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Our Tribe!
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For a moment this summer, it appeared that the Black Lives Matter movement was in a position to get everything it claimed to have wanted. Instead, here in September, it’s back to the mostly symbolic existence to which it has been relegated since the Ferguson, Missouri, unrest in 2014.
There were minor victories to be sure. There has been increased scrutiny on no-knock warrants and chokeholds following the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, respectively. But any real reform efforts were snuffed out when Democrats decided police reform was more useful as an election issue than as actual legislation, blocking the GOP bill in the Senate.
On what is said to be an urgent issue, even a GOP bill that didn’t deliver on everything they wanted should have still been worth passing. But there was hardly an uproar over it from the Black Lives Matter movement, which instead wasted its political capital on symbolic gestures and justifying violent riots in American cities.
The proof is in the polls. In June, a Pew poll found that 67% of Americans supported the Black Lives Matter movement. Just three months later, that number has dropped 12 points. Amid widespread riots, the group has seen support from Asians and Hispanics drop. The movement had even built up a solid 37% support from Republicans and GOP-leaning adults, but that has now plummeted to 16%.
Whether with the support of BLM activists or not, the protests were co-opted by violent rioters and the movement for change by a symbolic corporate push. Rioters have left American cities in turmoil: Kenosha, Wisconsin, is facing over $11 million in damages, three years’ worth of fire loss according to their fire chief. Minneapolis, Minnesota, suffered at least $55 million in damages, and more radical progressives, such as Rep. Ilhan Omar and the Minneapolis City Council, made a mockery of the movement by suggesting their police force be defunded or abolished.
Meanwhile, the corporate symbolism watered down any efforts for change. Bottles of syrup were renamed, non-black voice actors were removed from voicing black characters on television, and sports leagues made very strong statements about how racism was, in fact, bad. As each cookie-cutter statement came down, with fast food companies and Hollywood celebrities telling us they also thought racism was bad, specific reforms were pushed aside.
Now, Black Lives Matter is back to being just another partisan cause scrambling for a place in the 2020 race. The goodwill of a sizable chunk of Republicans has faded, and when the pressure was highest for some combination of the reforms they are ostensibly pushing for, they allowed their Democratic allies in Congress to torpedo the effort. Each riot and corporate lecture only serves to cement the battle lines, and the opportunity for change during this past summer may not present itself again.
