They're Trying To Hijack The Movement
Hypocritical murals and sanctioned kneeling isn't resistance.
When the Black Lives Matter hashtag first started, it was an affirmation of resistance against the state. The same is true of Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during NFL games. But in 2020, vessels of the establishment have hijacked both movements as mere branding.
Both Colin Kaepernick and the women behind Black Lives Matter were clear about the reasoning behind their demonstration: they were protesting state-sanctioned violence and racial inequality. Colin Kaepernick was blackballed from the NFL for kneeling. Black Lives Matter has been called a terrorist group by President Donald Trump, and former President Obama condemned "criminals and thugs who tore up" Baltimore during the 2015 uprising in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death.
Both movements are now being celebrated by politicians and capitalists that don’t actually agree with their cause. It was impossible to ignore anti-police advocacy once Minnesota’s 3rd police precinct was lit on fire and a national uprising erupted all over the country in June. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell admitted “we were wrong” to vilify Kaepernick and discourage players from kneeling. In June, Democrats sought to placate Black people by grasping onto the most prominent Black iconography they could think of, first wearing Kente Cloth at a George Floyd memorial, then painting Black Lives Matter on city streets.
Despite Goodell’s contrition, Kaepernick is still without an NFL team. All three Black Lives Matters co-founders (Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi) are self-described abolitionists, but the states that painted Black Lives Matter murals haven’t addressed rampant demand for police defunding. Corporations have enervated Kaepernick’s kneeling into feel-good symbolism and linked it with a Black Lives Matter movement that’s too decentralized to fight co-opting by the Democratic party. No matter how the movements began, and what its founders want, they’ve both been sterilized by the establishment.
D.C. was the first city to paint a Black Lives Matter mural. In early June, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser asked her staff to think of a way for protesters to feel safe on a street near The White House that had been heavily occupied by protesters. Her staff tasked local artists to work with city workers to paint the mural, and Bowser soon deemed the area Black Lives Matter Plaza. Replica murals popped up all over the country, including New York, Dallas, and L.A.
Activists in DC painted “Defund The Police” next to “Black Lives Matter,” reminding the establishment of the reason for their protest. While the city allowed the phrase to stay (for now), they removed the D.C. flag, because it made the entire piece appear to look like “Black Lives Matter = Defund The Police.” But Black Lives Matter does = defund the police.
All three Black Lives Matter co-founders have been on record discussing their views on abolishing the carceral state. In 2015, Opal Tometi tweeted, “Abolish the Police. Instead, Let’s Have Full Social, Economic, and Political Equality.” Alicia Garza has said that she didn’t want to be “prescriptive” about the answers for Black liberation, but told The Nation that “I’m not sure we can have both [policing and the valuing of black lives].” Patrisse Cullors recently told the Deconstructed podcast that “I believe that the first step to abolition is defunding both the police system, but also the carceral system, which is the system that has created mass incarceration.”
None of the politicians who saw fit to utilize their branding agree with them — a prime example of how the state practices erasure of Black women. D.C. Mayor Bowser is a hypocrite for OKing the mural while proposing a 50% increase in the 2021 Metropolitan police budget and doubling the size of the cadet program. New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio has OKed the painting of several murals (and Black Lives Matter avenues) throughout the city, but his $1 billion dollar “slashing” of the NYPD’s $88.1 billion budget didn’t affect a single NYPD job. He also refused to proactively address a woman being kidnapped by the NYPD last week. De Blasio responded to criticism of the mural by surmising, “it was exactly the right thing to do to paint that mural and we’re going to keep sending that message constantly that Black Lives Matter in New York City.”
The phrase has been steadily stifled to the lowest common denominator: the ineffectual acknowledgment that Black people shouldn’t be killed by police.
Black Lives Matter started as a hashtag, then an organization with 16 local chapters all over the country. Their decentralized approach to organizing was an ingenious effort to grow a collective that didn’t fall prey to the perils of hierarchy, but that approach has muddied their ideology. The media has linked almost every prominent Black activist of the 2010s to Black Lives Matter, from infamous grifters like Shaun King to reformists like Deray, despite neither of them ever being a part of the organization.
