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White people have gentrified Black Lives Matter. It’s a problem
By ERIN B. LOGANSTAFF WRITER
SEP. 4, 20203 AM
WASHINGTON — In July, a woman folded her body yoga-style onto the asphalt of a Portland street, her breasts and vagina exposed before a line of police officers. She said the movement for racial justice provoked a “very deep feminine place” within and that her “nakedness is political.” We don’t know the woman’s identity, but she has called herself a “non-Black person of color.” Some on Twitter described her actions as “stunning and brave.” I found it a grotesque display of privilege.
Black Lives Matter was once shunned by the white establishment. But now, it’s chic. And that’s a problem.Here in Washington, where the phrase is plastered on the street that runs perpendicular to the White House, white Black Lives Matters protesters joined Black colleagues in shouting at a restaurant patron who had declined to raise her fist in solidarity. One of the white people there, Chuck Modiano, 50, a journalist, told me: “In the moment, it was hard for me to understand that though she said she supported BLM, she did not raise her fist.”
BLM banners fly from homes in Silver Lake. BLM posters are taped to the windows of Portland coffee shops. BLM hashtags fill users’ bios on Twitter and Tinder.
Institutions including Uber, Airbnb and the National Football League have embraced Black Lives Matter. (Yes, the same NFL that shunned Colin Kaepernick four years ago for kneeling in protest of police brutality now issues calls to “end racism” in their endzones.)
This jolt of white solidarity is not imaginary. According to a June poll from Monmouth University, 49% of white Americans now say police are more likely to use excessive force against a Black culprit. In 2016, that figure was 25%. But will it last?
White people have been involved in Black liberation efforts for centuries, from abolition in the 19th century to civil rights in the 20th, according to Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a history professor at Ohio State.
Some white supporters bolstered the original Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in response to the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014. And in this second big wave of BLM protests that began in May after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, an unprecedented number of white people flooded the streets.
Young people like me (I’m 25) were the largest age cohort among the protesters. One reason young people protested is that they had been cooped up in their homes due to the global pandemic, said Douglas McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford who studies social movements. He told me that the dire economy, coupled with disdain for the current president, is also a factor in a large number of young people in the streets.
In other words, it can be hard to disaggregate young people’s rage about the loss of life, hope, jobs and opportunities from their righteous solidarity with Black protesters.
But Jeffries told me that, in broad terms, there is a distinction between the motivations of white and Black protesters.
Historically, when Black people protest, they are responding to intolerable and immediate injustice — say, the water crisis in Flint. In contrast, Jeffries said, white Americans tend to protest over more abstract goals — like the Occupy Wall Street protests against economic inequality or the melting of Arctic glaciers — and are driven by the “fierce urgency of the future.”
“What you’re willing to sacrifice, demand and compromise is going to be different,” Jeffries said. “There is a shared sense of the problem but your immediate objective is fundamentally different.”
This is certainly true for AJ Lovelace. The 28-year old activist filmmaker felt the marches over the summer started off coherent and then devolved into being performative.
“It was obvious to me that people were out there to say they were out there,” Lovelace said. “White girls would agitate the police and then cry when they responded. This isn’t how a protest works.”
“Saying Black Lives Matter is about the present,” Lovelace said. “If we are alive and breathing now, we are entitled to having a future. And I feel like white people get caught up in the game of politics and they lose the focus that this is not just about that. What it is about is changing a racist and oppressive system so there can be real measurable equality and equity,” he said.
“It’s bigger than one presidential candidate,” he added.
As a Black woman, I agree. It’s hard for white people to grasp that Black people have suffered from systemic racism under every president, including Barack Obama. Black America knows this struggle began long before Trump and will persist once he’s gone.
William Sturkey, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that when Black liberation movements emerge, there always “comes a point when white allies realize the gravity of the movement and want to make sure they are on the right side of history.”
“Their presence in the civil rights movement did help shine more of a light on protests but it overshadowed the courage of the original Black activists,” he said.
