern, the only five days I felt welcome on that campus were the five days of the encampment. And I met people who lived nearby who said, even though Northwestern did not at the time have big fences around that anyone could walk on, they said, “I met neighbors who never dared walk on the campus before.” So they’re breaking down. They’re breaking down the myth of antisemitism by showing that our entire encampment happened during Passover. There was a seder every night. There was Muslims and Christians and Jews breaking bread together. So they’re breaking down this fiction.
They’re showing that not only are , not the deviant idiots who they like to pretend that they are, but that they were wrestling with deeply spiritual, ethical questions about their traditions to think about how do we actually confront the American war machine and they exposed the financial structures of the university in ways that hadn’t been much in the public consciousness. I think the biggest things that it showed was that the line between public and private is a fiction. All of this shit has been 90% funded by the federal government and all of it has some level of philanthropy, which public schools, private schools, which effectively means the government is financing it, but the philanthropists are calling the shots on what’s happening. And that’s true at UC Berkeley, which is a public university and that’s true at the University of Southern California, which is a private university.
It’s federal money pushing all of this. And these encampments really showed the depths and the depravity of this relationship and not in a theoretical way. At Northwestern, a previous board chair or one of the big trustees had previously been a board chair of general dynamics. General dynamics makes the shells that go in the Israeli tanks. This is a direct connection. And so we’ve learned, and the same thing is happening around so- called AI and other things that the donors are using these universities as laboratories for their business interests. One of the things they’re developing in the lab is public opinion and wanting people to think, but also they’re literally developing MIT in these various STEM schools, they’re developing weapons and they’re using the institutions to either launder their reputation or to frame the terms of debate. Now, none of this is new and I try to be aware of presentism and where we come in with our understanding, including my own, because we encounter it in the era which we’re alive.
But one of the things I’m writing about in the book is using Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man who writes about a narrator who goes to college and he gets kicked out. And it happens because of an incident. It’s an HBCU kind of school. And I’m forgetting the novel comes out in the ’50s. I think if I’m remembering correctly, probably the story of the college years is probably set in the 30s or 40s, about a century ago or so. But he’s at this college and a white trustee doesn’t like what happens and has the Black president expel this, not just expel this young man, but secretly and nefariously ruin his life and make sure that he can never work again.
Baldwin writes about this all the time. I take comfort in knowing this pain that I feel right now or that I see around me actually has a lot of historical precedent. And part of what was so dangerous for the is they are unraveling this entire fictional structure that the trustees are really deciding what are learning, that punishment is offered more than education and that this threat is overseeing all of our lives and shaping us with class dynamics and showing us that to create a better society, we actually have to undo fundamental ways that power works in this country. So the modern version of it, which I think the deserve enormous credit for this and one of the easiest to demonk things when their detractors will say, why are they only asking about this for Israel? No, I read dozens of these student demands from universities around the world and they all said,” We do not want our tuition money.
We do not want our funding to go to any weapons, not just Israel. We don’t want Raytheon. We don’t want Boeing. We do not think this relationship should exist with war making. “And that relationship goes back a long time. And so that was one of the reasons why the hammer came down so hard on them on us because undoing that relationship would really fundamentally alter power dynamics, not just in the United States but throughout the world.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, we only have a few minutes left here and I wanted to sort of build on that and ask what comes next for Steven Thrasher, but also what comes next for us now that we’ve got this book with more of an understanding of who the overseers are in our lives and knowing that there are people in positions of power with names and addresses that we need to understand as like power wielders who are making active decisions against our interests and that at the same time there are structures that work that matter much more than the personality of the person holding the position that we’re talking about. I wanted to ask if we could sort of end on that point of what can we do with this in our lives now and what does that look like from academia to the person who’s considering joining the police to the person who doesn’t know what to do, but they know they need a paycheck and a job.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
I don’t know what comes next for Steven Thrasher exactly, because this is going to be a pretty big moment of transition. What people take away from the book, I actually frankly think is not really any of my business. I mean, I put the book into the world and then it’s up to readers to see what they want to do with it. I try to share vulnerably about myself and about some of the overseers that I’ve encountered, not just to center myself, but to try to create some, well, to create some vulnerability and also to try to shake up the power dynamics a little bit because one of the ways that overseers act in our lives, and I know we’ve talked about this before, is that there’s this expected silence that you’re going to have this fieldy and see yourself as subservient to these people who will never be spoken.
