this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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I think a better question to ask is whether the groups and ideologies involved in the BLM protests (which were MASSIVE) were ever allowed to have power?
If BLM failed to enact significant policy change than I don’t think it is because BLM wasn’t focused enough, had unrealistic goals or was handled badly, I think it is because in terms of law enforcement policy it really doesn’t matter what voters do or don’t want. Any kind of noise made by voters and the public about police violence and the inherent problems with police (and their vital role in maintaining economic injustice and inequality through state violence) will be aggressively pushed back in the opposite direction by the political forces of law enforcement, and because the average person has no power and their vote is useless this will result in a broad push in policy in the opposite direction of BLM’s goals.
However, the function of BLM must be seen for what it was then, to lay bare the true nature of the power relationship between voters and cops and in the minds of countless, countless people living in the US it delegitimized the authority of law enforcement to commit violence wherever and howsoever it chooses. It sent a massive crack through the entire structure of policing, jails and systematic divestment from minorities and the poor. Just because BLM didn’t create significant policy changes doesn’t mean that the battle hasn’t already been lost for the legitimacy of law enforcement in the long term in the US, and I call that a victory.
Really? Name a single policy change that was drafted by BLM that went on beyond chants or slogans? There were none, 0, zip. I checked. Screaming loudly is not really useful in this regard.
By that I mean an actual bill or proposal with actual numbers or data that backed it up, that could have been submitted to a vote by say a city council or State goverment. There were none. BLM, outside chants and causing $2 billion dollars worth of damage, dozens if not hundreds of dead people and making some BLM founders wealthy, did not achieve anything in terms of smart policy changes. Last time I checked out of the $90+ millions in donations, BLM staff could not fully account for about $30-$40 million. And that was like two years I go that I checked. BLM was an idealistic grift, at its core. Some mansions had been bought and some of the founders had hired lovers and family as their staff, with paid travel and food expenses. Who knows what else. One had hired her baby's dady as head of security because, why not? Most people never bother to look up this up because unless the way BLM presented itself, either you were a sycophant or you were a biggoted racist if you questioned or criticised them on anything. Whether criticism was valid or not, did not matter, until recently, when people sems more even minded about discussing it.
NYC and other cities briefly dropped some cop funding and all that did in the end was for crime to go up. NYC subway now needs metal detectors and the national guard was called in recently due to the uptick in violent crime.
At best some shallow, meaningless changes like a mural or a rainbow or BLM flag painted on a street, hell, maybe even a street name change or something akin to that, and in some cases, it just increased crime and looting statistics in the aggregate in numerous cities. Sorry bro, this is reality.
It also increase social tension and some distrust between races, which ain't good, either. I dare say that racism, from all races went up since 2016. Won't fully blame BLM for this but the movement sure did not help.
I am sorry, but you viewpoints are clearly based on your desire to engage with a narrative rather than the facts
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2023/manhattan-violent-crime-record-levels-trump-fact-check/
https://www.ahdatalytics.com/dashboards/ytd-murder-comparison/
The only spike in violence New York City saw was from the pandemic making desperate people even more desperate. There was a spike and then it subsided because people got less desperate.
The reality is that the people with the power in the US political system are like you and will categorically not accept less police violence, it is a feature not a bug. Meanwhile, crime has been decreasing and will keep decreasing no matter how much rightwing figures make a bunch of noise about crime and scary immigrants to try to distract people from noticing they aren't actually doing their jobs and passing legislation to meaningfully improve people's lives (that addresses REAL problems like unaffordable healthcare or lack of access to affordable housing, not whether hypothetically a transgender person might have a slighttttt advantage in sports??)
Cite your sources bro. If anything has changed it is that rightwing extremists have become less capable of hiding their racism under a veneer of acceptability politics and have become more openly violent as they realize the general public is beginning to see rightwing extremists (which is effectively the whole damn party, since it is a party of cowards that just follows the loudest, angriest person) for the losers they are. In this sense, yes maybe tensions have increased, but if they have the overwhelming evidence points to conservative rightwing extremists specifically escalating tensions in the vast majority of cases.
Perhaps more existentially for the conservative movement in the US, the general public is also beginning to realize how irresponsibly rightwing extremists behave in policy making (again which is essentially every Republican in office because they all just fall in line no matter how hateful their leader is) because their basic sense of empathy was utterly lobotomized by spending too many hours in front of the tv watching the likes of New Gingrich and Bill O'Reilly. Republicans are the dog chasing the car and the car is hate, and we can only hope that they have finally caught the car in banning abortions and overturning roe vs wade (which the numbers are looking promising, my fingers are crossed :) ).