I opened up the conversation about BLM with the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO. Begun in 1956 and ended in 1971 it actively sowed division among groups involved in constitutionally protected political activism. COINTELPRO’s actions included spying on, infiltrating, and discrediting groups and individuals it considered nonconforming. Through COINTELPRO the FBI indulged in psychological warfare, manipulation of the media with false reports, smear campaigns often based in complete fabrications, harassment, wrongful imprisonment, violence, and murder.
COINTELPRO was and is not unique. Covert operations under the U.S. Government against domestic political groups have occurred since its inception and continue to this day. Change is hard and power corrupts. People do unconscionable things to keep things just the way they are. People do unconscionable things to hold onto power. It is much easier for people in power to see Black people agitating to be treated as fully and equally human as “black nationalist hate groups” than it is to accept that change is needed.
“I can’t breathe,” said by Eric Garner in 2014. Said by George Floyd in 2020. The pleas of both men ignored by the police officers who held them down until there was no more breath in their bodies. In the in-between so many more lost to state violence. Tamir Rice. Sandra Bland. Philando Castile. Atatiana Jefferson. So many others.
When I look at the conflict between Israel and Palestine, I feel frustrated and impotent. On good days, I think that’s how a lot of non-Black Americans feel about anti-Blackness, systemic racism, and state violence. On bad days I feel as though most either don’t care or are anti-Black themselves. I say non-Black and anti-Black rather than white and people of color because there is an underlying anti-Blackness to American style institutional racism. Immigrants to the US, even Black ones, see this clearly and many do a lot to distance themselves from the “American Black” up to and including embracing anti-Blackness themselves. Yes, even Black immigrants.
The difference, of course, is that the Israeli-Palestine conflict is half a world away. If you are in the US, whatever your ethnic identity, you are immersed in systemic racism every single day. There has been a lot said and written about America’s “racial reckoning”. But anti-racism work is hard, uncomfortable work. American life is not easy. Maybe it’s our particularly brutal form of free market capitalism or our refusal to reckon with past atrocities (of which there are many) but America the beautiful never makes it into the top ten happiest countries in the world. We struggle to make it into the top twenty.
This still makes us very privileged. Most of us, even those battling poverty, have access to electricity, running water, and some form of basic healthcare. But that privilege can be hard to see when you are filing bankruptcy over medical bills while being crushed by student debt and working a job that is both absolutely necessary to our society yet still offers poverty level wages. Philip Alston, an Australian law professor, was appointed as a United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. His research in the US led Alston to state that the American Dream is but an illusion. American history shows us that anti-racism, particularly the anti-racism of the American white, fades quickly. Matters no longer seen as urgent quickly become forgotten in the grinding minutiae of American life.
But, also, when it looks as though Black Americans have a shot at being seen as fully human by the American powers that be, white supremacy roars forth in retaliation. Avowed white nationalists are supported by those who are uncomfortable with change. With righteous stridency white supremacy says, “You can’t come around and tell people that work their tails off from daylight to dark that they got white privilege and they’ve got to treat the coloreds and the gays better. People are sick of it.” (NYT) These are the people, who tend to be white and to lean older or conservative, who prefer “not to see color”. For these folks, the problem is the people who are demanding to be seen. These are people that fully believe that acknowledging racial disparities is in of itself a form of racism. I know, right?
This is how the state turns Black Lives Matter or the Black Panthers or Move into the Boogeyman.
When the American Black agitates for being acknowledged in our full humanity the response is often state sanctioned violence. Sure, even modern-day conservatives now look back on the Civil War and the Civil Rights Era and claim to see that enslavement, disenfranchisement, and legally enforced oppression were, if not abominations, at least inconsistent with the goals of our Constitution. Of course, at the time, conservative outlets like the National Review denounced Brown v. Board of Education as “one of the most brazen acts of judicial usurpation in our history.” A year later, in 1957, in defense of Jim Crow the National Review proclaimed:
“The central question … is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes-the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
National Review
Which sounds a lot like something written by the Klan rather than by a compassionate conservative. Yes, I am sure there are some folks who were around in the 1950s and 60s who believed as the National Review did who now truly understand the profound flaws in that way of thinking. But there is no doubt that many who support the movement in retrospect do so only strategically. We know this because they not so rarely reveal what they really think. (Looking at you McConnell, Lott, Cotton,…)
I’m not going to go into the neutering of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s from radical and subordinate to stories of Black people sitting politely. Nor will I do more than note again that racism, anti-Black and other, was and is not limited to the states that formed the former Confederacy. In America Black progress, be it political or material, has often – is often – met with retribution. In Black American communities the stories of the destruction of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, the town of Rosewood, and too many others to write about here are shared over generations. In the eyes of too many white people the worst thing a Black person can do is forget their place.
“The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is Black advancement.”
Carol Anderson, White Rage.
Between the end of the Civil War and 1950 by conservative estimates over six thousand Black people; men, women, and children were murdered by lynching. Though claims of sexual assault were common excuses for the assault on Black bodies it could be something as slight as not giving way on the sidewalk or not using the “proper” honorific when speaking to a white person that ended a Black person’s life. In the summer of 1919 white mobs rampaged through American cities killing hundreds of Black people in what would come to be called the Red Summer. Of course, these were all excuses. Quite often it was simply being Black and prosperous that incited murderous rage. So, what has all of this got to do with Black Lives Matter?
Sources
https://theconversation.com/the-backlash-against-black-lives-matter-is-just-more-evidence-of-injustice-85587
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/03/906809148/in-rural-oregon-threats-and-backlash-follow-racial-justice-protests
https://prospect.org/justice/civil-rights-movement-politics-memory/
https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/public-opinion-civil-rights-reflections-civil-rights-act-1964
https://www.noi.org/cointelpro/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/killings-by-police-declined-after-black-lives-matter-protests1/
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5161811
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-fbi-cointelpro-progra_b_4375527
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/fred-hampton-black-panthers-fbi-surveillance/2021/05/04/2b12f826-acd7-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/blacklivesmatter-hashtag-first-appears-facebook-sparking-a-movement
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/where-is-black-lives-matter-headed
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/08/15/the-hashtag-blacklivesmatter-emerges-social-activism-on-twitter/
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/page/things-you-need
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/black-lives-matter-backlash/
https://nyti.ms/2AvYz8Q
https://nyti.ms/3ecYd6I
https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro
https://nyti.ms/2ZqRyOU
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/movement-slogan-rallying-cry-how-black-lives-matter-changed-america-n1252434
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/us/politics/race-inclusion-wasau-wisconsin.html