They’ll name our names, they’ll name our names when they fire us, they’ll name our names in the US Congress, they’ll name our names in the press, they will smear in all kinds of ways, but they expect us not to say what happened to them. So the only kind of directive I would give that I hope people take out of this book, and I’m also just curious to hear what they do, is that the beginning of dealing with any problem is to name it. And I don’t hope this book will solve it. I just hope that it helps people name it. I’ve already gotten, and I’m very humbled and honored by this, I’ve already gotten responses from people who’ve told me they feel healing and a sense of dealing with the grief of this situation, just seeing somebody else name what happened to them that they felt was unspeakable has been healing to them.
So I’m grateful for that and I don’t want to give away the ending of the book, but I do really center towards the end who’s then writing this shirt in their honor, Palestinian journalists. And I think that they’ve taught me so much as a journalist and I think they’ve with the ultimate sacrifice their own lives, they’ve shown how powerful what journalism can be, how powerful it can be, what it can do in ways that really speak to us as a profession. But I think they actually offer a fundamentally different vision of what it means to engage with society and to be a responsible pillar of society. So that I kind of offer at the end is my take on my particular journey through academia and journalism and thinking about what are other ways of being. But I am very optimistic and I’ve gotten some good feedback already that more than telling people what to think in my book, I’m hoping I’m just answering questions that I hope I’m raising questions that help them interrogate their own journeys and think about this structure and think about other ways of being in the institutions they find themselves.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and let’s just do like two minutes of overtime here to bring that back down to the lived out level.You admit the big reveal that you’re like, yeah, there was a time in your life where circumstances were such that you were trying to be a cop. And I empathize with that, not because I’ve ever wanted or tried to be a cop, not that you wanted to but had to, but I know what that feels like because that’s why and how I ended up working 12, 13 hour days as a temp in warehouses and factories in Southern California during the Great Recession while our family was losing our house and everything was getting worse for us while Obama and the media and everyone was telling us that the economy was back and getting better. And so in that period where I had nowhere else to go, but the temp agency at 3:30 in the morning and hoped that I would get an assignment that I could keep for weeks or days or months or longer, I worked at this one particular warehouse in the city of industry that I had driven past on the freeway many, many times and just hadn’t noticed it.
There are these big beige buildings festuning the freeways that just sort of fade into the foreground when you’re driving around back home. And it was a very brutal exploitative, hot, awful place like most warehouses are. They use mostly temps because they could fire you and just send you home at the drop of a hat. They don’t got to pay nothing towards your benefits or what have you. But there was always this sort of dynamic between the 80% of us who were temps, the 20% who were actually working there full-time, the managers on the floor of the warehouse and then the people in the front office. Anyway, point being is that in that warehouse, I was being groomed at some point for being a manager and my manager who was Latina, Army vet, single mom, not a bad person overall, but she was like trying to groom me to be management.
And there was one day where we had a big batch of new temps in because we had a massive shipment we had to meet, we didn’t meet it, a lot of mistakes were made, yada, yada, yada. So at the end of the day, the manager is just fuming. She comes to me and she says, “I want you to tell me which one of the temps slowed us down the most so I can fire them.” And I was like, “I can’t do that. ” And I think about my name, Maximilian. It comes from St. Maximilian Colby who sacrificed himself for a stranger in Auschwitz. And I’m like-
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
And my St. Stephen was the martyr who went up to the religious authorities and said you were betraying the spirit of God and was stoned to death as the first martyr.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So sometimes it’s like just so on the nose, man, but I’m sitting there trying to kind of … I’m like, “Do I martyr myself? Do I just say take me or I’ll work late?” And the manager’s saying, she doesn’t give a shit. I offered to work late and she’s like, “No, she’s going to do it. She just wants to teach me a lesson.” I think back to the cruelty of that, the incruelty that you’re being inducted into to become one of these overseers and the lessons She thought she was teaching me. I try to pick the person who I think will suffer the least and then the manager calls her over in front of everyone, calls everyone together and calls her to the center, fires her in front of everyone. Just the theater of cruelty that I had been become a part of and the self-hatred that I still have from that and the pain that it all is causing us to inflict on each other.
