The opportunistic justice warriors creating chaos in city streets are unfortunately themselves vulnerable people who’ve been sucked into a guilt trip. Ryan Bomberger saw through the activism and bluntly denounced it writing at Town Hall Top 10 Reasons I Won’t Support the #BlackLivesMatter Movement. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
Every life unjustly killed deserves justice. In the cause to make things right, I will not join a movement that has nearly everything wrong. More innocent lives have now been killed (including cops) since these predominantly violent protests began over George Floyd’s horrific death. What about the black lives killed in this nationwide chaos? Do they matter?
Yes, #BlackLivesMatter. But Truth matters. As a Christian, the Church should be leading on these issues instead of sheepishly following a deceptive movement hostile to the Gospel.
The original BLM founders, the #BlackLivesMatter Foundation (BLMF), created it to radically shift culture. The far-left Ford Foundation, the world’s largest population control organization, vowed in 2016 to raise $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives (MFBL)—a nationwide coalition of BLM groups (including BLMF). MFBL released a shocking manifesto of policy positions that are deeply political and deeply disturbing.
Drawing mostly from those positions, here are the top 10 reasons why I will never support the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
The premise isn’t true.
I hate racism. And I hate when it’s used as a political weapon. According to the FBI’s latest homicide statistics, I’m 11 times more likely to be killed by someone of my own brown complexion than a white person. Also, a comprehensive 2019 study concluded: “White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.” Every loss of life is tragic, but Washington Post’s database on police-involved deaths puts things into further context. In 2020, among those killed were (all males): 2 Native Americans, 9 Asians, 46 Hispanics, 76 blacks, 149 unlabeled individuals and 149 whites (whose deaths don’t get reported by national mainstream media). Only nine black individuals were actually unarmed.
There is no goal of forgiveness or reconciliation.
None. It’s never mentioned on their sites. You can’t talk about the sins of the past and expect to move forward if there is no intention of forgiveness. I’m tired of the deeply prejudiced oppressed/oppressor critical race theory paradigm. It’s not Gospel-centered. This should, immediately, be a deal-breaker for Christians.
It’s all about Black Power.
It’s plastered all over the MFBL website. BLMF founders explain their “herstory”: “It became clear that we needed to continue organizing and building Black power across the country.” I don’t promote a colorblind society; I love all of our diverse hues of skin. But I’m so much more than my pigmentation. Martin Luther King promoted “God’s power and human power.” I’m with him.
They heavily promote homosexuality and transgenderism.
“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.” I’m not embracing confusion. Loving every human being is not the same as loving every human doing.
They completely ignore fatherhood.
From BLMF: “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.” Well, every “village” that has fatherless families is a village that suffers higher crime rates, higher drug usage, higher abortion rates, higher drop-out rates, higher poverty rates, and so much more. #DadsMatter.
They demand reparations.
Ok. Sooooo, I guess the white half of me will have to pay the black half of me? If progressives want to push reparations, start with the Party of Slavery and Jim Crow—the Democrat Party! Let them ante up. But the #BlackLivesMatter movement bizarrely demands: “Reparations for…full and free access for all Black people (including undocumented and currently and formerly incarcerated people) to lifetime education…retroactive forgiveness of student loans, and support for lifetime learning programs.” Uhhh, good luck with that.
They want to abolish prisons and police forces.
And…cue utter chaos. MFBL asserts: “We believe that prisons, police and all other institutions that inflict violence on Black people must be abolished…” Defund and remove the police have been rallying cries. That would be anarchy in any community. I advocate some needed police reforms and better community/police relations, but this is just foolishness.
They are anti-capitalism.
Oh the irony of this declaration made by a movement that is the result of capitalism: “We are anti-capitalist. We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system.” The videos that make us aware of police brutality are captured on phones that are a result of capitalism. The best way to elevate people out of material poverty? Capitalism. This system is why the United States is the most charitable nation.
Colin Kaepernick supports it.
A “biracial” adoptee, Kaepernick is now obsessed with his “blackness.” He idolizes the late murderous Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and worships Malcolm X (just see his social media feeds). Malcolm X was anti-integration, pro-violence and a member of the virulently racist Nation of Islam (who forced him out). Kaepernick makes millions from Nike—a company whose entire Executive Leadership Team is white (isn’t this white supremacy???)—that makes its shoes in the most murderous regime in the world. Kaepernick, of course, is completely silent on that. But you know, #SocialJusticeWarrior.
Apparently, not all black lives matter.
