5
   

The problem with the Black Lives Matters movement...

 
 
Mon 25 Apr, 2016 02:48 am
The problem with much of the Black Lives Matters movement actions (not the concept itself, the execution) is that most of the time the participants don't articulate any solutions and just yell at the people who they need to work with. I'm glad Obama is helping point out to them that just yelling about what they are against doesn't help anything. To enact change you can't just be against something you must also be for something. They need to work harder on articulating not just the dissatisfaction with the status quo but also what it is they want from the people they are yelling at to do (many of whom agree with them on the problem but don't understand why they are being yelled at mindlessly).

Quote:
“Once you’ve highlighted an issue and brought it to people’s attention and shined a spotlight, and elected officials or people who are in a position to start bringing about change are ready to sit down with you, then you can’t just keep on yelling at them,” Obama said.
“And you can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position,” he continued. “The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then to start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved.”


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/obama-to-black-lives-matter-yelling-is-not-enough-to-achieve-progress/article29745072/
 
revelette2
 
  2  
Mon 25 Apr, 2016 08:48 am
@Robert Gentel,
I read about that yesterday. I wonder how it is assimilated by the movement. Positive, negative?
0 Replies
 
Blickers
 
  2  
Mon 25 Apr, 2016 08:53 am
Here's where Hillary said approximately the same thing in a meeting with Black Lives Matter last summer:

0 Replies
 
sozobe
 
  6  
Mon 25 Apr, 2016 08:56 am
@Robert Gentel,
I agree. I think it's not that weird that they're still at the yelling point in the movement -- the movement itself is still coalescing. But yeah, I think Obama's comments were good and I think the movement would be well-served to take them to heart.
0 Replies
 
Sturgis
 
  2  
Mon 25 Apr, 2016 09:04 am
Sincerely hope that they will heed President Obama's words.
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  2  
Mon 25 Apr, 2016 03:48 pm
I think the behavior they used is why people were listening pretty raptly for a while.

The sit back and be patient admonitions of the past 150 years didn't get them fair treatment. Then, as we all noticed, blacks were getting murdered or beaten at a pretty hardy clip by cops with little to no provocation - or consequences - for a while. Racism has been built into so many systems in the US... and it looked like, due to the irritating yelling efforts of BLM, the black community was legitimately pushing toward power...but lately, things seem quiet - like they're losing steam.

I'll be happy for dialogue too, but I think possibly the irritating yelling got them where they are - or maybe - were.

revelette2
 
  1  
Mon 25 Apr, 2016 05:34 pm
No, what got attention was the simple fact of unarmed blacks were getting shot down in the streets and other abuses. If anything the movement has hurt the movement, if that makes sense. In other words, it is all about the movement and not enough about what is actually going on with the systematic abuse of blacks in the justice system.
bobsal u1553115
 
  0  
Mon 25 Apr, 2016 09:36 pm
http://www.alternet.org/activism/black-lives-matter-movement-most-visible-twitter-its-true-home-hard-work-organizing


<snip>
Writing in Truthout, organizer Ejeris Dixon, who has worked with the New York City Anti-Violence Project and the Audre Lorde Project, describes base-building as, at heart, relationship-building: “a series of activities designed to introduce, engage, and keep people involved in our movements. That means meeting individuals where they are and building forward from that place—the barbershop, the salon, the laundromat, the doorway—where we come together as people and have a conversation.” The Movement for Black Lives policy table, which grew out of a national gathering of activists at Cleveland State University last summer, recently set out to do just that. In January, the policy table announced the start of a six-month process to develop a national agenda. Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, a regional organizer with Project South, is a participant. She says she feels the pressure of developing a vision and creating infrastructure while responding to the seemingly endless killings of black people by police: “We’re building the bicycle while riding it and being shot at.”

Henderson’s background, like Carruthers’s, shows deep connections to earlier iterations of the black-liberation movement in the United States. “My mom is an original Black Panther Party member, and my father was very big in the Black Arts Movement in Tennessee and also in the black radio scene,” Henderson says. When a 66-year-old black man named Wadie Suttles died in custody at the Chattanooga jail in 1983, her father took the bold step of naming the police officer suspected of the fatal beating on the air. In 2004, Henderson met veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when she took a monthlong bus ride with other young activists to register voters and commemorate Freedom Summer.

Among the current organizers, evidence of such long-standing commitment to racial justice is common, notes Barbara Ransby. Many leaders are taking the skills developed in labor or prison or community organizing and applying them to new collaborations. “Oftentimes we don’t do that genealogy, and a new organization feels like it came out of the blue,” she said. “There were new formations, but they were not newly formed organizers.”

