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A Thread About [Black Lives Matter]
The Ender
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
What is Black Lives Matter (which henceforth will be abbreviated as 'BLM' in this OP)?
BLM is an explicitly non-partisan organization that encourages & schedules protests to build public awareness and attempt to apply pressure regarding police & public violence inflicted against black persons in the United States (and is expanding to cover international issues). The org primarily operates via public gatherings & social media; it was formed by Opal Tometi and Alicia Garza following a year of high profile slayings of black persons by police officers & consequential community backlash (both in terms of peaceful protest & vigils as well as violent rioting, arson & looting).
What are the goals & interests of BLM?
The current mission statement of BLM:
Black Lives Matters is an affirmation and embrace of the resistance & resilience of Black people.
And, to quote from their response to the DNC's pledge of support to their cause:
We demand freedom for Black bodies, justice for Black lives, safety for Black communities, and rights for Black people. We demand action, not words, from those who purport to stand with us.
I don't want to put words in their mouths, but I think it's reasonable to say that they wish for a very swift end to the brutal violence & distorted lens through which the legal system sees & judges black people. This seems like a more than fine goal to me.
BLM also provides a concrete platform that they wish to see implemented, which they call Campaign Zero. Full credit to @AngelHedgie for giving that topic it's own thread.
OP's opinions on BLM?
I am very torn on the organization right now. Just as one example: this is their response to the DNC expressing support & solidarity with them. On one hand, they're absolutely right: the Democratic party has been an absolute blight on the lives of black people in the south. They were the longest-standing allies of the KKK, for example. Talk is also cheap in politics, and everyone has heard the same tiresome promises over and over again about how we'll eventually get around to creating some sort of equal laying field for the PoC. When? Well we're not so sure about that.
On the other hand, rejecting an offer of solidarity from an entity as large as the DNC strikes me as having the wrong attitude, and while I can appreciate that patience is pretty spent by now, I'm afraid that more is always required in politics. I also disagree that True Change (TM) is strictly the domain of people marching in the street.
I dislike the cavalier stance that BLM has taken in the past when violence overruns a protest (re-publishing images of beaten & bloodied police officers as war trophies, for example), as I feel that this is totally counter-productive to their goals. At the same time, I honestly don't know what to say to a community of people that have been pushed far, far beyond any reasonable level of tolerance, who have repeatedly been told to just politely sit and wait for change to come drifting down from Heaven.
I agree that applying pressure mostly on the left is a good strategy, but I also feel that the implementation of that strategy so far (taking over speeches, mobbing camera crews, yelling website slogans) is, again, counter-productive. The Id that I think one might want to aim for is what Malcolm X captured in that famous exchange:
“Do you consider yourself ‘militant’?”
“No, I consider myself Malcolm.”
That aside, they're a good organization full of good people with a blunt message that hasn't been echoed nearly enough in a culture that does not at all currently appear to appreciate that Black Lives Matter every bit as much as anything else matters.
Things I hope the thread can be used to discuss:
Civil rights, both historical & contemporary; community organization; protest strategies; data about how ridiculously racist the systems in the U.S. are; arguments & data regarding means to make the system less racist;
Things I hope that the thread can perhaps avoid:
'White lives matter' rhetoric; demonizing or championing protests that devolve into riots; partisan rhetorical shots about which party is most racist (BLM seems to feel that this is a distraction, and that the systemic racism transcends the party system. I agree with that assessment).
With Love and Courage
The Ender on
+2
This discussion has been closed.
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-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
The AG's office and Dept. of Justice continuing to pressure local and state governments into greater accountability, transparency, and standards of practice is probably the most helpful thing that the federal government can continue to do.
This is is so strongly intertwined with the culture of police corruption and abuse that it's hard to say they're even really separate issues.
One thing I know is not my place is to tell BLM how they should be demonstrating.
If they won't rally voters for a party ,which you know is how you enact change then they're just as worthless as Occupy.
I wonder sometimes if most people understand that the civil rights movement was an uncanny political player and PR machine not just protesters.
Okay, so this is perhaps not the best thing to be doing: cooking-up the most extreme hypothetical to negatively paint with the What If brush. Is there precedent for BLM members murdering police officers and making al Qaeda esque videos of the act? No. Not even remotely close.
