Book Review: Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements, by Deva R. Woodly

• Published date: 01 June 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231165686
• Author: Erica Townsend-Bell
• Date: 01 June 2023

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(3) 581 –591

© The Author(s) 2023

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements,

by Deva R. Woodly, New York: Oxford University Press, 2022, 283 pp.

Reviewed by: Erica Townsend-Bell, Department of Political Science, Oklahoma State

University, Stillwater OK, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917231165686

Deva Woodly’s Reckoning is a deep and illuminating dive into the Movement

for Black Lives (M4BL)1 and the shifts in worldview philosophy and future

visioning it promotes. It is a difficult book to review because Woodly has

done such a masterful job at examining and analyzing the movement itself, its

contribution to American Politics specifically, and democracy broadly. But

try I will.

The big-picture contribution of the book is outlined within the subtitle. At

base, Woodly’s argument is that social movements are a necessary and recur-

ring condition of democracy, and an essential part of the democratic appara-

tus. They are democratic institutions in their own right, and thus it is

impossible to offer a full theorization of democracy that does not account for

them. In this understanding, movements offer three principal functions—

antidote, imagination, and re/politicization. First, the antidote. Movements

make apparent the inaccuracies of the interest group pluralism model, and

join the extensive set of entities that underscore the point that the powers of

voice, inclusion, and representation are not enough. Importantly, they do not

accept the fact of systemic inequities as unchangeable status quo, but rather

see these as problems in need of intervention on a spectrum ranging from

reform to excision. In doing so, movements push back on the lens of despair

through which modern politics is commonly viewed, and raise new notions

of what public life should look like. This is the imaginative component, and

1165686PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231165686Political TheoryBook Reviews

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1. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) refers to the semi-federated expansion

of the Twitter hashtag and nascent movement Black Lives Matter (BLM). They

are often used interchangeably, and that approach is adopted here.