I think we also have to accept the reality that a lot of us are put in these kinds of positions daily and that we incur those moral injuries, whether it’s rolling your window up when you’re passing a homeless person or just saying nothing when you see something wrong happening because you’re running late because you’re dropping off an Uber delivery. Again, I guess the last thing I’ll say is that I think about our fallen brother, Michael Brooks’ axiom, that you got to be kind with people and be ruthless to systems. So I guess I wanted to ask if you could talk about that to wrap us up by way of telling people that this doesn’t mean that every person who wears a badge is an awful person. This doesn’t mean you’re an awful person if you have a job that makes you do shitty things, but you can be part of changing this awful system that does awful things to us and makes awful people out of us.
Dr. Steven Thrasher:
The writer, Susan, now I’m forgetting how to pronounce her last name. She’s Australian Palestinian who clapped back at Mamdani, Susan Abalawa who talked about how he had been pushed to denounce her and she gave him a very, very sweet and also completely bearing 15 minute response, very much couched in being a South Asian auntie responding to him. And one of the things she said was, “If you are not careful, they’re just going to keep siphoning off a little bit of your soul at a time until you don’t know what’s happening.” And that happens. And I tried to think as much as my life totally changed on Dearing Meadow, which is where the encampment was at Northwestern, I tried to think that that was also a divine moment for me because it’s a blessing. You don’t often get exactly the paradigm in front of you where you know you have to make the decision.
And I’ve turned a lot to spirituality for, which is an ongoing exploration for me, but particularly during the last couple of years. And actually a Buddhist teacher named Adi Ashanti talking about John the Baptist and the moment of divinity coming down where you know that your journey is on a different path because you’re opening yourself up to what the Holy Spirit is. Holy Spirit is, I mean, the language comes from Christianity. It can speak to any tradition, but the idea of you are opening to what you know is true. And I think one of the things that overseers do that is so nefarious is it tries to bifurcate people inside of themselves from turning away from what they know is true.You know that you’re not supposed to be firing somebody. You know that that woman is going to go home and not be able to have to tell her children, “I don’t know how we’re going to have food next week.” It’s putting you in that position and the person could do it without the spectacular cruelty, but the point of pulling you into that is actually to siphon a bit of yourself off and to try to make you more cruel.
And so I knew for me the impetus to put me in a position where I basically would have to say, “I’m going to stand by and watch my get beaten up by somebody.” All of this is ludicrous to me after going through Title IX training and all of it, the idea that some university employees can beat up the and touch their genitals and heads and kick them and whatever is completely ludicrous. Also because we had to go through mandatory bystander intervention training as well. But I knew in that moment and I feel very grateful that my parents have my ancestors, other professors I had already seen do it. And the few days before, I knew if I’m in that position, that’s where I have to be. And that’s a blessing. Even if the consequences are difficult, that’s a blessing. To have lived with the guilt of saying I stood by and watched that happen, that would have been damnni.
And so I hope that my book and sharing my own story helps people think about when they see these dynamics and the moments where we are actually given the grace to make a decision, because there are all kinds of structural things that happen. And I don’t know whether my sacrificing my career or whatever, whether that will actually create structural change. I do know from other people, including a woman that cried with me on the line when she came to get a book signed who also lost their job. I do know that when we stand up for what we know is right, it is meaningful to other people and that there’s healing and grace that can happen in that. But I hope that the book, if nothing else, helps people understand this as a class dynamic. I do agree with the late Michael Brooks that we should be kind to people, but part of the kindness to people is actually saying no to people who are hurting them.
I hope that my act of kind of you’re not wanting to humiliate this worker, that’s a kindness. And sometimes we have the moments to protect the kind people from the metaphorical or literal whip. And I hope that the book helps people think about the ways that we can do that sometimes.