White co-optation can overshadow those involved in grassroots efforts, and it creates the illusion that “everyone was part of this movement the whole time,” he said. After the dust settled in the 1970s and public opinion shifted, everyone claimed to have been a civil rights activist.
Anti-racist author and lecturer Tim Wise said he is “cautiously optimistic” about the onslaught of white faces in crowds but also “nervous about what happens when people who really up until May weren’t particularly engaged in this issue are all of a sudden ‘ready for the revolution.’”
Wise said that while protests can be cathartic, “95% of what needs to happen is not in the streets.”
That’s true. Most of what needs to change happens in a civic setting often void of TV cameras. And it is an improbable place for a white woman spreading her legs for the whole world.
It’s going to take drastic changes in policy and laws. It will also require everyone’s attention.
Jeffries told me that if history shows one thing to be true, it’s that white attention and sympathy for Black social justice is fleeting. It wanes when cameras disappear.
I fear that may be happening now.
According to a June poll, 45% of white people surveyed found racism to be a “big problem.” By early August, that number had fallen to 33%.
I suppose I’m not too surprised … because … white people.
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SIGTaibbi and Weinstein Do Not Understand the George Floyd Uprising
I’ve been watching all these “Intellectual Dark Web” types struggling to comprehend the George Floyd Uprising and the Movement for Black Lives, and the first thing I noticed was that they have NOBODY on their shows with any connection at all to the demonstrations. Here in Portland, home of the longest-running and most intense George Floyd protests that are the subject of these recent shows, there are visible and vociferous leaders of this protest movement who could be interviewed (such as Teressa Raiford of Don’t Shoot Portland and Devin Boss of Rose City Justice). There are ground-level demonstrators, journalists who have been covering the protests, and local politicians (such as City Counsilor JoAnn Hardesty and County Commissioner Loretta Smith) allied with the movement. I’m sure this is also the case in Minneapolis, and everywhere else these George Floyd protests are happening. For that matter, there are established national Black Lives Matter leaders (such as Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza) who have little connection to the street movement but could answer questions about the origins and beliefs of the movement as a whole. I would even suggest that police officers should be interviewed to get their side of the story. If I were putting together a panel to put on my big famous podcast in order to help people understand the demonstrations in Portland, I would talk to those people.
Who do we get instead? A bunch of university professors and media pundits. Look at this “Black Intellectual Roundtable” that Bret Weinstein put together. All professors and journalists, and not a single one of them sympathetic to the Movement for Black Lives. Who gets the spotlight on Taibbi’s podcast with Katie Halper? Omar Wasow, Adolph Reed, Dr. Gerald Thorne, and so on — a more varied bunch, but equally disconnected from this movement. Over on Joe Rogan, the 900-pound gorilla of the I.D.W., Joe’s interviewing… BRET WEINSTEIN???!!!?! Isn’t he a biology professor from Washington? Why is nobody interviewing people who are actually involved in this movement?
Then I get to thinking: Why is it that, when people like this do a podcast on the Drug War or the Opiate Epidemic, there are no drug addicts, drug counselors, or drug dealers included? Why are there no homeless people or shelter personnel included in panels about homelessness, and no prisoners or prison guards in panels about prison? Wouldn’t a journalist doing a segment about the Healthcare Crisis in the United States be wise to include a chronically ill person who can’t afford healthcare? Why does this happen so rarely?
It’s these University People. I’m talking about people whose whole lives went like this: They were born, they grew up in prosperous homes, they went to school, they went to university, they got some job based on their degree, marriage and kids maybe, and that’s what they’ve been doing ever since. Some of you read that previous sentence and thought, “Isn’t that everybody?” Well, it’s not everybody, but it’s a lot of people. It’s the Square Culture — a way of living that’s derided by those who aren’t a part of it, and unrecognized by those who are. Squares don’t know they’re Squares. Universities are the Churches of Square Culture, and the University People believe that their Square way of life is the Normal default way of life that all decent people aspire to. It goes without saying, in the Square Culture, that going to University is the one true path to improve oneself and set one’s life on the proper track. It doesn’t even matter what you study, so long as you go to college and study something or other until they give you a piece of paper with your new title on it (Master of Arts!)
