On the heels of Ibram Kendi’s disgrace, people started to speak about the terrible cost of the BLM:
I know people who participated in the BLM protests. They did it with very good intentions. They sincerely wanted to do good. But the result was that a large number of black people died, lost their lives because of these well-intentioned protests. This is hard for the well-intentioned to accept but that’s the only way. The consequences are too serious to keep pretending this didn’t happen.
Coleman Hughes has always been somewhat heterodox in his thinking and writing. I’m not sure people who are pro BLM will hear or listen to what he has to say. If they hear, they are likely to dismiss him. He’s a smart guy.
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Wait, so… what happened to Kendi? I missed that one.
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He got into a big scandal at his college where it came out that he embezzled all the money, produced no research, and fired all the black people. :-)))
Somebody, please, donate a link to the whole mess?
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I would correct one of your statements. Just in case, people these days seem quite eager to lawyer up on the flimsiest excuse. Kendi is not being accused of embezzlement but it’s true that somehow under lax accounting rules he seems unable to explain how the money was used or what exactly it was spent on.
Ah, Thanks Clarissa and Avi for bringing me up to speed.
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Hi Clarissa. From your posts back in 2014 you seemed pretty outraged by some of the events that also outraged people who participated in BLM protests. Have your views changed since then (and if so, how?), or is your objections more consequential in that that you don’t like the practical consequences of where things have gone?
Excellent question! I participated in the very first BLM protests after Michael Brown’s death and completely supported the BLM. I tend to be very literal, so I thought that the movement was going to be about the extremely high violent death count of black people in places like East St Louis. I sincerely thought this was going to be about finally paying attention to the mini-Holocaust black people experience daily in such places. I care about that and I never stopped.
But then it turned out that the movement wasn’t about making black lives matter. It turned out nobody cares about black lives. The movement isn’t about black people at all. It’s about white people. It’s about oohing and aahing about the non-existent racism of white people. In the meantime, East St Louis is as tragic as ever. And everybody is as indifferent to it as ever. I’m still outraged by that but I have failed to find a single person who feels about it as I do. Good, anti-racist, well-meaning people scoff, puff, and roll their eyes every time I bring it up. If a black person’s death can’t be used to narcissistically make it all about whites, to hell with that black person.
I’m so angry about this, I have no words.
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It’s easy enough for them to ignore black on black violence. If white people were threatened the reaction would be rather different, not that this is likely to happen in the US.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2023/10/03/the-long-bloody-road-ahead-for-south-africa/
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This is the original poster (I sometimes post here as YZ), thank you for answering and for clarifying.
Do you see a practical way forward to address the actual issues you care about? If there were a protest movement (or other movement, I don’t know) to address the high violent death rate in black communities, how would you recognize it?
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I thought we had that movement in the very first days of BLM. But then it got very deftly, very insistently turned to the non-existent subject of “police brutality”. I remember that moment very well. Smooth-talking operators came in from the city and hijacked our protest. All of the original participants (we were a small group) were pushed out.
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Back in my more innocent days, I met a very interesting fellow– exquisitely educated, smooth, international. Back and forth to Africa a lot, spoke several exciting languages. So what do you do for a living? I work for an NGO. What’s an NGO? It stands for non-governmental organization. Oh, uh… is that like a charity? What does your NGO do? –I thought international charity work was all about clean water, rural medical services, malaria prevention, that sort of thing– I was so ready to believe this dude was a hero.
And the thing is, he never broke stride or looked awkward, and he had really really stylish glasses, but even though I tried re-formulating the question several times, he never actually said what his NGO did. Smooth talker though. That was pretty damn sketchy, and the guy was charming about it. I thought for a while he must be a spy, working for some kind of nonprofit as a cover. But thinking about it later… spies have better cover stories than that, don’t they? A real spy would be ready with a handy “oh, I coordinate drinking-well installations with local tribal leaders” or somesuch, right? No, that dude was probably taking rich people’s money to destabilize third-world governments, foment revolution, or talk poor people into selling their children for first-world pharmaceutical testing or some shady sh*t like that.
That guy made me re-think the whole NGO/nonprofit thing. Like it all sounds very nice in theory, but actually meeting that guy cast a very big shadow, and everything I’ve learned since about that scene supports the impression I came away with after that conversation. Whatever that dude did, he was a professional, and it wasn’t good. Found out through the grapevine later, incidentally, that after that chance meeting the fellow had spent a bit of time in a Congolese prison– again for nobody-knew-what reasons– but was sprung by some diplomacy and negotiating.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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