What is the #BLM ask?

there's still no consensus policy agenda for BlackLivesMatter

I don’t mean to drop you into a conversation without context (here’s the thread) but what’s being dramatized here is essential and pretty easy to understand. As I linked to on Monday, David Shor’s argument about the 2020 election includes the idea that issues highly popular with progressive media, activists, and influential donors were in fact highly unpopular with much of the country, including with voters of color who are broadly assumed to vote for Democrats consistently. One such issue was “Defund the Police.” Here Chris Hayes analogizes this effort to the fight for gay marriage. This is a rhetorically convenient comparison for defenders of defunding the police - or the entire BlackLivesMatter wing of contemporary Democratic politics - because gay marriage is obviously morally correct and won in a decisive victory.

The problems with Hayes’s analogy are many, though. For one thing, gay marriage rights were not won through democratic processes but through Supreme Court decision. Of course rising public popularity of the concept had everything to do with that case and that decision, but still, had it not been for a federal court decision recognizing same-sex marriages across the country, we probably would have a few states where it was still illegal. I feel that I can hazard a guess that defunding the police, as a state-by-state issue, would not be widely or consistently applied. Same sex marriage is also a question of individual rights rather than large-scale municipal spending and policy and is thus far easier to win through the courts - or otherwise. I suppose you could envision a world where the Roberts court discovers some constitutional fine-print that mandates the abolition of police departments but… I’m skeptical. And there’s the simple fact that, as lefties such as myself have been saying since long before gay marriage was a practical possibility, marriage rights are inherently conservative and thus appeal to different types of people and different types of argument than defunding the police.

But here’s the bigger thing: when same-sex marriage was successfully exploited by Republicans for electoral gain in 2004, gay rights advocates did not give up or pivot to a different policy or rush to deny their prior support or complicate the demand to the point of absurdity. They said, “OK, stay the course, get ‘em next time.” That did not happen when it suddenly became clear that Defund the Police was a losing issue and a waste of attention and energy and time. Around about the time that polling started to come out showing that even a significant majority of Black Americans reject the idea, huge numbers of the same organizations and individuals who had jumped on¹ the “Defund the Police” train jumped right off. And the particular, peculiar mechanism many of them did this was to abstract the concept to the point of meaninglessness - well, we never meant actually defunding the police, we meant changing the funding priorities, we meant perhaps you should increase the funding, uh too many cops in schools!, what was I talking about, defund the police? what’s that?, etc. I have never in my life seen so many people professionally involved in politics jump off of a sinking boat so fast.

The difference, in other words, is that gay marriage is coherent and simple and direct and was almost universally supported within the LGBTQ movement. No such thing is true of defunding the police. My impression is that Hayes is not actually throwing his weight behind defunding the police here so much as he is behind the broader BlackLivesMatter movement. But this is precisely the problem: seven years into its existence, no one knows what BlackLivesMatter means, in policy terms, as a movement and there is no clear process through which such a thing would be established.

Sadly the clear moral correctness of BLM has obscured the profound political, economic, and sociological complexity of doing the right thing for Black people.

I am well aware that there are a lot of policy proposals out there from a number of organizations that consider themselves part of the BlackLivesMatter movement. And with $10 billion worth of donations last year there should be ample funding for more policy work. But to date nothing has coalesced as far as a broadly acknowledged set of communally agreed on policy demands. If you ask 100 people who consider themselves supporters of the BlackLivesMatter movement what they think should be done, you will get 100 different answers. The Civil Rights movement enjoyed its greatest victories because it developed unity of purpose around specific, achievable policy goals which became codified in the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act bills, which became the political targets that the activists and voters fought for. And they won. Principle to policy to legislation. I don’t know what the contemporary policy demands are that could function the same way.

Reasonable people can of course disagree about how far along this work should be. Many would say that it’s wrong to look back to the initial wave of Michael Brown protests as the beginning of the movement and instead argue that we should look at the George Floyd killing as the benchmark. One way or another, I think it’s reasonable to say that if the movement wants to make the kind of society-altering changes it has always called for, its members have to coalesce around tangible, material demands that are expressible, because Black people have tangible, material needs. If things don’t change, they’re going to get Nancy-Pelosi-in-kente-cloth shit until the end of time. If I had Chris Hayes’s influence and audience, I would focus on that point.

I am excited for the future of BlackLivesMatter and I think that there’s every chance that the kind of tangible demands I’m asking for come together. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act will be a good start. I just think people should be careful. It’s so easy to get lost in all of these purely symbolic acts - every politician and celebrity and corporation putting out a statement, signs about Black power at the library, quotes from Black leaders on the cups at a fast food chain. The PR campaign. These things predominate because they are easy and they are easy because they don’t threaten establishment power. I don’t care if the demands are initially unpopular, as defunding the police was - like all of my own demands are unpopular. But they should be the right policies and they should be specific and concrete. I think coalescing around cutting Black people checks would, in the long run, do a world of good for actually-existing Black people. But if the conversation remains at the level of abstractions like “dignity” or “respect,” or the demands collapse on contact with resistance like defunding the police, nothing is going to change beyond the odd diversity statement from Raytheon.

1. A remarkable number of otherwise-staid progressive organizations put out positions on the issue, likely caught up in the passion of the time - or the fear of appearing not to be on the right side. Why did Planned Parenthood come out for defunding the police? What’s the connection beyond popularity and inertia? It’s not just hard to see how this helps Planned Parenthood, it’s hard to see how it helps defunding the police.