Here is a very good critique of the Black Lives Matter movement:
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The whole post is great, not just the quote. I was part of the movement at my university when it first started but it kind of fizzled out for the reasons the linked author analyzes very well.
Black Lives Matter is not a movement. It’s a meme. It’s an advertising slogan cum consumer status item. That always seemed obvious to me, but I didn’t want to come right out and say it.
It’s also feeding on the corpse of the civil rights movement (more or less 1954 to 1968) which was the defining domestic political issue in the 20th century US but which ran it’s course and is now dead and won’t be revived no matter how much people want that.
The hard work of addressing racial anomosity and its by products in the US can’t be accomplished by memes or slogans but by no-holds-barred dialogue and lots of pain and discomfort on all sides which is why it won’t happen.
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I knew you couldn’t help yourself with your chickenshit dog-whistles.
” no-holds-barred dialogue and lots of pain and discomfort on all sides”
Ha, I wonder what you had in mind.
Remember folks, when racist people call for ‘an honest discussion of race’ what they mean is ‘please don’t make me feel bad for saying racist things’.
And you’re right, that’ll never happen.
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Yes, it’s not a movement. And memes tend to outlive their capacity to feel relevant.
Our Black Lives Matter events started out so well. We had the Michael Brown vigil, we had an exhibit of photography from Ferguson, we brought over youth organizers from East St Louis, but then everything culminated in a talk by a colleague who told us to “examine our privilege” and then repeated it many times, after which I wilted and died.
I’m not blaming anybody for this development, or lack of it, rather. I was there as much as everybody else. But it’s such a charged issue in this country, and I’ll always be an outsider. There’s nothing I seem to be able to say that doesn’t just make people angry.
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I’m going to post a preemptive fuck-you to Cliff’s future toxic replies:
The first black president singing Amazing Grace at the podium of a black church founded by a man who planned a slave revolt.
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I honestly wonder what a real movement with real leaders in the present moment would look like to you now vs a prolonged moment.
It’s difficult to declare something a movement or a moment when you’re in the middle of it. I bet the civil rights movement in the 1960s looked like a bunch of slogans with no one clear leader and a series of protests with unclear demands to most people. It’s not like people anointed Martin Luther King Jr the pope of civil rights at the time. Here, some memes:
#WeShallOvercome, #IAmAMan, #BlackIsBeautiful, #IHaveADream, #EndRacism
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I would hesitate to relegate something as heartfelt and as mournful as “Black Lives Matter” to the superficial category of “meme.” I agree that the linked article was very very good. I think that the trouble is there is nothing concrete to combat right now. The Civil Rights movement had specific goals: repeal Jim Crow laws, repeal segregation, repeal anti-miscegenation laws etc. etc. Now the issues are still profound but more nebulous (and perhaps all the more profound because they are nebulous.) There are very few laws that specifically enforce racial disparity and yet racial disparity exists.
Moreover, the dominant group (i.e. white people– particularly middle-to-upper class white people) refuses to acknowledge that de facto racism exists (even as de jure racism has been mostly eliminated.) People have tried talking about racial disparity in terms of privilege (i.e. it’s a privilege that white people don’t have to fear cops suffocating them for selling non regulation cigarettes) but white people have rejected the notion of privilege. Fine. So people begin to speak about systemic racisms and systemic injustice and white people scream that systemic injustices don’t exist– even as the body counts for black people pile higher and higher.
So now we are here. A world in which white mass murderers are misunderstood boys who get to have a trial and black men are executed without due press for stealing a pack of mini-cigars. Nothing can happen until the empowered group acknowledges that a deep-seeded, systemic, and grotesquely unfair racial issue exists in our country. It’s not “racial animosity.” That implies a two way street. This is a system that degrades, imprisons, and murders a substantial portion of our population.
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“I would hesitate to relegate something as heartfelt and as mournful as “Black Lives Matter” to the superficial category of “meme.””
That’s because you’re a fundamentally decent person.
Damn, all those black people getting rich off the #Blacklivesmatter merchandising and TV rights. Consumer culture gone wild, bro!
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Memes are not about getting rich. They are about feeling good in the moment. Like Occupy Wall Street. It all fizzled out with no consequences, no results. It was like a ritual dance where people enacted a protest and then everybody went home and forgot about it.
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I agree with everything except the privilege. White people not only embraced it, they invented it. I know a fellow who starts every other sentence with “I have white, male, upper middle class, cis, hetero privilege, and I feel horrible about this.” It’s always delivered without a trace of irony and with enjoyment he seems unaware of.
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It’s a way of forfitting responsibility. Michael Korda describes “Games of Weakness” as a simple game that superiors use in negotiation.
“I agree. You absolutely deserve a raise but upstairs is breating down my neck right now and there’s no way to push it through.”
“Hell yes, you should get that promotion but Smith on the board really has it in for me, so you can’t count on me for anything. A word from me would be poison. I’m doing you a favor by not recommending you.”