Pro-abortion BLMF declared: “We deserve and thus we demand reproductive justice [aka abortion] that gives us autonomy over our bodies and our identities while ensuring that our children and families are supported, safe, and able to thrive.” Aborted children don’t thrive. BLM groups announced “solidarity” with “reproductive justice” groups back in February 2015. You cannot simultaneously fight violence while celebrating it.
Infected with Hateful Ideology
For those of us who missed seeing the rise of “woke” ideology and its cult-like following, James Lindsay provides a thorough assessment of the racial component of this, writing at New Discourses Do Better than Critical Race Theory. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
Many of you have noticed that more people than ever are presenting the stock Critical Race Theory ideas. Do not be alarmed. This is correct. Critical Race Theory mainstreamed during the Black Lives Matter protests following a similar incident in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2015. The rapid mainstreaming of Critical Race Theory is actually a problem, but you don’t need to despair. Critical Race Theory is definitely mainstreaming more than ever now, but on the other hand, not only do more people know what it is now than in 2015 and before, more people than ever are also connecting the dots that something in it is leading not to healing but to harm. We have an opportunity to steal the motte and bomb the bailey, as it might be phrased, and hopefully get this conversation and our country back on track.
The present circumstances are volatile, and fighting for sense in mayhem like this is like trying to talk sense into a hurricane. This public rage, like all public rage, will not last forever. Thus, right now presents a valuable opportunity to educate ourselves and then others clearly about Critical Race Theory, including its role in the present outrage (some of it quite justified) and mayhem (utterly unjustifiable). We have a chance to learn how and why, while it points to important problems, Critical Race Theory is a bad way to deal with the real problems we are put face-to-face with now and to realize that there are better ways. To be clear, Critical Race Theory points to real problems, but it diagnoses them incorrectly and prescribes poisonous solutions that will only make the problems worse. And there are resources to do this now.
Many of us have seen the very compelling footage of one black man talking down another very angry one and instructing a younger black teenager to find a better way because what people are doing now isn’t working. I watched that video. I heard that man’s pain. I know he’s right. A better way to deal with whatever racism may be is needed, and having read a God-awful lot of it, I can tell you for certain, it isn’t to be found in Critical Race Theory. There are ways, but not that way. Finding that better way is now. The systems we’ve been using clearly aren’t working as well as they could. A different way is needed, for sure, and, equally surely, Critical Race Theory isn’t that way.
I’m not going to tell you we know for sure what the better way is, but we have some clear hints about what it looks like and what it doesn’t look like, and we can set to building it together. Our society, which is built upon liberalism, has the capacity to answer these problems and make good on the promises of a genuinely free society for every individual in it. It works. It has worked. It was working. It can work again, even if we have to use liberalism to make amendments to our society.
To understand, we need to understand Critical Race Theory. This theoretical, not evidenced, approach proceeds on a number of mostly bad assumptions. First, it insists racism is ordinary in society, sometimes also said to be permanent. If racism is ordinary and permanent, it cannot be fixed. How can such a Theory offer a solution, then? It can’t, and it wouldn’t want to because that would render it useless.
Second, Critical Race Theory accepts a thesis known as “interest convergence.” This idea comes from the forefather of Critical Race Theory, the late Derrick Bell of Harvard Law. Bell, for all his insights and contributions, was remarkably pessimistic and cynical, if not downright paranoid. His interest convergence thesis insists that white people only care about and help other races out of their own self-interest. If you’re white and feel moved by the appeals of Critical Race Theory or the real (and/or narrativized) circumstances we face and want to be an ally, then, you’re only doing it because it makes you a better white person, a “good white” who is ultimately the biggest part of the problem of systemic racism. How are we supposed to build a better world when people aren’t allowed to help?
Third, Critical Race Theory believes that liberalism is a force that upholds racism. It allegedly does so by making “minoritized” races believe they’re more enfranchised than they actually are and thus unjustly disinterested in agitating for further radical change. We shouldn’t believe this or that we need radical change when liberal change is and has been working. Liberalism is an unparalleled means of resolving conflicts between citizens and ideas, and it, better than anything else, can resolve the conflicts of racism. That the societies that have called themselves liberal and have espoused liberal principles up until now have not done this perfectly or maybe even satisfactorily doesn’t mean that the method itself needs to be destroyed. They are, in fact, the least racist societies the world has ever seen. For all it’s imperfection, no other method has come close to doing as well as liberalism, and this is for good reasons (which are documented in the book Kindly Inquisitors, which everyone alive should read, twice).
