The writer River Page has referred to poor whites in America as "political dalits," and it's true that the establishment's hostility to low-status whites is so open as to lack plausible deniability. In the case of poor and working class blacks, things get weirder and more passive-aggressive. Black lives are so important that after George Floyd millions of Instagram influencers left black squares on their accounts for the day. (If you don't understand the previous sentence, count your blessings.) And yet look at something like the Pritzker-approved bail reform in Illinois. Running up the number of serious felonies for which the authorities have to let you go with just a wink and a promise you won't run, it only benefits black people if you equate them with felons. It's people in poor neighborhoods, yes a huge number of them non-white, who are going to suffer from decisions like this. And yes, they know.
Tuesday, September 6, 2022
Faith misplaced
I'll be brief here, but this piece is fairly on-target about the deference afforded Black Lives Matter. BLM in the main acts as a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for corporations, which seems to be a very lucrative business. Ali is also right that the policies they support in many cases harm the people they're (allegedly) supposed to help.
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I'll be brief too and say I agree with you.
Like a few other recently defined organizations it appears that BLM began as a hashtag on social media about police violence against black men. Since it was just a loosely defined group with only a few general principals and goals and no national organization it wasn't long before the BLM title was appropriated by anyone who had a particular grievance. We all know what happened after George Floyd's death and that's when the real trouble began. Undoubtedly there are reasonable concerns but the organization itself is a mashup of various local associations that don't necessarily agree with the others so there is no real focus.
Then, not surprisingly, there have been the issues with those who have taken advantage of the enormous amounts of money donated to this vague cause. It's admirable that people will donate money to just causes but not all those at the other end of the collection plate are selfless beings. In fact, some of them have taken extreme advantage.
There's nothing to be said about the button pushers and posers who leave black squares on their tweet of the day and then go on to the next thing. At this point it appears to have lived past its expiration date - the return of Martin Luther King, Jr's civil rights movement BLM is not. His vision was for positive change was inspirational for all.
It often happens that a disparate group of people associate themselves with an umbrella term. And it would be nice if, at the very least, the broader public could be aware of the differences. But usually there's some kind of winner, and often it's the more unscrupulous who get ownership of the term. There are indications that this has happened with BLM, including the biig properties they own, the appearance of money laundering, and the refusal of anyone to take responsibility for same.
Like you say, they've taken advantage. I kind of think that at the grassroots and on the street there are a lot of people who know they've been had. In the boardrooms no one will talk about it because expressing any doubt is radioactive.
That Bob Dylan lyric keeps coming back to me. "Show me someone that's not a parasite/And I'll go out and say a prayer for him." We live in an age with a lot of false prophets. And they keep being rewarded after their actions have exposed them.
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