So maybe let's stick to hypotheticals, if we use them, that aren't bent to the furthest possible extreme.
While not nearly as bad, there's that thing they did at the Medicaid / Social Security event in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, at which Bernie Sanders was to speak.
That... wasn't great PR, for BLM. Made them look like a bunch of crazies. So while @spacekungfuman cites an extreme example, I feel that he is on the mark, without a defined leadership structure, I absolutely agree that it will turn into OWS.
Leaderless movements are the new normal. If BLM or OWS had a leader you would be making the conversation about an individual instead of the issues at hand. If someone acting badly using the same hashtag as those fighting for social justice is enough to turn you off social justice, then you were never going to support social justice to begin with.
This is a productive conversation to be having; how to be a good ally. If I had to hazard a guess, our step one ought to always be Shut up and listen. PoC/queer/other minority groups have a unique perspective and are in the best position to state their own needs. A well-intentioned reframing of the issues in more comfortable classist terms, for example, is a good way to be a Bad Ally *cough*Bernie*cough*.
Read up on intersectionality, ableism, tone policing, derailing, white feminism, cultural appropriation, and what it means to check your privilege.
Another good example is gay rights. Trying to pick one or two people who were the face and brains of that movement doesn't work.
Occupy Wall Street was limited by the scope of their actions, not by the nature of the movement.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
And I'm not convinced that a relatively non-hierarchical movement/organization is always less effective or powerful than a more hierarchical one. I think it depends on the context.
They are playing a role in our politics right now, despite being ideal-driven instead of leader-driven.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I think there are trade-offs between movements without figureheads vs movements with them.
To keep this tangential: MLK was both a boon to and an impediment to civil rights, for example. While his command of language & organizational skills were excellent, his faults as a human (and arguably things that weren't even really faults, like the fact that he really digged girls) were used to blackmail him into submissive posture on some issues (he knew that anything used to smear him would also rub off on the movement as a whole).
Malcolm X provides an even clearer example of some of the trouble one can run into with a figurehead.
Distributed leadership, with no clear human icon, lacks the single vector for attack & criticism. Of course, it also lacks the singular voice & organizational talent; but to say it's just weaker is, in my opinion, incorrect.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Well, that may not be strictly true - the end goal of BLM is to change white minds, and you have one of those! Your support and insight may be more valuable than you might think, but it's important to be sensitive in how you may express those.
Steam: adamjnet
There is a list of 8-9 demands somewhere that were for the most part completely agreeable and things we should be doing as a country.
http://www.joincampaignzero.org/#vision
This should absolutely be in the OP if it isnt.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Sanders was working on that platform before the distribution. Most of the material was already on his site, just without its own section. All they did was make him release it a few days earlier. And in exchange, a whole group of his supporters missed the chance to see him speak and BLM picked up bad publicity.
Those 10 points are exceptionally not all that demanding, and there's no real good reason I can think of to not implement them. They're not even particularly cost-intensive.
I don't agree with this. It's not uncommon nor inadvisable to be turned off on a movement when said movement does something completely out of line. It breeds copycats and not all new movements who imitate them are going to be ones you support or even want to exist. Can you imagine some traditionalist storming a pro-LGBTQ+ rally? Not cool, right? It's why I, as a black person, was so turned off when they silenced Bernie. It sets a dangerous precedent and communicates ideas I'm not comfortable with. I still support BLM but that's more out of self-interest than any belief in their rightness. If an alternative appeared to be as successful then I'd jump ship in a heartbeat.
Riots.
People already in power taking up the cause.
Corporate pressure upon private interests.
Community action and policy.
Vote for representatives that will... represent their interests
Riding buses through segregationist southern states & getting beat-up while not resisting attackers.
This would be uncool not because disruption is an inherently uncool tactic but because the cause of the interrupters in this case is uncool and, more importantly, the established power dynamics do not create a need for such a tactic when people have a voice already.
If Bernie Sanders showed up somewhere and stormed the stage, everyone would rightfully say "Dude, you literally have the ability to broadcast your views on TV whenever you want". BLM activists are responding to being ignored or silenced in the ways that they are able.
