As
promised, the research (your welcome!):
This is Black Li(fe) Matter(s) (The good guys):
This is Black Liv(es)
Matter (The Assholes)
(Be sure to read the manifesto at the end of the
Editorial)
A
recent survey by the Pew Research Center
found that more than two-thirds of
Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement. The high level of backing
raises the question of how much the public knows about BLM.
On the surface, BLM presents
itself as a grassroots movement dedicated to the noble tasks of fighting
racism and police brutality. A deeper dive shows that BLM is a Marxist
revolutionary movement aimed at transforming the United States — and the
entire world.
-
BLM's founders openly
admit to being Marxist
ideologues. Their self-confessed mentors
include former members of
the
Weather Underground, a radical "leftwing" terrorist group that sought to
bring a communist revolution to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.
BLM is
friendly with Venezuelan dictator
Nicolas Maduro, whose socialist policies have brought economic collapse and
untold misery to millions of people there.
-
BLM
states that it wants to abolish: the nuclear family; police and
prisons; heteronormativity; and capitalism. BLM and groups associated with
it are demanding a moratorium on rent, mortgages and utilities, and
reparationsfor a long list of grievances. BLM leaders have
threatened to "burn down the
system" if their demands are not met. They are also
training militias based on the
militant Black Panther movement of the 1960s.
-
BLM, which is not registered
as a non-profit organization for tax purposes, has raised tens of millions
of dollars in donations. BLM's finances are opaque. BLM's donations are
collected by
ActBlue, a fundraising platform
linked to the Democratic Party and causes associated with it. Indeed, BLM
leaders have
confirmed that
their immediate
goal is to remove U.S. President Donald J. Trump from
office.
-
Most importantly, the main
premise of BLM is based on a lie —
namely that the United States is
"at war" with African Americans. Blacks are
not being systematically targeted
by whites. Fifty years after the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, more
than three in four Americans, including most whites and blacks,
agreed that real progress has
been made in getting rid of racial discrimination. Scholars have
noted that BLM's inability to
produce solid empirical evidence of systemic racism explains why its leaders
continue to "broaden and deepen" the indictment to include the entire
American social and political order.
BLM in
its Own Words
"We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia
[Garza] in particular, we're trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We
are super versed on ideological theories." — BLM co-founder
Patrisse
Cullors, July 22, 2015.
"
If this country doesn't give us what we want, then we will burn
down this system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking
figuratively. I could be speaking literally. It's a matter of
interpretation.... I just want black liberation and black sovereignty
, by any
means necessary." — BLM activist
Hank
Newsome, June 25, 2020.
"Stay in the streets! The system is throwing every diversionary
and de-mobilizing tactic at us. We are fighting to end policing and prisons as
a system which necessitates fighting white supremacist capitalist
heteropatriarchal imperialism. Vet your comrades and stay focused." —
BLM Chicago, Twitter, June 16, 2020.
"There's no such thing as 'blue lives.' There is no hue of a blue
life. Being a police officer is an occupation. It's a job. 'All lives matter'—
it's like saying the sky is blue. I haven't heard how police are on the right
side of history." — BLM co-founder
Alicia
Garza, ktvu.com, March 30,
2018.
"It's hundreds of years of generational oppression and trauma and
infrastructural racism that impacts our bodies and makes our bodies more
vulnerable to something like a COVID-19." — BLM co-founder
Patrisse
Cullors, Hollywood Reporter, June 2,
2020.
"We say #DefundThePolice and #DefundDepOfCorrections because they
work in tandem. The rise of mass incarceration occurred alongside the rise of
militarized and mass policing. They must be abolished as a system." —
BLM Chicago, June 13, 2020.
"We are anti-capitalist. We believe and understand that Black
people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized
capitalist system." —
Movement for Black
Lives (M4BL), of which BLM is a part, June 5,
2020.
"'All Lives Matter,' is little more than a racist dog whistle
that attempts to both delegitimize centuries of claims of global anti-Black
oppression and position those who exhibit tremendous pride in their Blackness
as enemies of the state. Well, we are enemies of any racist, sexist, classist,
xenophobic state that sanctions brutality and murder against marginalized
people who deserve to live as free people." —
Feminista Jones, BLM activist.
"We stand with Palestinian civil society in calling for targeted
sanctions in line with international law against Israel's colonial, apartheid
regime." —
BLM UK, June 28, 2020.
"We are an ABOLITIONIST movement. We do not believe in reforming
the police, the state or the prison industrial complex." —
BLM
UK, June 21, 2020.
"Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is
Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have
been. In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in,
guess where they went? EGYPT! Not Denmark. Tear them down." — BLM leader
Shaun King, June 22, 2020.
"We are living in political moment where for the first time in a
long time we are talking about alternatives to capitalism." —
Alicia
Garza, BLM co-founder, March
2015.
"Anti-racism is anti-capitalist, and vice versa. There are no two
ways around it. To be an anti-racist must demand a complete rejection of
business as usual. An end to racism demands transformation of the global
political-economic setup." —
Joshua
Virasami, BLM UK, June 8,
2020.