Meanwhile, there are many of us who do not live that way — criminals, artists, queers, addicts, political radicals, and the poor. If you live in the Square World, you cannot imagine what it looks like from outside.
What are the political and social issues of primary debate among the Square University Class? Homelessness, socialized healthcare, affordable housing, evictions, unemployment, crime, police violence — issues that exist almost exclusively in the lives of poor people. They study us. They debate, among themselves, what is best for us. Yet they see us as unqualified to discuss, or even understand, our own circumstances. Our lack of a Square pedigree means that we can’t grasp what our own lives are all about — what we need, what we want, why we do the things we do. To a University Person, it would be absurd to invite demonstrators to a panel on the George Floyd Uprising. Instead, they invite “experts” who have never been anywhere near those protests.
To the University People, including a homeless person on a panel about homelessness would be like including a chimpanzee on a panel about primatology. To interview a drug addict about drug addiction would be like interviewing a child about pediatric medicine. We are, in this way, diminished. Our lives are not our own to explain.
I’ve been out at these George Floyd protests from May 29th to just a couple days ago, and in previous waves of Black Lives Matter and related movements for years before that. It’s not always easy to tell a person’s class background, but from what I know this is chiefly a movement among poor and working class people. The martyrs whose names animate the movement — George Floyd, Breona Taylor, Eric Garner — were poor people whose poverty was just as much a contributor to their deaths as race. Garner was selling loose cigarettes. Floyd might have been passing a counterfeit twenty. Taylor’s boyfriend’s house was mistakenly raided by cops. This is a poor people’s movement, as was King’s movement in its later days. It’s poor people, standing up for other poor people, via a populist strategy of direct street confrontation and a non-hierarchical decentralized model of leadership. Is it any wonder the University People don’t get it?The George Floyd Uprising is a movement for radical police reform. This is broadly thought of in terms of Defunding, Disbanding, Dismantling, and Abolishing the Police; and it’s complicated. There is much literature available on the subject, which Bret Weinstein and his Black Intellectuals seem to have ignored or disregarded. They say that Police Abolition would be dangerous, because it would leave us with nobody to stop crimes and protect the citizenry. Every working plan for Abolition or Defunding includes the creation of alternative forms of law enforcement and mutual aid meant to replace the Police, who are an under-trained and over-armed military organization that spends the day writing traffic tickets and the night responding to noise complaints and mental health emergencies. Weinstein and Co. insist that the Uprising is not truly about reforming the police, but rather about advancing a Far Left movement of Political Correctness the likes of which they’ve seen on university campuses. They talk about Struggle Sessions and Cultural Marxism, and before you know it they’re all arguing about Reparations. To the extent that they address the matter of police reform at all, it is to bat around a few old chestnuts about whether or not Black people are actually mistreated by police in the first place (they are). Weinstein says on Rogan’s show that he knows what Black Lives Matter is really all about, because he’s “talked to these people,” but the people he’s talking about are a bunch of rich kids who got him kicked out of Evergreen University for being against some planned Day of Whatever when like the Black teachers were going to do some thing and all the other teachers had to go to some other place or… I don’t know, some university shit. Those college kids who yelled at Bret Weinstein are not behind the George Floyd Uprising.
Taibbi falls into a similar trap. Like Weinstein, he doesn’t understand the protests, and so he assigns to them the identity of his existing foils du jour— Cancel Culture and the “antiracist” training movement exemplified by the bestsellling book White Fragility. He believes that the George Floyd Uprising is a fight for those values — the bourgeois values of University People and a rich White lady who holds trainings at Intel. Contrary to all the readily-available evidence that BLM and the GFU are grassroots movements to radically reform the Police, Taibbi has determined that we’re out there in the streets getting shot at and tear gassed every night because we want to force these University-spawned concepts on society at large.