Furthermore, it is fallacious to attribute to a movement the actions of everyone claiming to be on the side of that movement. If I was to start claiming association with the hate group Stormfront and also working as a volunteer feeding the homeless, that doesn't mean that it would suddenly be sensible to ascribe a "charitable volunteers" label to Stormfront. It is necessary to divorce the merits of an idea from the proponents of the idea.
I want to reply but I don't know how to separate quotes while still keeping the attributions in tact. Can someone tell me how to do it?
1: Click the paragraphs symbol above and select quote from the dropdown.
2: Edit the first part to have =Postername beside quote.
3: paste the part you want to reply to between the two quote boxes.
Should look like this
typing what I put above looks like this:
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
The thing is I suspect the assholes wouldn't see it that way and will be apt to push their advantage. The Average American is sadly prone to a simplistic view of things which is why everyone thinks Rachel Dolezal= Caitlyn Jenner when she really, really doesn't.
If you were a faceless volunteer then fine but if you were a CEO of a nonprofit devoted to helping the homeless then you'd come under serious fire and so would your organization. A real life example of this is what happened to the Chik-fil-A CEO and the resulting boycott of Chik-fil-A restersaunts for his antigay views.
This all turns back to the fact that we frequently have and continue to attribute the actions of a movements proponents to the movement itself. Its why seeding rabble-rousers among a group of peaceful protesters has been an effective tact to destroy causes for centuries. BLM, no matter how leaderless, is going to get blamed when there 'members' fuckup.
The risk with being leaderless is that some BLM group could decide to crash the stage at another Bernie event, something that at this point would probably be counterproductive since he's now dialed up the racial justice messaging and hired new peeps to help with that.
I think the biggest issue for BLM is that a lot of what they want done needs to be done at the local and state level. In some ways that's a harder slog because instead of a single target (the federal government) there's 50 different states and an ungodly number of municipalities and counties that need to have pressure put on them.
It's also hard for a headless group to have w strategy at all. Who is going to direct BLM to work at the state level when no one can direct BLM at all?
That is a conversation that can happen internally. Opponents of the movement want a leader to point to in order to easily condemn the movement without having to talk about substantive issues.
I dunno, I think it very much can cut both ways. Take the "chant" that happened at some state fair protest over the weekend that implied they were advocating for violence against police. That isn't going to help anything and will likely further entrench opponents. A strong leader can come out and say "knock it off, we don't support that kind of rhetoric and you're hurting the cause".
What is meant by the Broken Window laws proposal with regard to trespassing or disturbing the peace (for example)?
I'm not sure how one addresses these without the police, without its worst-case-scenario devolving into a similar shit-show?
(See also Treyvon Martin, or any of the shit that came up when I Googled 'trespassing shooting death' expecting to find articles about cops pulling the trigger)
It seems to me that Body Cameras (6) and Training (7) would be a better policy focus. If you need an active legal situation defused, you should be able to rely on trained professionals. I think the real problem is that the police, our designated point-of-contacts in these matters, cannot always be relied on to be both trained and professional.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/200184/campaign-zero-a-ten-point-plan-against-police-brutality
tl;dr - You are rehashing SKFM's argument in that thread.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. My position is that your vision of political organization and placing priority on figureheads would serve primarily to enable the opposition and that there will always be a fringe element of any movement to serve as a convenient scapegoat for already-calcified prejudice.
You are basically outlining an approach that only works for true believers. How can you expect to convince people to support a cause by telling them to shut up and to only support the cause in ways that some subset of its supporters like? It is incredibly alienating and dismissive of anyone who is not a member of the minority group. In my view, and group that is literally not interested in my views is not a group that is interested in my support. Isn't part of inclusion giving everyone the opportunity to be heard?
The notion is that currently police place high priority on 'petty crime' under the assumption that to do otherwise would enable an area to deteriorate (one graffiti tag leads to more, etc) but in so doing they have effectively taken a position of hassling people for non-crimes. Viewed in light of the fact that any interaction with the police has the potential to turn deadly and especially so for black people, this is a very relevant bone to pick.