Brief
History
Black Lives Matter
began in July 2013, when George
Zimmerman, a 28-year-old neighborhood watch coordinator of Hispanic-German
descent, was
acquitted of homicide charges in
the 2012 fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black high school
student, in Sanford, Florida.
Alicia Garza, a black woman from Oakland, California, posted to
Facebook what she described as a "love letter to black folks." She
wrote: "I continue to be surprised
at how little black lives matter. Black people. I love you. I love us. Our
lives matter." Patrisse Cullors, a black woman from Los Angeles, California,
then
put Garza's Facebook post on Twitter, with the hashtag
#BlackLivesMatter. After seeing the hashtag, Opal Tometi, a first-generation
Nigerian American woman from Phoenix, Arizona,
partnered with Garza and Cullors to establish an internet presence. Tometi
purchased the domain name and built BLM's digital platform, including
social media accounts, where they encouraged people to tell their
stories.
The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter
gained national attention in August
2014, after the
fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by Darren
Wilson, a white police officer. The hashtag was
ubiquitous during riots in November
2014, when a grand jury
decided not to indict Wilson. By
2018, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter had been
tweeted over 30 million
times.
Since its beginnings seven years ago, Black Lives Matter has
grown into a movement with nearly
40 chapters and thousands of activists in the United States, Canada and Great
Britain. What began as an effort to seek justice for black people has become
far more expansive — and more radical — in its demands.
What's
the Agenda?
BLM's worldview is based on a mix of far-left theoretical
frameworks, including critical race theory and intersectional theory. Critical
race theory
posits that racism is
systemic, based on a
system of
white supremacy and therefore a
permanent feature of American life.
Intersectional theory
asserts that people are often
disadvantaged by multiple sources of oppression: their race, class, gender
identity, sexual orientation, religion, and other identity
markers.
Black Lives Matter and other purveyors of critical race theory
and intersectional theory reject individual accountability for behavior,
criminal or otherwise, because, according to them, blacks are
systemic
and
permanent victims of racism. Such racism,
according to BLM, can only be defeated by completely dismantling the
American economic, political and social system and rebuilding it from scratch
— according to Marxist principles.
Black Lives Matter seeks to
replace the foundational cornerstones of American society: 1) abolish
the Judeo-Christian concept of the traditional nuclear family, the basic
social unit in America; 2) abolish the police and dismantle the prison system;
3) mainstream transgenderism and delegitimize so-called heteronormativity (the
belief that heterosexuality is the norm); and 4) abolish capitalism (a free
economy) and replace it with communism (a government-controlled
economy).
Abolish
the Traditional Nuclear Family
In its policy agenda, Black Lives Matter
states that it is committed to
abolishing the traditional nuclear family:
"We disrupt the Western-prescribed
nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended
families and 'villages' that collectively care for one another, especially
our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are
comfortable."
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
rejected the traditional family
because, according to them, the nuclear family, as an economic unit, sustains
the capitalist system. Engels
wrote: "The care and education of
the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike,
whether they are legitimate or not."
Many experts have noted that African Americans need stronger, not
weaker, families. In March 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an Assistant
Secretary of Labor under U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, wrote a
groundbreaking
report, which focused on the roots
of black poverty in the United States. The report linked the many problems
plaguing African Americans — crime, joblessness, school failure,
out-of-wedlock births — to the breakdown of the traditional nuclear
family.
When the Moynihan Report was written in 1965, 25% of black
children in the United States were born out of wedlock. Fifty years later, in
2015, more than 75% of black children were born out of wedlock,
according to the National Center
for Health Statistics.
Twenty years after the Moynihan Report, Glenn Loury, the first
black economist to earn tenure at Harvard University,
lauded Moynihan as a
prophet:
"The bottom stratum of the black
community has compelling problems which can no longer be blamed solely on
white racism, and which force us to confront fundamental failures in black
society. The societal disorganization among poor blacks, the lagging
academic performance of black students, the disturbingly high rate of
black-on-black crime, and the alarming increase in early unwed pregnancies
among blacks now loom as the primary obstacles to black
progress."
Thomas Sowell, an African American economist and social theorist
opined that the Moynihan Report of 1965 "may have been the last honest
government report on race." By contrast, African American civil rights
activists
criticized Moynihan for "blaming
the victim."
Abolish
Police and Prisons
BLM
states that it wants to "defund" and ultimately "abolish" police and prisons
in the United States. Police officers would be replaced by educators, social
workers, mental health experts and religious leaders, who, according to BLM,
would bring down the levels of crime.
In an interview with
Newsweek, BLM co-founder Cullors
said:
"The freedom of mostly white
affluent people is predicated on the unfreedom of black people. So, law
enforcement is not actually used to keep black people safe. They're used to
patrol, occupy, harass, abuse, often hunt and mostly, what we've seen is
kill our communities.
"Policing and incarceration are part
of a continuum. The policing is the first response and then incarceration is
the last response. And these two systems rely on each other very, very
deeply. We have to be working on getting rid of both
systems."