* * *

“The work we have to do doesn’t necessarily lend itself to 140 characters.” —Rachel Gilmer, Dream Defenders
What is new, at least for many, is the space for explicitly black organizing undertaken by activists tied to black communities. Makani Themba, a longtime organizer and founding director of the Praxis Project, explains that in the 1960s, the leaders of the movement were the heads of black institutions with sizable bases—think Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael. That changed in ’70s and ’80s, as black leadership came to mean “the most deeply penetrated black person in white or mainstream institutions,” Themba adds. As civil-rights organizations began to depend more on corporate contributions than member donations, and as Reagan-era cuts decimated organizations serving the black poor, black activists who wanted organizing and advocacy jobs turned to the institutions that had the resources to pay and retain them—often unions and economic-justice organizations that operated outside any explicitly black cultural context.

That pattern has shifted in recent years. The phrase “unapologetically black” appears on T-shirts and hoodies worn by movement activists, and a dedication to using messages appealing to black audiences dominates today’s approach to racial-justice organizing. New groups like BYP 100, the Dream Defenders, and Black Lives Matter have blossomed in the wake of Zimmerman’s acquittal. Denise Perry directs Black Organizing for Leadership & Dignity, whose stated mission is to “help rebuild Black social justice infrastructure…and re-center Black leadership in the US social justice movement.” BOLD launched in 2011 and graduated its first class of trainees the following year. Perry says that the focus on black organizing was new for a majority of participants. “Many of them were organizing in multiracial, multiethnic organizations. That work is important; we’re not going to win on our own. But the space to have conversations about what we need to work on was new for 98 percent of the people in the room.”

* * *

After the Dream Defenders’ successful occupation of the Florida statehouse in 2013, its members were tempted to focus on actions that would satisfy a Twitter following that had jumped from about 4,000 to more than 30,000 in a month’s time. But the work of organizing “has to be done,” says Rachel Gilmer, 28, who joined the group last summer, “and it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to 140 characters that are going to get retweeted thousands of times.”

In the end, the commitment to building local campaigns won out over the lure of high visibility. The organization, which has eight chapters in Florida, is now in the midst of a yearlong effort to determine its long-term strategy, regardless of the ebbs and flows created by social-media buzz. Last fall, the group put a three-month moratorium on social media, which strengthened relationships and built trust among colleagues, Gilmer says. “It was an opportunity for us to take a break from all the noise in order to get back connected with one another.”

It also forced a reality check about relationships in the movement. “We’re like ‘Hey, fam!’ [online], but people don’t really know each other,” Gilmer says. “There’s no substitute for human interaction.”

<snip>
revelette2
 
  3  
Tue 26 Apr, 2016 08:39 am
@bobsal u1553115,
Quote:
Perry says that the focus on black organizing was new for a majority of participants. “Many of them were organizing in multiracial, multiethnic organizations. That work is important; we’re not going to win on our own. But the space to have conversations about what we need to work on was new for 98 percent of the people in the room.”


I am not sure what the above means. Does it mean the organizations were not really focused on issues of blacks in the justice system before?
0 Replies
 
tony5732
 
  0  
Sun 14 Aug, 2016 01:25 pm
@revelette2,
Completely agree. Seeing an asshole cop on tv gunning down a black guy running away gets people disgusted and angry. Than there is a protest, stuff gets trashed, traffic gets backed up, and white cops are killed just for being white and the dialogue is flipped.
0 Replies
 
tony5732
 
  0  
Sun 14 Aug, 2016 01:26 pm
@Robert Gentel,
They do a lot more than yell....
0 Replies
 
tony5732
 
  1  
Sun 14 Aug, 2016 01:33 pm
@Lash,
I disagree. Obama, king, Michael Jackson, and a lot of other Black people did awesome positive things over the years to get respect for black people, successfully. BLM is counterproductive to that, because instead of breaking the stereotype they reinforce it by living up to it.
greyowlfive5
 
  -1  
Wed 22 May, 2019 12:28 pm
@Robert Gentel,
I feel, I am being TOLD that I don't know lives matter, and I need to KNOW black lives matter too. WHY this pisses me off, is because it ASSUMES people DON'T know. I don't give a darn what race you are, I'm not stupid, and don't tell me what matters.
0 Replies
 
oralloy
 
  -1  
Thu 30 May, 2019 01:52 pm
I think the main problem is the fact that BLM goons are protesting cases of lawful self defense where black people were killed while trying to murder police officers (and in one case a neighborhood watch captain).

The idea that black people should be allowed to murder police officers with impunity is repugnant to me, and I think also to many other people.
RABEL222
 
  1  
Thu 30 May, 2019 02:49 pm
@oralloy,
How about white people murdering blacks? Is that repugant to you or the way it should be?
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  2  
Fri 31 May, 2019 05:00 am
@tony5732,
tony5732 wrote:

I disagree. Obama, king, Michael Jackson, and a lot of other Black people did awesome positive things over the years to get respect for black people, successfully. BLM is counterproductive to that, because instead of breaking the stereotype they reinforce it by living up to it.

They never got respect. They never got equality. That check is still marked insufficient funds.
livinglava
 
  0  
Fri 31 May, 2019 06:37 am
@Lash,
Lash wrote:

They never got respect. They never got equality. That check is still marked insufficient funds.

Seeking equality with environmentally- and social-economically unsustainable economic culture is a nightmare dead-end.

