The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

When examining the moving parts of Blow’s proposal, it is essential to consider the document type. The Devil You Know is a self-proscribed Black power manifesto. It is also important to consider that Black people are the target audience for The Devil You Know. Blow’s manifesto is his ideological guide for achieving self-determination, and he hopes it will act as a catalyzing agent that galvanizes radical action.

In this light, it becomes apparent that Chapters 2 through 4 are the logical heart of Blow’s manifesto. As instigating forces, the “Push” and “Pull” chapters are long-form arguments that seek to prove the proposition’s value to the reader. In sum: Oppressive institutionalized racism is the “push,” socioeconomic opportunities and political power are the “pull,” and the “proposition” is Black regionalism to achieve Black self-determination. Further, it should be stressed that Blow sees political power as the ultimate means to achieve any meaningful form of Black self-determination. As he prudently points out, political representation derives from demographic densities (138).

Having already determined the Great Migration was a failure, Blow employs statistical evidence to convince the reader that the period’s legacy still impedes progress toward Black self-determination. With population density the key to power, modern institutional racism uses gentrification to further displace and divide Black communities. From 2000 to 2013, gentrification displaced 110,000 Black people from neighborhoods mainly in destination cities (96). When physical displacement is not available, institutional racism often employs the militant police and criminal justice system to suppress Black power. This form of violence is not regionally based but near equally employed across the entire country (75).

While believing that prejudice alone should incentivize migration, Blow acknowledges that socioeconomic opportunities are often what motivate action. Blow again uses statistical analysis to highlight the present opportunities and potentialities for Black people in the South: The South has a higher concentration of Black-owned businesses when compared to the rest of the country (123), and the “top three metropolitan areas for Black-owned companies were Memphis, Montgomery, and Atlanta” (124), all major cities within Blow’s new South. Additionally, compared to the rest of the country, Black household incomes experienced the largest significant increases in the South (124).

By voting-with-their-feet, Black people can reshape their communities and institutions while holding elected officials accountable to their Black constituents. In turn, a Black sphere of influence can cultivate Black talent and reinvest locally and regionally (134-37). Vermont’s changed demographics and Atlanta’s success already show the viability of the proposition.

Amid his ample statistical evidence is Blow’s attempt to establish an emotional connection to the audience. He uses his and others’ personal experiences to ground his arguments in the human condition. Chapter 3 personalizes the enduring commonalities of the Black American experience by comparing Blow’s and his son’s experience at gunpoint. It is a similar situation in which both men must surrender to the power of an unjust system to avoid extra-judicial death, a dark situation brilliantly illustrated when Blow recounts the officer who pulled him over declaring that “he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head, and no one would say anything about it” (70). Blow later recounts the police killing of Tamir Rice by focusing not on Tamir’s death but on the emotional trauma his mother and sister survived (74). Blow describes these experiences as members of “‘the club,’ the ignominious order to which so many Black men belong; the harassed and detained, the roughed up and beat down, the killed and the clinging to life” (70). Blow makes clear his aversion to repeating the sordid details of this phenomena, but he perseveres to demonstrate that the Great Migration failed to create any form of security for Black people (77).

Considering the 2020 George Floyd protests, and the many marches and movements beforehand, Blow expresses his belief that it is foolish to think repeating the same displays of protest and disobedience will create change, particularly in many destination cities (77-79). Additionally, he worries that protest and activism are becoming “an exercise in credentialing” (117) rather than a meaningful form of civil disobedience. It is from this cynicism that Blow finds the radical answer he sought from many Black intellectuals and civil rights icons: hope.

Although Blow explicitly discusses hope and community in the South later in the book, he highlights these themes here to establish a goal and encourage Black people to embrace his proposition. He questions the notion that this idea is radical, calling radicalism “a term so ubiquitously applied and awarded without circumspection that it has nearly been stripped of substance” (142). But finding hope is a radical proposition in a world built on white supremacy; Blow finds hope in his plan and within the incipient Black communities it will form. He believes these communities are fertile places for Blackness, acknowledging, “I have known the nurturing, protective aura of majority-Black places” (130). When faced with criticism of his agenda, particularly charges that his plan is counterintuitive and inspired by segregation, Blow rebukes his critics by stating that “Black people need no permission to seek their own liberation” (51) and “Black people in America must engineer their own Zion” (114).