Fourth, Critical Race Theory is actively disinterested in evidence and even reality, which it identifies through a gross (but academically established) reference to slavery that frames rigorous methodologies and civil society (really) as a part of the “master’s” toolkit, which will never dismantle oppression. Instead, it prefers to forward storytelling as a form of knowledge. It calls these, when activist in nature, “counterstories,” and they’re meant to disrupt and deconstruct the “dominant narratives,” which are believed to be white and thus white supremacist. (That’s insanely hyperbolic, but it’s also now standard belief across much of the left half of the political spectrum and a core belief of Critical Race Theory, from which it arose.) If we want to solve our real problems, though, we have to know what those real problems are, in reality. We know this, and we can do better than hot-takes and highly emotional stories. Highly interpretive takes that we know are intentionally biased will not work, and, of course, the people who will get hurt most by getting this wrong are the people Critical Race Theory pretends to speak for, especially black people. Being hostile to science, evidence, reason, and truth will not advance anyone’s interests very far, unless we just meant the short-term political interests of the Theory-masters pushing this garbage.
Instead, Critical Race Theory says that “real” knowledge resides in the lived experience of oppression, but only when this experience is interpreted through, you guessed it, Critical Race Theory.
So, if the statistics don’t support the narrative spun by Critical Race Theory, the statistic were produced by a “white” method that wanted to keep black people down, even if all the researchers aren’t white (they might be “acting white,” or “seeking white approval,” or “white-adjacent”). Worse, if a black person speaks up and says something Critical Race Theory doesn’t agree with, then he’s a “race traitor, or “not politically Black,” or “not Black,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates said about Kanye West. In other words, Critical Race Theory believes that if you aren’t black according to how Critical Race Theory says you have to be black, then you’re not authentically black. There is no individual in Critical Race Theory. You are an emissary of your race, and you have to speak on its behalf the way Critical Race Theory says you have to. How is this supposed to help anybody except the grifters pushing it?
Let this sink in. Critical Race Theory explicitly urges an “identity-first” approach to race, where it defines what that political identity looks like and then demands conformity.
This is captured in the famous injunction that it means something more and more important to be a “Black person” than a “person who happens to be black.” It puts identity first and programs what that means. Thus, Critical Race Theory holds up race as a core feature of one’s identity and then says you have to be that race to know what it is to be that race, and one’s politics must go from that place. But we know that increasing racial salience like this is divisive poison.
Because of these things, Critical Race Theory doesn’t believe progress is possible, that it’s a myth (indeed, one created by white people to keep black people and people of other races down). But if an approach tells us progress is impossible, it by definition cannot lead us to progress. Why should we use it? Because it’s the only voice in the game? It’s not, but to the degree that it’s true, it’s because it destroyed every other voice by calling it a racist until it was silenced. Critical Race Theory is pessimistic, cynical, and paranoid to the core, and it teaches these as though they’re virtues, filling young black people especially with a belief that society is against them. This is utter poison. Learning to see problems is good; dwelling on them isn’t.
What do I mean by intentionally impossible? This, a thousand things just like this, straight out of the Critical Race Theory playbook: If you see race, it’s because you’re a racist; if you don’t, it’s because you’re privileged enough to ignore it and are therefore a racist. In the end, you’re going to get wrecked for how problematic your allyship is (it can’t be done right), for being a “good white.” And people care so much about racism they continually sign up for this, mainstream this, become an ally, and endlessly pledge to do better, like some kind of victim of an abusive marriage. Eventually, they fail, get called racist, and get destroyed for it, and then still pledge to “do better.” Why? Because if you reject Critical Race Theory, you must have done so because of your racism. Critical Race Theory is abusive; there’s no other way to put it.
We can do better than Critical Race Theory. We can do better than a sloppy “theoretical” approach that’s really about pushing divisive grievance politics into our society, one that treats people as props for the narrow politics that primarily, if not solely, benefit the elite grifters who know the Theory. Critical Race Theory advances them at everyone else’s expense. And we already know a lot of how to tackle these problems better than Critical Race Theory can. We already know how to be liberals, apply liberalism, judge by the content of character rather than anything to do with identity or color of skin. And we already know that liberal approaches are open to reform and improvement of the societies that employ them.
Footnote: James Lindsay describes the cultish aspects of this movement in The Cult Dynamics of Wokeness
Background: See also Battle of Presidents Park
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