In an interview with the
Hollywood Reporter, Cullors
explained that she is not merely an
activist but a modern-day abolitionist:
"An abolitionist believes in a world
where police and prisons are no longer weaponized as a tool for public
safety."
BLM co-founder Opal Tometi, in an interview with
The New
Yorker, claimed that policing in America has its roots in managing slavery
and therefore is systemically racist. She
explained:
"We have been fighting and
advocating to stop a war on black lives. And that is how we see it — this is
a war on black life. And people understand that this system is filled with
all sorts of inequality and injustice, and that implicit bias and just
outright racism is embedded in the way that policing is done in this nation
— and when you think about it historically, it was founded as a slave
patrol. The evolution of policing was rooted in
that...."
Washington, D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham has
warned that underfunding police
departments could cause an increase in excess force by police
officers:
"The number one thing that
contributes to excessive force in any police agency is when you underfund
it. If you underfund a police agency, it impacts training, it impacts
hiring, it impacts your ability to develop good
leaders."
The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the city's police
union,
said that budget cuts would be
"extremely irresponsible":
"Cutting the LAPD budget means
longer responses to 911 emergency calls, officers calling for backup won't
get it, and rape, murder and assault investigations won't occur or will take
forever to initiate, let alone complete."
Polls show that most Americans — including most blacks — do not
share BLM's views on abolishing the police. A recent Rasmussen's report
found that 63% of American adults
"regard being a police officer as one of the most important jobs in our
country today." Furthermore, 64% are concerned that the current anti-police
sentiment will lead to fewer people willing to become police officers, and
that it will "reduce public safety in the community where they live."
Importantly, according to the Rasmussen report, "Blacks (67%) are the most
concerned about public safety where they live, compared to 63% of whites and
65% of other minority Americans."
Abolish
Heteronormativity
"We are self-reflexive and do the
work required to dismantle cisgender [a term for people whose gender
identity matches their sex assigned at birth] privilege and uplift Black
trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be
disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic
violence....
An academic study titled, "The 'Queering' of Black Lives Matter,"
describes in great detail how
issues of sexual identity and gender orientation have taken priority over
BLM's original focus on police brutality. The heavy focus on sexuality has led
to
accusations that BLM is "a gay
movement masquerading as a black one."
Two of the three founders of BLM describe themselves as "black
queer females." One, Alicia Garza, is married to a biracial transgender male.
Patrice Cullors
describes herself as "polyamorous."
In interview after interview, Garza and Cullors raise the issue of "black
trans and gender nonconforming people," often to the exclusion of police
brutality.
In an interview with
The New Yorker, Garza
said that she is not interested in
the American tradition of live and let live: "We want to make sure that people
are not saying, 'Well, whatever you are, I don't care.' No, I want you to
care. I want you to see all of me."
Abolish
Capitalism and the "Patriarchal" System
BLM equates capitalism with racism in the same way that its
Antifa cousins
equatecapitalism with fascism. BLM's views on capitalism are
based on the concept of "racial
capitalism," a term created by the late Cedric Robinson, who
posited that capitalism and racism
are two sides of the same coin: both are, according to Robinson, dependent on
slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.
The British wing of Black Lives Matter UK
states: "We're guided by a commitment to dismantle imperialism,
capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that
disproportionately harm black people in Britain and around the
world."
The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), an "ecosystem" of over 170
Black-led organizations, including BLM,
states:
"We are anti-capitalist: We believe
and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the
current global racialized capitalist system."
M4BL
demands "
a reconstruction of the economy to ensure Black communities
have collective ownership" and "a progressive restructuring of tax codes at
the local, state, and federal levels to ensure a radical and sustainable
redistribution of wealth."
M4BL also
demands reparations for past and continuing harms:
"The government, responsible
corporations and other institutions that have profited off of the harm they
have inflicted on Black people — from colonialism to slavery through food
and housing redlining, mass incarceration, and surveillance — must repair
the harm done. This includes:
"Full and free access for all Black
people (including undocumented and currently and formerly incarcerated
people) to lifetime education; a guaranteed minimum livable income for all
Black people; reparations for the wealth extracted from our communities
through environmental racism, slavery, food apartheid, housing
discrimination and racialized capitalism."
The demands of BLM and M4BL are similar to those found in the
Communist Manifesto, which
include:
"Abolition of property in land and
application of all rents of land to public purposes; A heavy progressive or
graduated income tax; Extension of factories and instruments of production
owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the
improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common
plan."
BLM's
Immediate Demand
BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors recently
confirmed that the immediate goal
is to remove U.S. President Donald J. Trump from office:
"Trump not only needs to not be in
office in November, but he should resign now. Trump needs to be out of
office. He is not fit for office. And so, what we are going to push for is a
move to get Trump out. While we're also going to continue to push and
pressure Joe Biden around his policies and relationship to policing and
criminalization. That's going to be important. But our goal is to get Trump
out."
THE MANIFESTO OF OUR
STRUGGLE