This is just a social version of that:
“What can I do? I’m a mere cis, hetero, upper class white male with enormous privilege?”
translates to: screw you, you’re on your own
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It’s more a way of saying “I’m better than you”, in my view.
The problem with the privilege theory is that nobody will accept it without an ulterior motive. And that ulterior motive is always some passive – aggressive version of humiliating people. Both privilege and intersectionality should die a horrible death as soon as possible.
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I’m halfway convinced that “privilege” and “intersecionality” were malignant viruses thought up by cultural conservatives (or some other dark forces) to hamstring anyone trying to bring about any positive change.
Both words function as roadsigns warding off debate and (ultimately) thought.
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“I think that the trouble is there is nothing concrete to combat right now. The Civil Rights movement had specific goals: repeal Jim Crow laws, repeal segregation, repeal anti-miscegenation laws etc. etc.”
That’s why it was so successful. There were lots of concrete small and doable goals along the way towards reaching the larger goals.
“There are very few laws that specifically enforce racial disparity and yet racial disparity exists”
The rest of your post is like a racial version of American exceptionalism – white people exceptionalism. It’s like Blacks have no agency at all and play no part in the current status quo.
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\ It’s like Blacks have no agency at all and play no part in the current status quo.
What should Blacks do, in your opinion?
Try to create special programs to help black students stay at school, for instance?
You talk about agency and painful conversations, but I can’t understand what you mean in practice.
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It’s like global warming. All one ever hears are the endless debates on whether it’s man-made. As if that mattered. Who cares who caused it? Let’s undo it, that’s what really matters.
The existence of hopeless slums like East St Louis, Gary Indiana, West Baltimore, South Bronx, etc is an absolutely bloody shame. They need to not exist , period, debate closed. But instead of just agreeing on that already we indulge in endless masturbatory discussions of privilege, agency, responsibility, and so on.
I feel like even just achieving a consensus that these slums are shameful would be huge because I’m yet to say it and not hear a “yes but” in response.
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Because if we accept what I’m saying, then we have our answer on the issue of reparations, for instance. For now, it’s all “I didn’t do anything, so why should I pay” when it should be “This is unacceptable, let’s all get together and change it.”
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And this is precisely the problem with the privilege theory. It leads us nowhere but towards the excruciating discussions of who did what to whom. And that a place where any real action goes to die.
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“What should Blacks do, in your opinion?”
Beyond ‘commit fewer crimes’ and ‘show more respect for education’ which is the core of my advice for all ethnic groups (including my own), that’s not my call.
One problem is that Blacks are caught in a historical hard place. Legal and illegal immigration destroyed their working class employment base before enough of them could move into the civil service (the traditional marker of any group that’s ‘arrived’ in the US) and create a stable middle class. Admittedly unrewarding employment was replaced with welfare which is demeaning and has had terrible social effects.
I remember back in the 1980s reading articles on how fast the black economy was growing (faster than the white economy which was in a boom) and then crack cocaine came along and many black communities still haven’t fully recovered.
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It’s a bit difficult to talk about “Black agency” in the face of mass murders and lethal police brutality. Where’s the agency here? Don’t commit petty crimes (like many white people do regularly and escape unscathed?); don’t go to church? I see repeated instances of stomach churching oppression. I am not sure that it’s my place to tell the oppressed that their “agency” contributes to their own oppression.
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This is, sadly, how I feel/felt about Idle No More. Two years ago, there was so much power invested in this movement, in the joy of watching Indigenous people take up public space, blockading highways, rallying together for issues as diverse as the Elsipogtog crisis (or Oka II) the passing of Bill C-45, the encroachment of Monsanto on sacred Hawaiian land, but… it fizzled. People showed up at round dances just to be seen, there was a loss in direction, non-Indigenous people started profiting off of it and taking selfies at Theresa Spence’s hunger strike winter camp, and we never really got back that sense of unity and momentum.
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I’m beginning to wonder if political movements are even possible any more. The Indignados in Spain started as such a massive, enormous movement, but all they ended up achieving was bringing the horrible conservative party to power.
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Your perception of this might also be biased by your physical location. I’m in the SF Bay Area right now and I’m sensing a major shift in attitudes and social norms when it comes to discussing race. We’ve made enough progress to elect a black president, which in turn brought all the closet racists out of the woodwork during a time when technology is making it possible for everyone to see everyone else’s opinions all at once.
My sense is that these “memes” bring short bursts of activism that might fizzle out, but they’re also going to keep happening and they have a cumulative effect.
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“I’m in the SF Bay Area right now and I’m sensing a major shift in attitudes and social norms when it comes to discussing race.”
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No, clearly black lives DON’T matter- they’re still killing EACH OTHER every damn day ! So tired of their bullshit whining….
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Go take a PILL, you unhinged HYSTERIC.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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