White culture is economically overprivileged by having an underclass of poor people, many if not most black (unless you count all the low-wage workers in Asia), who keep inflation lower than it would be if there was social-economic equality with (non-poor) whites.

So if you would somehow achieve equality for all these people who want to be just as overprivileged as the white upper-middle class, it would be even more unsustainable than it already is, including just because the inflation rate would increase.

So the only real solution is for traditionally-privileged whites to cut down their own economic privileges to levels that would be sustainable for all people, including poor blacks, to strive for; yet they simply ignore/reject the need to do that.

So the problem of inequality persists, and the black political solution is not to demand whites cut down their level of economic privilege but rather to demand equality with white privilege. That is a crazy solution, but it is the one that feels safer to privileged whites because it implicitly validates that level of privilege as being something everyone can and should strive for . . . even when it really wouldn't be sustainable for everyone to achieve it, either in terms of environment/climate OR in terms of economic stability and preventing inflation.
0 Replies
 
Olivier5
 
  3  
Wed 12 Jun, 2019 04:54 am
Thank you Ms. Holsey for what you did.

Quote:
A woman in Hawthorne, California, begged officers to put their guns down as they pointed it at a black man who was kneeling with his hands above his head.

[...] Holsey said the incident occurred at a busy intersection in Hawthorne, in Los Angeles County. William Ewell, 24, ended up being arrested that Friday morning, police records show.

Holsey’s video went viral over the weekend, leaving many people outraged over the number of police officers with their guns drawn. Some people credit Holsey with preventing the officers from using deadly force against Ewell.

Holsey told HuffPost in an email that she was getting gas before work when the confrontation occurred. She said Ewell, whom she doesn’t know personally, “instantly” surrendered to the officers by kneeling with his hands up, noting that “he seemed in shock.”

Holsey said she began filming because she believed that the police were using excessive force.

“Is all that really necessary,” Holsey can be heard telling the officers in the video. “Is all the guns drawn on him necessary?” [...]

As Holsey filmed the confrontation Friday, she warned Ewell to stay still “because they will shoot you” while she asked the officers to put their guns down and just arrest the man.

Holsey began crying as the officers kept their guns aimed at Ewell, as seen on her video. She later told the officers that her boyfriend, Leroy Browning, was killed by police in 2015.

After more than two minutes of filming, the police apprehended Ewell. One officer approached Holsey and told her that they were responding to a robbery and that the man “loosely matches the description” of the suspect.

[...] Police accused Ewell of arguing with a female cashier over a “prior purchase” and “forcibly” grabbing “store items from the display.” Police also claimed that Ewell assaulted an employee with a trashcan.

Ewell was released Monday [therefore he spent the whole weekend in jail] with a citation, according to an arrest record.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/video-hawthorne-police-kneeling-man_n_5d004b29e4b011df123c7008

Here is the video:
https://twitter.com/KenidraRWoods_/status/1137693933742501888?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1137693933742501888&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffpost.com%2Fentry%2Fvideo-hawthorne-police-kneeling-man_n_5d004b29e4b011df123c7008
0 Replies
 
oralloy
 
  -1  
Fri 14 Jun, 2019 09:24 am
Quote:
3:30 a.m.

A spokeswoman with the Tennessee Borough of Investigation says U.S. Marshals went to a home in Memphis to look for a man with felony warrants before the suspect was fatally shot.

Keli McAlister said at a news conference early Thursday that marshals with the Gulf Coast Regional Fugitive Task Force went to a Frayser home about 7 p.m. on Wednesday. They saw the man get into a vehicle and she says that he proceeded to ram police vehicles with his car multiple times and then he exited the car with a weapon.

McAlister says marshals opened fired and the suspect died on the scene.


5:20 p.m.

A Mississippi prosecutor says a black man killed by a federal fugitive task force in Tennessee was wanted in a shooting in his state not far from Memphis.

DeSoto County District Attorney John Champion said 20-year-old Brandon Webber was wanted on aggravated assault and armed robbery charges related to a shooting during a car theft in Hernando, Mississippi, on June 3. Champion says the victim was shot five times and survived.


8:30 a.m.

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland is expressing pride in the city's first responders to the scene of a fatal shooting by federal marshals. His statement says six officers had to be treated at a hospital.

Police director Michael Rallings told a Thursday morning news conference that the slain suspect was being sought for felony warrants. He says a group of protesters gathered and became irate, throwing rocks at officers, and damaging police vehicles and a nearby fire station.

Strickland said he's impressed by the "professionalism and incredible restraint as they endured concrete rocks being thrown at them and people spitting at them."

He said at least two journalists were injured, police cars were damaged, a fire station's windows were shattered and a concrete wall outside a business was torn down.

http://apnews.com/264c520107894b95a058e5da24412668

Another hero for the BLM goon squad to mourn.
Olivier5
 
  2  
Fri 14 Jun, 2019 10:02 am
@oralloy,
You should have used flashing pink uppercase letters for additional emphasis...
 

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