Is BLM a trojan horse?

[Thingybob]

Am I the only one feeling uneasy about the BLM movement?

We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead

We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise)

blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

This business of colour blindness - that is something to be careful of.

The way it's sometimes been meant is just that institutionalised forces still act on people based on categories like race.

But there are still plenty of activist who take the more traditional view that the only way to destroy racism is to destroy race, which after all is a construct. If that is true that colourblindness is the goal and taking steps that undermine it needs to be considered very carefully, especially i they become institutionalised.

@Goosefoot could you explain what you mean by this part? Opens up a lot of questions!

More than that, it behaves this way because it's meant to, because it is designed to protect power, it's meant to avoid looking at real mechanisms and it's meant to fracture solidarity, it' meant to be bread and circuses.

This video was shared by a friend: m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=4FngeEwsVLU

I haven't watched it yet so can't comment, but sharing as it features Adolph Reed who has been mentioned in this thread, so I thought some of you might be interested in watching.

Goosefoot, I would separate out the poor from people of colour because I think that these groups overlap but are somewhat different.

Part of why black people are treated differently is due to global attitudes to Africa and people with a connection to it. A variety of countries have colonised areas of Africa (the Chinese currently) and caused all kinds of problems there. That ongoing situation of exploitation changes how people see black people, even when they no longer live in Africa or are not individually poor.

Many police officers are racist. It isn’t anything to do with unconscious bias. They just are racist people, and if they hadn’t gone down a racist path they would find another group to harass. A lot of people become police officers for the wrong reasons and police forces by their very nature are always going to be susceptible to corruption.

I name change frequently, and always admire your posts Goosefoot. I think you’ve explained many issues very well.

I’m not attempting to form any kind of complete analysis, nor am I capable of doing so, just highlighting a couple of examples at another poster’s request.

@stripesgalore - Many police officers are racist is quite a sweeping statement! Are you talking about in the States or in the UK or just worldwide in general?

I am only referring to the U.K.

Sexism a blind spot? Not for me. I just can't be arsed with the fixation with Trans. And colour blindness is not a thing. It's a construct to ignore racism

And Trans rights Insistence of gender over sex is a construct used to ignore sexism. Enshrine that in law and girls worldwide are fucked. Completely fucked.

Crikey, so close, yet still you refuse to see it.

could you explain what you mean by this part? Opens up a lot of questions!

Sure, I'll try, anyway!

More than that, it behaves this way because it's meant to, because it is designed to protect power, it's meant to avoid looking at real mechanisms and it's meant to fracture solidarity, it' meant to be bread and circuses.

Identity politics, or critical race theory, is a type of racial essentialism. To some extent you could compare it to ender essentialism. Our race is an essential part of our identity, from this view Racism is fundamentally disparities between races. So if you see a disparity, say in something like university education, it's caused by not recognising these identities as equal.

In this way of thinking, there is no questioning of underlying structures, and there is no critique of race itself. Both the leftist and conservative critique of racism, and the civil rights movement largely too, worked on a critique of race, and one that is based in history. That is, race was invented in order to justify economic oppression. The ultimate solution to solve racism, then, is to dissolve that concept. How to do that, conservatives and leftists disagreed, at least in part, but the observation that our perception of race was constructed was fundamental.

In the id politics conception of equality, because race itself is fundamental, equality and justice means lack of discrepancy between races on various measures. So as long at the % of blacks in university, killed by police, with degrees, heading companies, matches the general population, that is racial justice. But what you notice about this is what it really doesn't do is challenge the underlying problems, and especially not the economic system that needs exploitable workers at the bottom.

There are a lot of people with a strong interest in having exploitable workers at the bottom, and it no longer is very useful to them if they are defined by race. In fact it is useful to them to point to them being racially diverse, because that shows that the situation is just. So these people and organisations will tend to like these kinds of formulations. The Democratic party is the best example by a long shot, they can continue to be the party of the corporate sector and the 1%, and also claim to be the party of social justice. It deflects pressure on their paymasters by those with an interest in justice issues, their energies are being spent elsewhere.

It's not unimportant that it was after the uprising by black and white slaves in Haiti that African chattel slavery was introduced. And it's not unimportant that in the case of the the civil rights leaders, it was when they started to see the economic system as a whole at the root of the problem, many of them were radicalised, and began to make increasing moves to solidarity between groups and for workers, that you started seeing things like assassinations.

Reed has called this kind of race identity politics the lapdog of neoliberalism, and I think that's a useful image.

Late to the thread.

BLM isn't a Trojan horse but it is saturated by identity politics to the point that it's in danger of losing its main focus. I wanted to find out more about BLM's aims, so went to their website, and like the OP found a load of babble about queer identities. It's not helpful because a movement like that needs concrete aims, and it needs to know what its core message is, but it's obviously become infested with another ideology.

Sexism a blind spot? Not for me. I just can't be arsed with the fixation with Trans. And colour blindness is not a thing. It's a construct to ignore racism

if you can't see sex, or refuse to acknowledge it, then you fail to see sexism; and you also fail to see difference of the sort that requires particular arrangements and services on account of that difference.
You are the only one that has gone on about 'trans' for most of this thread.

I agree that colour blindness, in terms of not noticing that different people have a different skin tone or complexion, or national dress or cultural attire, is never going to be a thing. Same with sex. It is naive to assume that people do not, or will ever not, notice the sex of a person - that they be blind to sex.

What is most important is that people are treated according to the content of their character, in a context of equal civil rights legislation.

