You're viewing a single thread.
I think a better question to ask is whether the groups and ideologies involved in the BLM protests (which were MASSIVE) were ever allowed to have power?
If BLM failed to enact significant policy change than I don’t think it is because BLM wasn’t focused enough, had unrealistic goals or was handled badly, I think it is because in terms of law enforcement policy it really doesn’t matter what voters do or don’t want. Any kind of noise made by voters and the public about police violence and the inherent problems with police (and their vital role in maintaining economic injustice and inequality through state violence) will be aggressively pushed back in the opposite direction by the political forces of law enforcement, and because the average person has no power and their vote is useless this will result in a broad push in policy in the opposite direction of BLM’s goals.
However, the function of BLM must be seen for what it was then, to lay bare the true nature of the power relationship between voters and cops and in the minds of countless, countless people living in the US it delegitimized the authority of law enforcement to commit violence wherever and howsoever it chooses. It sent a massive crack through the entire structure of policing, jails and systematic divestment from minorities and the poor. Just because BLM didn’t create significant policy changes doesn’t mean that the battle hasn’t already been lost for the legitimacy of law enforcement in the long term in the US, and I call that a victory.
Yeah, I think this is it right here. While the protests might not have done much for those of us who were already painfully aware of the cops’ racism, behavioral issues, and lack of accountability, it did make it so that everyone else had to pay attention. You couldn’t ignore the protests, they were everywhere. I don’t have numbers, but I think a whole lot of white people who by default didn’t believe there was any real injustice in the system finally saw it, at least for a little while.
That said, it was unfortunately fleeting, and there hasn’t been enough sustained motivation to address the systemic issues that would need to be fixed for law enforcement to ever be properly held accountable. The people doing that admirable work are still doing it while the cops still have too much power. They might think twice before murdering someone in front of a camera. Maybe. They’ll still do the murder, they’ll just make sure there’s no evidence.
So, a net positive, but the bar was already so damn low.
Just to add a tiny bit of clarification, I think what BLM did was change the subterranean psyche of America, you can’t measure it in policy or material changes because those were resisted absolutely by the ruling class, but they could not stop the change in perspective and thinking that occurred.
These comments remind me of the Occupy Wall Street protests back in 2011. That movement also didn't lead to immediate law or policy changes at the national level, but it seems to have left a more subtle mark that is still with us. Income inequality has remained a hot topic, states have raised minimum wages, and UBI proposals are being discussed more seriously (at least in certain circles).
Exactly and as time goes on I have shifted from a perspective that Occupy Wall Street was an unfocused failure to a perspective that the control of the finance industry and money on politics is absolute and those in power will not tolerate it being questioned, so Occupy Wall Street could never have resulted in immediate policy changes, Wall Street would have prevented it any cost even if it meant physically walking into the street and shooting protestors until they went back to work. Of course “financial instruments” would probably be used instead of guns, but murder is murder and the weapons the finance industry uses to make their living make mass shooters with assault rifles look like amateurs playing around with toys, see the 2008 financial crash as example A.
The role of Occupy Wall Street was thus to lay bare this power relationship and the associated threat of violence towards those who seek to modify it. The impact of Occupy must be understood in terms of how the internal psyche of the US was irrevocably radicalized from a collective witnessing of this truth.
In the same way that a crowd of fans will remember a ref on the soccer field making horrible calls that screw their team over (…and even though the crowd has no actual codified power to stop the ref from making bad calls and swinging the game), the crowd will remember:
the injustice itself
the collective shared awareness of the injustice among fellow strangers in the crowd
the disempowerment forced upon the crowd in that moment to preserve the status quo of the injustice
These are not things that crowds forget easily, in sports or in broader political contexts. Movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have to be understood as acts of reality crafting that first and foremost validate individual’s feeling that the majority of the public understands the power structure of the status quo as an existential threat to the common good.
Once people have seen the validation from essentially 1 out of every 10 people in the country showing up to Black Lives Matter with them it flips a switch in their head and talking heads on tv permanently lose a degree of power to manipulate people into believing their feelings are fringe in regards to rejecting police violence and systematic racism.
I think there is a big piece missing if we want to make lasting change. Protests should be the first part and we have missed many opportunities by skipping the second part. Challenging the legality of the issues in court. The MLK jr. movements were so powerful because they changed the laws. In many cases they “got arrested” on purpose and then challenged the legality of the issues in court with some amazing well armed lawyering. The protests, though important, should only be to stir up public opinion and momentum, followed by a timely well thought out and public challenge to the laws we wish to change. That’s where to orgs should be focusing their energy to capitalize on these fleeting moments.
I think there is a big piece missing if we want to make lasting change. Protests should be the first part and we have missed many opportunities by skipping the second part.
Certainly so, but also I think an important difference between the civil rights movement with MLK and current day is the public is actually much closer to siding with the civil rights protestors now, MLK and others were not necessarily anywhere near as accepted during their time as a political activist figures though their ideas may have won out in the long term. We forget this when we see people like MLK as “popular figures” now.
I think the current problem is not that the majority believes in defending the racist structures of society, we don’t need an MLK to convince us that systematic and direct racism are abhorrent. The majority of us know, but the other difference between the civil rights movements of the MLK era and now is that we are far more powerless as a public body of normal people to actually wield power politically and enact the changes Black Lives Matter advocated for. We can’t change the laws, the rich and powerful WILL NOT let it happen, and we live in a time period where their power is near absolute.
We can’t judge the BLM or Occupy movement for failing to create policy changes when both movements were specifically born out of a desire to directly express the unsustainable nature of disempowerment in the US of the average person. We have reached a maximum point of powerlessness against an entrenched, corrupt political system and at this point policy just isn’t going to happen unless we all collectively keeping threatening to shut it all down.