Why Black Lives Matter Failed to Change Anything
Radical revolutionaries and their critical theory ruined everything
This month marks four years since the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests began. Many have lamented that, out of those protests, nothing seems to have changed in regards to racial justice. No effective reforms have been enacted, and society has become even more divided than before as to what we should do about racism. If this is the end result, then what did that so-called ‘reckoning with racism’ moment mean? And what went wrong?
The harsh reality is that BLM was, to a significant extent, infiltrated by revolutionary far-left activists who promoted critical race theory (CRT) and other radical ideologies, which in turn made effective reform impossible in the end. That four years later, many people still can’t face up to, and rationally talk about, this reality, is testament to the current dysfunction in so-called social justice politics. If we can’t even face the reality, how can we achieve justice for anyone?
What many people don’t understand is, BLM was basically the victim of a failed revolutionary movement that immediately came before it. Two months before BLM began, Joe Biden won the 2020 Democratic presidential primary in a landslide, thus foreclosing the possibility of ‘revolution via the ballot box’. While most supporters of Bernie Sanders were not far-left revolutionaries, some on the far-left were planning to use Bernie’s election as a starting point for their revolution. Now that Bernie had lost, not only was revolution not coming in 2020, the magnitude of Biden’s victory meant that revolution wasn’t going to come anytime soon, because it wouldn’t have the popular support to succeed at the ballot box. Moreover, the historic landslide defeat of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in the UK three months earlier provided further confirmation of this. Thus, the far-left began turning towards fantasies of non-electoral methods of revolution, although these are basically useless and ridiculous in a context where most people are committed to an existing liberal-democratic electoral system. At first, they couldn’t identify a way forward, especially since everything was basically shut down during the early days of the pandemic. But then, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, protests against racial injustice began to heat up, and these frustrated revolutionaries saw their chance.
The involvement of the revolutionary radicals meant that BLM went from being about the need for policing reform to being a revolutionary movement that aimed at ‘defunding the police’ among other things. Later on, it even became about things that had nothing to do with racism or policing at all. For example, the infamous CHAZ experiment in downtown Seattle was basically an attempt at a modern re-enactment of the Paris Commune, and had absolutely nothing to do with the original goals of BLM. Meanwhile, those who really cared about racial justice, and who wanted to bring the movement back to its original purpose, were sidelined. The revolutionaries created a climate where even to gently remind people that chaos and disorder would favor Trump’s re-election would be met with attempts at cancellation. Many well intentioned people were afraid of speaking up. Meanwhile, the influence of CRT saw the movement take on an oppressor vs oppressed worldview, rather than trying to bring people together to rationally explore where there might still be racism in society, and what needs to be done to fix it. This alienated many people, and eventually caused the right-wing scare campaign about all sorts of diversity initiatives in every imaginable context being based on CRT (this is certainly not true). In fact, the divisive impact of CRT was so great that, by the end of 2021, we had been having more debates about CRT than about practical ways to end racism.
Looking back, if we could do it over again, I think we would have to do things very differently. I think we should have opted for a movement based around the values of love and compassion, and explicitly avoided pitting people against each other based on immutable characteristics. Ideologies like CRT, which take a fundamental oppressor vs oppressed worldview, should have been rejected outright. Blanket anti-police attitudes (e.g. ACAB) that were clearly a product of anarchism should also have been rejected. Instead, we should have brought people together, and examined where racism was still a problem in society, with the whole project being rooted in compassion. This would allow a rational examination of racism, and allow for effective reform solutions to be developed by consensus. If we had done that, then we would have advanced racial justice. But like many other things in history, we would had to have been disciplined enough to resist the radicals and their attempts to ruin everything. I think we should make this a lesson to learn indeed.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