The George Floyd Uprising has nothing to do with any of that. Again, I’ve been at a ton of these demonstrations. There are no struggle sessions. Nobody is talking about Robin DiAngelo — indeed, some movement leaders have expressed a sense of frustration about how corporate “antiracism” is distracting from their true goals. Nobody at the demos is arguing about semantics or “tone policing” or demanding “safe spaces.” The charge of Marxism is challenging to address; since the ideas expressed by Karl Marx in his seminal work Capital are fundamental to the studies of Political Science, Economics, and Sociology as well as the practices of revolution and civil disobedience. If what we’re talking about is Marxism-Leninism, the state philosophy of the Soviet Union, that’s not what this movement is about at all. There are Communists in the movement, to be sure, but it is not a Communist movement — it’s a movement to reform the Police. I personally know Republicans and Democrats, Patriots and Anarchists, Socialists and Capitalists, who are out there demonstrating in the street on a regular basis because they believe that the Police are a violent and racist organization that must be defunded or abolished. That’s what the movement claims to be, and that’s what the movement is.
You know where these sorts of issues — such as arguing over “Black” vs “African American” or accusing people of being insufficiently “Woke” or demanding that demonstrators observe some made-up code of conduct — get a lot of play? In the hundreds of Facebook groups and Twitter feeds that have sprung up since the Uprising began, where people with no connection at all to the demonstrations spend hours typing at one another while sitting safely in their homes. None of this is happening at the demonstrations themselves, and I think that’s part of the reason we’re making so much progress and having such positive experiences out there. Setting aside our minor disagreements in pursuit of a common goal (such as halting the trend of police murdering hundreds of people every year and getting away with it)— this is a habit we should all be getting into, if we hope to achieve anything. In the George Floyd Uprising, we are doing exactly that. Online and in the Universities, the opposite is happening — instead of getting together, people are Balkanizing themselves into a multitude of warring factions over who gets cast in superhero movies and how we should spell or capitalize words relating to race. Weinstein and Taibbi can’t see the difference, ensconced as they are in the Square Univerity Culture.
Why do these University People insist on believing this movement is a part of the petty struggles that they know from their own privileged lives? For one thing, it’s because they have experienced so little adversity, so few profound catastophes that must be dealt with in order to survive. Their sense of scale is shot. For another, it’s because University People think of themselves as the smartest people around, and are therefore skeptical of anything that they don’t already know about. They see a video online of somebody setting a fire in a dumpster in front of a police station, and it confuses them — why on Earth would anybody ever do such a thing? Rather than accept that this is something unfamiliar and work to understand it better, they assign it to an existing category that’s within their zone of comfort. Oh, it’s just those Grievance Studies kids again, trying to make me conform to their P.C. ideas!
This is why the Republicans have made so much hay out of resentment toward “coast elite” and “ivy league intellectuals” in the flyover states. These folks are like, “The factory shut down, then the government stole my land, and now the water coming out of my sink catches fire!” University People want to talk to them about how the new International trade deal is going to lift millions out of poverty in China and Bangladesh. They show up in expensive suits to pantomime handing out relief supplies for a photo opp, then fly back to their big expensive houses while poor people get crammed into FEMA trailers and mass shelters. I feel more of a connection to a poor person in Mississippi who voted for Trump than to a rich person in the Silicon Valley who voted for Clinton. Real life is that connection. We’re poor folks trying to survive in a world run by the rich, and the rich congregate in universities to plan the next steps in our exploitation.
