White Journalists Are Terrified of Appearing to Criticize BlackLivesMatter, Obviously

but the movement badly needs outside review

For some time I’ve been asking for a mainstream (read: not conservative) publication to investigate BlackLivesMatter and the case of the missing $10 billion, and at last New York has taken a credible stab at that. At the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, typically named as the closest thing to an “official” BLM organization, things aren’t looking great.

BLMGNF has never been a model of fiscal clarity, and even people close to the organization find its arrangement confusing. Over the years, there have been nonprofit and for-profit arms. The BLM Global Network Foundation is distinct from the dissolved BLM Global Network, which is distinct from the BLM Action Fund, BLM Grassroots, and the BLM Political Action Committee. Tides sponsored an effort called the BLM Global Network Project and replaced it with the BLM Support Fund. BuzzFeed News reported in 2020 that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other corporations nearly donated $4 million to an entity called the Black Lives Matter Foundation before realizing it had no connection to the group started by Cullors….

Aside from BLMGNF, Cullors has started or helped lead several other organizations, including three related to criminal-justice reform and prisoners’ rights: Dignity and Power Now, JusticeLA, and the Justice Teams Network. According to filings, money sometimes flows between the organizations. For instance, in 2018, the Justice Teams Network received a $400,000 grant to support work for JusticeLA. From its website, JusticeLA looks like an autonomous entity, but users who click to donate are directed to a PayPal account for Dignity and Power Now….

In 2019, while working on an ultimately successful ballot initiative, Reform LA Jails collected more than $1.4 million in contributions. More than half was paid out to just four recipients. The group sent more than $270,000 to Bowers’s consulting company, as well as some $211,000 to Asha Bandele, a friend of Cullors’s who co-wrote her memoir. About $205,000 went to a company Cullors operates with her spouse, Janaya & Patrisse Consulting. And about $86,000 was paid to Trap Heals LLC, an entertainment, clothing, and consulting company started by Damon Turner, the father of Patrisse Cullors’s child.

It’s a big old mess. Part of the issue is that while there is a national organization that operates under the BlackLivesMatter banner, the broader “BlackLivesMatter” movement has always been said to be its own thing with no official umbrella organization. Unfortunately, this distinction has mostly served to obscure important issues and to deflect criticism - the national organization can never be criticized for what unaffiliated people and protests do, while the greater movement can never be criticized for what the organization does. It’s a setup that’s almost tailor-made for avoiding accountability. And I want accountability for BLM because, despite its warts, the broader movement represents authentic rage at a system that certainly does devalue Black life, occasionally through police violence but more often through grinding poverty.

It’s important and telling that the reporter New York sent out on this fact-finding mission, Sean Kevin Campbell, is Black. It gives him a degree of protection against the typical means of shutting down criticism of BLM, which is to call critics racist. But only a degree, it seems.

Sean Kevin Campbell @Sean_Kev

This has been one of the hardest stories I’ve done. As a Black man, raised by a single Black mother, who has had police guns trained on him, I never expected the insinuation that I was “racist” and “sexist.” Then I worked on this piece with @NYMag. 1/10

nym.agThe Murky Finances of Black Lives MatterA lack of transparency into donations has led to friction and mistrust among activists.

That pouring billions of dollars into an amorphous social movement could result in mismanagement and corruption is as obvious a thing as I can imagine, and so the need for a watchdog press that helps ensure that money isn’t misspent is also quite obvious. I would analogize the current moment and BLM to the Red Cross after 9/11, when a great deal of scrutiny was justly applied to that organization and its practices. But the media has spent the past year and a half saying almost nothing about BLM and where the money has gone, ceding the ground to conservative publications. It was the right-leaning New York Post that reported that one of the cofounders of the BLM Global Network Foundation had purchased four houses in a short time span, for example. The trouble is that many left-leaning people feel that they can safely disregard anything published in conservative media, and thus a badly-needed conversation hasn't happened. Anyone who has ever been part of a large protest movement understands how desperately such movements need external review for accountability, but if only Breitbart et al. are engaged in critical inquiry, the liberal donor class is not going to be moved.

In fact in June of last year, around the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death, I emailed Ben Smith, then the media reporter at The New York Times, why the paper of record had not published a single critical story about BLM and its directionlessness since the death of George Floyd. He was not receptive. But that an issue of such immense social and political importance has received such reflexively and relentlessly positive coverage from the mainstream press, especially if you recognize (as any child can) that people and organizations that claim to speak for a given social purpose are not in fact coterminous with that purpose…. It’s bizarre.

Or maybe it’s not so bizarre. It makes perfect sense that there’s been so little critical coverage if you realize that most of the media is white and panders to liberal sensibilities. In 2020 the atmosphere was impossibly heated, with a pervasive “watch what you say” attitude among the chattering class. Who at a publication like the Times was looking to stick their finger in that socket? What white journalist, not inoculated professionally by working in conservative venues, was going to risk the easy and immediate accusations of racism that would begin the moment they published a critical piece? The NYT had published Wesley Lowery’s absurd “moral clarity” essay, in which he argued that journalists had advanced to a sufficiently august moral plane that they could drop the pose of objectivity their profession had long adopted. Who was going to tell him that, in fact, his evaluation of what moral clarity entailed was as subject to distortion and tunnel vision as anyone else’s?

I never think of my writing as satisfying any particular purpose beyond the edification and education of my readers, and do not see this newsletter as a vehicle through which to do politics. But if I can be said to have any purpose here, any larger project, it is to rehabilitate the concept of critical solidarity. We live in a political culture bent towards the whims of cretins and dullards, and as such it’s a binarist’s dream, a discourse where “you’re either with us or you’re against us” is so widely believed it doesn’t even have to be said. But the most elementary form of political support I know is to criticize, to reveal flaws of substance and strategy so that someone’s project can better flourish. For at least a year and a half the American left has been practicing totally credulous and uncritical support of BLM, out of a combination of good intentions and fear. And I think it’s past time that we embrace critical solidarity. Because the cause of racial justice deserves it.

2020 seems like a long time ago.