“(Backlash) came to stand for a topsy-turvy rebellion in which white people with relative societal power perceived themselves as victimized by what they described as overly aggressive African Americans demanding equal rights.”
Cornell University historian Lawrence Glickman writing for the Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/white-backlash-nothing-new/611914/
While I was writing this piece the Republicans in the Senate used the filibuster to block the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection. White people storm the Capital and threaten their lives. Our representatives refuse to investigate. People protest the murder of unarmed Black men, women, and children by the State and the military is called in.
Even now there is less government focus on the insurrectionists than there is on the Black Lives Matter movement. Already the narratives are changing. Major media outlets refer to “the violence of last summer” without offering context.* Meanwhile the events of January 6th are being whitewashed and stripped of their reality. Once again groups advocating for people of color are targeted by the government and the media while radical white supremacists are mostly ignored. From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement to the modern antiracist movement when Black Americans demand equality and an end to oppression there has been a white backlash. Which leads us to All Lives Matter.
The first thing All Lives Matter does is twist Black Lives Matter to imply that instead of the obvious “too” there was an implied “only”. Obviously, all lives matter. The entire point of Black Lives Matter is that all lives should matter. These are the people, mostly white and mostly 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.
All Lives Matter ignores systemic problems to focus on individual bigotry, which can then be dismissed as a personal issue. All Lives Matter points to the myth of Black on Black crime, ignoring that in a country as segregated as the US continues to be almost all crime is intraracial. Yet All Lives Matter managed to become so ubiquitous that even the most arguably leftist presidential candidate of the 2016 race, Bernie Sanders, used it as a comeback.
But mostly All Lives Matter, and the colorblind thinking that underlies it, is a lie. The same folks who will respond that All Lives Matter to the notion that Black lives should matter will not hesitate to say they stand up for so called Blue Lives. (Of course, the minute law enforcement gets in their way they unhesitatingly turn to violence.)
First of all, there is no such thing as “Blue Lives”. Law enforcement is a job. An often difficult, sometimes dangerous, job. But still a job. One a person can choose to leave at any given moment. Lone gunmen who, in 2014 and 2016, in New York, Dallas, and in my hometown of Baton Rouge ambushed and murdered police officers in retaliation for the deaths in Black communities have given the idea that there is a “war on cops” legs. However, like other mass shootings, these were outliers- not the beginning of a war. **
This did not stop at least 14 states from introducing “Blue Lives Matter” bills to extend hate crime protections to law enforcement. This is redundant and reductive. There has never been a doubt about the value of the lives of those that work in law enforcement. Every single state already has more severe penalties for crimes committed against law enforcement officers. When an officer dies in the line of duty flags fly at half-staff, they are honored with memorials and parades, and the pursuit of their killer takes precedence over all else. As it should be. But that hasn’t stopped almost exclusively Republican legislatures from trying place them in the victim class.
“This is consistent with the general trend of legislators’ responding to powerful and persuasive protests by seeking to silence them rather than engaging with the message of the protests. If anything, the lesson from the last year, and decades, is not that we need to give more tools to police and prosecutors, it’s that they abuse the tools they already have.”
Vera Eidelman, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/us/politics/republican-anti-protest-laws.html
Because of shortsightedness on behalf of the Democrats that resulted in an almost exclusive focus on national politics Republicans dominate the legislatures of over thirty states. Twenty-seven states have Republican governors compared to twenty-three Democrat governors. Racism and anti-Blackness are bipartisan and embedded into the system. But modern Republicans seem to have embraced them as part of their platform.
Republican dominated legislatures have responded to last summer’s mostly peaceful, if disruptive, uprisings by drafting legislation that directly violates the freedom of people’s political expression that is covered by the First Amendment of the Constitution. In over thirty states over eighty “anti-protest” bills have been introduced- just in the 2021 session.
In Indiana Republicans would ban those convicted of unlawful assembly while utilizing their First Amendment rights from state employment- including being elected to office.
A bill in Minnesota would prohibit those same folks from receiving student loans, unemployment benefits, or housing assistance barring help from those who need it most as punishment for standing up to oppression.
Of course, Florida had to get in on the fun with Gov. Ron DeSantis signing what he’s called “the strongest anti-looting, anti-rioting, pro-law-enforcement piece of legislation in the country.” Ignoring the fact that the over 90% of the uprisings last summer were peaceful and when there was violence it was often instigated by the police themselves.*
And in Oklahoma and Iowa Republican legislators have made it legal for drivers to mow down protestors with their vehicles. Considering that this is how Heather Heyer was murdered in Charlottesville in 2017 this law is particularly egregious.
Laws that punish rioting already exist (and are disproportionately used against people of color). There is no doubt that the new bills violate rights of lawful assembly and free speech protected under the First Amendment. Though who knows how the Conservative stacked court system will interpret things.
All of this despite the evidence that the uprisings of last summer were almost entirely free of violence. Not to be hemmed in by facts Republicans consistently couch them in terms of riots and looting helped along by media focus on the rare inflammatory moments. The rhetoric they amplify is that Democrats are supportive of violence in the name of racial justice. That this reinforces that so-called small government Republicans are supportive of violent oppression in the name of the State is an irony that seems to be lost.
*More than 96 percent of last summer’s nationwide Black Lives Matter protests were peaceful. Of those that were not it was often police officers or counterprotesters who instigated the violence.
**More, while these murders were the work of individuals, right wing groups and ideologies have also been murdering law enforcement officers yet are not targeted in the same way by federal agencies. Between 2001 and 2017 those from right wing extremist groups murdered 25 law enforcement officers. Those on the left killed ten. In the last ten years of the twentieth the right murdered 16 and the left killed one.
***This is a common reaction to protests. Even Barak Obama signed H.R. 347.
**** Some of these bills date back to Ms. Heyer’s murder.
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
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/us/politics/race-inclusion-wasau-wisconsin.html