It strikes me that few students see their education as a primary focus in life. Homework, exams, and study are what they try to get done as quickly and with as little effort as possible; so they can focus on things like playing in a band, writing, getting laid, political activism, or just going to parties. This is not a problem — one can excel in most universities with little effort. Not so much if you’re studying something like Engineering or Chemistry or Medicine — these are complex disciplines, requiring much study and expertise to perform. With anything in the Humanities, be it History or Gender Studies or Philosophy, you’re pretty much in the world’s most expensive book club. You read the book, you write a little book report, you talk about it in class a little, maybe there’s a quiz, then it’s on to the next subject. As many have pointed out, Universities don’t reward the smartest students, but the ones who are best-behaved and least inclined to challenge the status quo. As for professors, they’re often students who never left college, whose careerism and ability to work the system have freed them from any need (or ability) to go forth into the world and make their mark. And these are our experts! We look not to people who have lived experience with the issues at hand, but to people who have studied them from a distance in controlled enclaves of Square thought.
Detractors like to bring up George Floyd’s colorful background — he’s a former rapper who performed as Big Floyd with the legendary DJ Screw, he has a history of smoking crack, and he was in prison for armed robbery from 2009–2013. None of that bothers me. I honestly think it speaks well of him. Hip Hop is the most vital and important music of our time, and myself and most of my favorite people have smoked plenty of crack. Armed robbery isn’t something to be proud of, necessarily, but poor people like us will tend to get wrapped up in crime when we’re young. Sometimes it’s that or the street. I used to dream of striking it rich through crime and buying a house for my Mom. I believe that George Floyd could shed more light on these demonstrations than Weinstein’s entire Black Intellectuals Roundtable put together, but nobody like him is on that panel. I guess people like George Floyd aren’t Intellectuals, or at any rate they don’t have degrees. He went to Texas A&M on a football scholarship, but he dropped out. That happens with us poor people a lot, too, dropping out of college when life gets crazy. Then before you know it, we’re face down on the pavement.
I dropped out of community college in Los Angeles after getting good grades there for two years. Before that, I dropped out of high school the very day I could legally do so. Because of the chaotic nature of my childhood, I didn’t graduate middle school (my family was homeless at the time that would have naturally happened) or elementary school (I was skipped out of the middle of 6th grade and into the middle of 7th grade after a log period of truancy). I like to say the only thing I ever graduated from was Bartending School. Mine has been, for the most part, a self-education. Thank goodness for libraries.
I know all about the Police. The Police kick down your door and evict you from your apartment. The Police arrest your Dad or your Mom or your Brother and take them away to prison for years, maybe forever. The Police pull you over and rough you up for fun, laughing and joking while they smash your face into the hood of the car and kick your legs out from under you. The Police put up tape around the neighborhood when they kill one of your neighbors, and they fly overhead with their helicopters all night, shining spotlights through your window to remind you they’re always watching. I know about the Police. George Floyd knew about the Police. The George Floyd Uprising is made up of people who know too. If the Squares want to know what’s going on, they should interview those people instead of interviewing each other.The “RIGHT THING TO DO” for this country and future generations is to get rid of Trump !
Of course. We’re just disagreeing about the idea that we should sacrifice a powerful movement and its peaceful protests just cause Trump tried (and failed) to make an issue out of that small faction of graffiti warriors in Oregon.
And I believe that a “powerful” movement loses it’s power if it ceases to accomplish it’s goal. Rewarding Trump does nothing to further the “movement”. ( I realize you disagree on whether it rewards Trump) Finally, I don’t know how anyone who wasn’t there can say there was only a “small fraction of graffiti warriors”. To say that you either have to have been there or know a trusted person who said that. Other than the tv my only knowledge comes from a Presbyterian minister who I grew up with and who lives in Portland. He said it was “pretty dangerous” and wouldn’t want to have been there. He is a solid Biden supporter and said there were many, many outsiders there who were purely bent on destruction “in the name of protest”. My talk with him didn’t sound like it was a “small faction of graffiti warriors” . Then again while he was there he wasn’t where the destruction was occurring and like you, and I, he most likely got his info from TV. However, my impression was that he knows people who were there-in peaceful protest. No matter what really happened, at its core is the fact that Joe Public sees what is on tv and Trump ties into that.
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