There have also been conservative outlets that tried to blame the movement for police shootings. This misrepresentation isn’t the fault of the co-founders, and isn’t a blight on their social agency. But the mass conflation of the Black Lives Matter organization with the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag weakens the movement. The term’s ambiguity makes it too easy for opportunists like De Blasio and Bowser to appropriate for bare minimum affirmations of Black life.
Similarly, corporations co-opting Black Lives Matter in order to appeal to Black people are essentially saying “we know Black lives matter to sustaining capitalism.” In 2018, Nike made Colin Kaepernick the star of their “Just Do It” 30th-anniversary campaign, championing his kneeling. The campaign was an oxymoronic coalescence of capitalism and activism. Vox reported that the league made $6 billion in the first month of the campaign. That’s roughly the same amount of money that retailers lost when Black people boycotted Black Friday 2014 after the Mike Brown verdict — a mark of real activism.
The Nike-Kaepernick ads were lauded, which paved the way for countless brands and corporations to attempt to mollify Black people without acknowledging their complicity in sustaining capitalism. Cloying campaigns like Nike’s “You Can’t Stop Us” have sought to paint the current movement in sentimental colors, but they’re inherently tone-deaf attempts to commodify Black trauma.
The NBA regular season officially restarted on Thursday night, and players have been kneeling during the National Anthem while wearing Black Lives Matter shirts and wearing social justice messages on their jerseys. Coach Gregg Popovich, and players like Meyers Leonard and Jonathan Isaac stood during the anthem. Popovich noted “Black and brown people are the two major groups that have suffered these injustices,” but both players noted to reporters after their games that they believed “Black lives mattered,” flattening the term like De Blasio in a way that doesn’t mean anything in the name of resistance or solidarity.
The social justice messages on the player’s jerseys are as toothless as one could expect from a billion-dollar entity with major corporate sponsors (“Peace,” “Justice Now,” “How Many More”). But in the case of Say Their Names, an offshoot of #SayHerName, the league exposed its ignorance. #SayHerName was coined as a response to the underreported deaths of Black women at the hands of cops who didn’t get as many headlines as men. Amplifying Say Their Names, a term that re-incorporates men, is well-meaning but disrespectful. That glaring mistake shows that the league, and the mostly Black players union, didn’t take its activism as seriously as it could have — but that’s not a surprise.
Surely, high-ranking sports officials have a genuine distaste for police brutality, but the extent of their demonstration, like Bowser and De Blasio, has been lip-service and symbolism that doesn’t broach policy or ruffle the feathers of conservative allies. The NBA is one of the world’s most prominent coalitions of Black people, but the league is also about profit over all — that’s why the players are in the COVID bubble in the first place.
On Saturday, writer Howard Bryant called out the kneeling, tweeting “just call it for what it is: kneeling is a safe gesture now. No risk, no sanction. When it was a risk, very few people took it.” Indeed, Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 national anthem kneeling was an act of disruption that cost him his place in the NFL. Few players in any sport knelt with him in 2016 in fear of the consequences of challenging the status quo. But in 2020, pregame kneeling ceremonies are the status quo. Kneeling is no longer an act of revolution; it’s an act of placation.
Late freedom fighter John Lewis popularized the term “good trouble,” surmising in a June 2018 tweet that, “our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble."
Kaepernick, like Cullors, Tometi, and Garza, are embodiments of good trouble. Their dissension caused them to be demonized in the media and called terrorists. Their peace of mind, livelihood, and day-to-day safety was, and still is, in jeopardy because of their bravery. They sacrifice. They make noise. Unfortunately, the establishment tried to muzzle them until they saw fit to co-opt their message. Perhaps their symbolism was too easy to appropriate, but Black people shouldn’t have to be thinking about perfect modes of resistance in the first place.
Mayors and sports leagues weren’t defending dissenters when they were perceived as anti-establishment. But similarly to the way Martin Luther King’s legacy is manipulated to chastise rioters, these movements have been misrepresented by entities that know no better than to posture Black solidarity — because genuine unity would spell their dissolution.
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Venmo: Andre-Gee
Again, this is great! Thank u.
A couple questions:
1 - how did decentralization work in the past? Since most folks are still caught up in the halos of prominent male figures, how can decentralization empower each of us with the political courage to take risks?
2 - Did Kaepernick take the deal with Nike knowing it would lead to him being co-opted, or because he needed the money?
3 - you ever been near a grifter? What did they smell like?