As to whether issues are to do with race or poverty? They are interlinked. Poverty caused by structural racism

Poverty also creates and generates its own cultures, which further trap people in poverty. This is the same for white communities too.

That is not suggest that poor black communities in a dominant white society do not suffer from additional prejudice and/or alienation.

I agree that I feel Grabthar summed it up well.

It strikes me as a pp said that "especially black transwomen" is a telling signal that there's been some SJW stuff going on without much genuine analysis of the experiences of black trans people.

If black women have appalling birth outcomes in the US, as they sadly do here too, how would a black TM have any better experience?

Well the id politics types make the assumption that poverty in black communities is caused by structural racism. It's a lot like the assumption that racism causes police killings of black people. The question is, do the numbers support it, and do the historical facts support it, and that is not obvious, at all. It just can't be taken as a given.

Given that historically, economics created race as we know it, I think it's not an easy argument to make that fundamentally race causes economic disparity.

I should think you could do a comparison on social mobility between residents of a deprived inner city area somewhere very white like Inverclyde and parts of South or East London with a high BAME population and similar social issues and below average educational attainment. I suspect on some metrics the black Londoners would do better, especially on the perceived gold standard of good old Oxbridge entry. I dont think white supremacy is holding people from Inverclyde back but failures of late capitalism certainly affect them, why should there be a completely seperate mechanism being the main cause of similar symptoms in Inner city London? This is where looking to the US for answers doesnt make sense in a British context.

Wbeezer, I remember local teacher in our inner city bit of London saying the biggest predictor of low achievement in schools was not race but three generational unemployment. It was very hard to change the mindset and to create aspiration. In contrast many first and second generation immigrants, regardless of skin colour, were very ambitious and had a lot of family encouragement so tended to do well.

Goosefoot, thank you. These are clearly complex issues which require more than slogans and simple remedies.

I thought three generational unemployment was a myth.

Even assuming you left school recently, and every member of this family had kids in their teens, three generational employment would still require a family in which nobody had a job since the 1950s.

If you left school earlier I. The 2000s it would require a family in which nobody had a job since they were conscripted during World War Two.

First generations can come quite close together. There are certainly kids in schools now whose parents and grandparents have not worked. These grandparents may be in their thirties, so not WW2. The big correlation seems to be between literacy and long term unemployment. This affects both white and black British, and also some newer communities who have both poor literacy and perhaps poor English.

As child employment is illegal, three generational unemployment would mean a child whose parents, grandparents and great grandparents had never had a job.

If you left school in 2015 and every generation of this family had children at 18, that would mean the great grandfather reached working age in 1961.

Meaning nobody with a job since the fifties.

It was very hard to change the mindset and to create aspiration. In contrast many first and second generation immigrants, regardless of skin colour, were very ambitious and had a lot of family encouragement so tended to do well

I used to be a teacher, and my last school was a very high achieving grammar school ( The Liverpool Bluecoat One year it was the highest achieving state school in Britain)

I left teaching 10 years ago, but even then the school had a high proportion of Arabic, Asian & Chinese pupils - relative to the population, but not many black pupils at all. Cultural issues and expectations are certainly at play.

I've been thinking some more about what bothers me, besides the anti-carceral stuff. I mean, I am for major prison reform, including not imprisoning women of any colour for minor crimes or crimes not against a person, but until someone shows me how lovely community 'restorative justice' becomes an option for women victims, I'm going to stay carceral. Doesn't mean I think rates of incarceration for black men and women are just.

But it's the religious fervour of the language, and I wonder if that's because the movement and rhetoric comes out of the US, a nation drenched in way more religion than my own.

'Examine yourself!' is an exhortation that comes directly from a priest to a parishioner, and it refers directly to sin.

BLM (the movement) adherent's rely on this religious language, in the same way genderists do. And even though I believe that black lives matter, and not not believe in gender, I do not align myself with pseudo-religious movements.

Someone here mentioned literacy as a driver of poverty, including amongst people of colour. Literacy is my jam; I volunteer one morning a week to support literacy in a school for indigenous children. That matters more, in material terms, than any failure to adopt the desired pseudo-religious language.

There are some families that are like that, or where employment is sporadic for generations and I can well imagine they would often be families with serious problems that affected them. But it's not at all unheard of particularly in communities that are depressed - we see it in some First Nations communities, particularly ones that are in the North or very isolated. There just isn't a real economy to speak of, not one that can support many people, so the greatest part of the town may have been unemployed for generations. It gives rise to really horrific social problems.

But I'm not sure how much that would tell us about other instances. It's difficult to break out of poverty, and it takes time to accumulate enough to give the next generation the best start. The patter with a lot of immigrant families seems to be that the second generation is expected to enter the middle class.

Well I have certainly known women who became grandmothers at 33, and round our way having your first child at 16 is far from unknown. (Though paradoxically middle class mothers round here tend to have their children unusually late.) And families come is different forms. One friend who taught Yr 2 claimed none of the children in her class lived with both natural parents.

Life chances are influenced by a multitude of things. Race may be one, though many kids are mixed race. But employment, literacy and other factors come into play. For a very long time, perhaps even today, our local secondary had 93% of pupils on free school meals.

I thought three generational unemployment was a myth

Chronic or insecure un/employment is not a myth. I live in Liverpool, and there are certainly communities in which generational state dependence is chronic and institutionalised, and in which low expectation, coupled with a materialist mind-set has resulted in many living on the fringes of the black economy, and areas in which feral kids ( lads, in the main) terrorise the streets - on their expensive dirt bikes and quad bikes - that parents buy for them - with no obvious legitimate means.