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C MN's avatar

Eh, I don't think you're fully wrong, but I think there's a bigger issue here: COVID. Every plague in history has ushered in social unrest. This one was no different.

I live in Minneapolis. The riots here weren't really about change. Much of it was bored, pandemic-anxious people glad to finally have some excuse to do something, see their friends, and vent a bunch of nervous energy. The bulk of the rest was mass hysteria. I'm talking upper-class black women who own highly successful businesses and are friends with the mayor suddenly having panic attacks because they're convinced they're going to be shot if they step outside. I'm talking multiple professional meetings with people having literal, hysterical, sobbing breakdowns over some dude they'd never met and wouldn't have had a lick of sympathy for if he'd been begging on the side of the street.

This isn't a political movement, which is likely why it was so easily captured. Political movements have actual concrete goals that aren't amorphous crap like "re-imagine society". Political movements have adherents that don't burst into sobbing fits whenever they're questioned.

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Always Adblock's avatar

If BLM were run by the most grass-roots and the most caring, pro-Black people alive, it would still have failed to meet the goals of its initial founding for one very simple reason: the police in the US, in the aggregate, simply aren't going around killing Black people in any disproportionate manner. Ancillary to this, Black people are arrested more - again, in the aggregate - because they commit more crimes, particularly violent crimes, on a per-capita basis than anyone else does. (Shockingly so, in fact.)

But as Freddie says, it went beyond the police and to a fundamental re-organization of society, at least in spirit. Scratch the surface of our society, however, and it becomes a large case of 'be careful what you wish for'. Freddie laments the "toothlessness" of police reform and then laments, seconds later, that failure to prosecute will result in a reactionary backlash. Both true, in isolation. Yet they are toothless because - and Freddie knows this full well - the people who actually live in the cities don't want wholesale police reform; and the reactionary backlash to which he refers comes in large part from the Black people who have to live in crime-riven neighborhoods.

It's an obvious racial truth in our society, so naturally you can't say it out loud, so naturally a lot of people have never even considered it: Black people are among the strongest advocates for visible, active policing in their neighborhoods because their neighborhoods are where the crime is. White liberals, on the other hand, can go literally their entire lives without even witnessing violent or property crime, much less being personally affected. The three variables here - White, Black, and crime - only coexist in a very small number of places in the country, affecting a decimal point of the country's population and an insanely tiny percentage of its geography - parts of San Francisco, parts of New York, very small parts of Chicago. That's really it. So when White liberals are instructed by media culture, NY-driven as it is, to disband the police, it's an easy call for them because they haven't needed the police in their lives and probably look down on them for being poorly-educated anyway (in a way that they wouldn't do of, say, postal workers.)

So let's reverse the question - why would you *expect* success of an organization founded on a fraudulent basis, and with goals antithetical to even the most basic aspects of harm mitigation among the community it purports to elevate? A fool and his money etc.

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