Between Protest and Politics: Black Lives Matter Movement(s)

for Black Lives

Robert J. Patterson

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Volume 19, Number 2,

October 2020, pp. 427-452 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/774542

[52.1.53.209] Project MUSE (2024-04-14 19:03 GMT) Kansas State University Libraries
 ES S AY

Robert J. Patterson
.........................................................................................

Between Protest and Politics

Black Lives Matter Movement(s) for Black Lives

Abstract: This article examines the official Black Lives Matter Movement (the
Black Lives Matter Global Network) as a point of departure to argue that
Black Lives Matter (BLM) in general expands our epistemological frame-
work for thinking about black freedom movements, black freedom dreams,
and black freedom strategies. By analyzing the movement’s explicit refusal
to be likened to civil rights movement organizations as a concurrent attack
against intraracial sexism, heterosexism, and transphobia, the article insists
that BLM deprivileges heteronormativity to show that black freedom
dreams must include gender and sexual liberation. By considering BLM’s
rejection of capitalism as a broader critique of neoliberalism’s forceful role
in maintaining black dispossession, the author posits that BLM desires to
[52.1.53.209] Project MUSE (2024-04-14 19:03 GMT) Kansas State University Libraries

disrupt the state’s tendency to use the black middle class to enact, enforce,
and reinforce an economic order that relies upon race and racism to codify
and cement black inequality. Finally, the author posits that the movement’s
tactics and goals provide a framework through which to enact short-term
change, while pushing to dismantle the larger system of antiblack racism
that is refracted through global capitalism.

BLM: Introduction
Right-wing conservatives, centrist democrats, and black middle-class
respectability politics adherents alike have questioned the purpose, effi-
cacy, and sustainability of the Black Lives Matter movement.1 Indeed, for
the aforementioned critics, the very use of the term movement instigates ire

meridians  feminism, race, transnationalism 19:2 October 2020

doi: 10.1215/15366936-8308476 © 2020 Smith College
428 meridians 19:2  October 2020

because the word itself invokes a political purpose or organizational

structure that, in their estimation, the movement initially lacked (see
Jackson 2016; Pearce 2015; Altman 2015a; Dixon 2016; Orr 2015). The per-
ceived absence of an outspoken, visible leader (a man) who articulated the
goals, tactics, and expected outcomes of the movement engendered the
sense that Black Lives Matter lacked coherence, objectives, or strategies.
These critiques and questions illuminate a desire to situate Black Lives
Matter (BLM) within the context of the civil rights movement (and perhaps,
to a lesser degree, within the Black Power movement). Yet the comparisons
often tacitly ignore or reject how BLM’s political purpose, organizational
tactics, governance structure, and policy initiatives intentionally diverge
from those of earlier black freedom struggles. For instance, the civil rights
movement desired for black citizens to have access to economic opportu-
nities that would improve their material circumstances. Although BLM
wants black citizens’ economic circumstances to improve, BLM questions,
unlike the civil rights movement, whether black people can achieve this
goal under capitalism. For BLM, the persistence of antiblack racism, black
inequality, white supremacy, and discrimination, despite the achievements
of the modern civil rights movement, demands new philosophies and
strategies to achieve racial equity. Variation persists among movements for
black lives and likely within the Black Lives Matter Global Network, so this
discussion assumes continuities and discontinuities among and between
the multiple organizations that fall under BLM.
When Alicia Garza tweeted #blacklivesmatter in August 2013, the hash-
tag went viral because the succinct statement drew attention to the histor-
ical paradox that has characterized black life in the United States for
approximately four hundred years. On the one hand, it articulated the fact
that black lives do indeed have value, despite the persistence of antiblack
racism and state-sanctioned violence against black people that would sug-
gest otherwise.2 On the other, it signaled how, in American culture more
broadly, political, cultural, and social institutions collude to confirm that
black lives matter less than nonblack lives in general and white ones in
particular. Although the failure of the justice system to hold George Zim-
merman accountable for the murder of Trayvon Martin inaugurated BLM
in the United States, BLM has taken on an expansive set of institutions,
policies, ideologies, and principles that coalesce to thwart the ability of
black lives to live, flourish, and thrive. At the heart of the devaluation of
black life, black people, and black cultures lies an antiblack racism that
 Robert J. Patterson  Between Protest and Politics 429

infects every American institution; harkening back to David Walker, whose

Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) argued that slavery was but
a manifestation of a broader antiblack racism, BLM clarifies that the
expendability of black life in the American justice system reflects a more
generalizable disdain and disregard for black people. Capitalism, which
Walker astutely calls avarice, colludes with antiblack racism to impede
black lives from mattering beyond their surplus values.
While Garza, in collaboration with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometti,
cofounded the organization Black Lives Matter, several other groups, orga-
nizations, and individuals have appropriated the hashtag and some of its
principles. Since its inception in 2013, Black Lives Matter has grown and
now operates as “The Black Lives Matter Global Network—a chapter-
based, member-led organization” with membership and chapters operat-
ing throughout the United States and abroad. BLM’s Global Network
encompasses a capacious set of ideologies, organizations, and tactics. To
understand this twenty-first-century movement in the United States it is
also useful to consider the more general movement for black lives in con-
junction with Garza et al.’s organization. Several “Guiding Principles”—
including diversity, restorative justice, queer affirming, black families,
empathy, and black women—animate the political, social, cultural, and
economic issues that BLM undertakes. These principles also shape BLM’s
organizational structure, mobilization strategies, and freedom dreams.3
#BlackLivesMatter self-consciously calls attention to itself as a movement
that eschews the race-focused orientation of earlier black freedom strug-
gles that explicitly and implicitly privileged black people’s race over their
gender and sexuality. This framework moves the black freedom struggle
toward a community-focused enfranchisement initiative and values the
plurality of black lives inasmuch as it does black heterosexual men.
This article examines the official Black Lives Matter Movement (the Black
Lives Matter Global Network) as a point of departure to argue that BLM in
general expands our epistemological framework for thinking about black
freedom movements, black freedom dreams, and black freedom strate-
gies. By analyzing the movement’s explicit refusal to be likened to civil
rights movement organizations as a concurrent attack against intraracial
sexism, heterosexism, and transphobia, this article insists that BLM
deprivileges heteronormativity to show that black freedom dreams must
include gender and sexual liberation. By considering BLM’s rejection
of capitalism as a broader critique of neoliberalism’s forceful role in
430 meridians 19:2  October 2020

maintaining black dispossession, I posit that BLM desires to disrupt the

state’s tendency to use the black middle class to enact, enforce, and rein-
force an economic order that relies upon race and racism to codify and
cement black inequality. Finally, I posit that the movement’s tactics and
goals provide a framework through which to enact short-term change,
while pushing to dismantle the larger system of antiblack racism that is
refracted through global capitalism.
BLM scholarship to date has historicized the movement, compared it to
earlier black freedom struggles, considered its longevity, and assessed its
effectiveness in achieving measurable outcomes. For example, Christopher
Lebron (2017) usefully captures how earlier black thinkers, including
W. E. B Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper, provided the intellectual frame-
work through which to understand ongoing debates about the value of
black life in the American body politic. He notes that one of the major
obstructions to racial progress that BLM makes visible is the morally dim-
witted, which is, in Lebron’s (2017: 153) words, “a person convinced of his or
her position yet whose moral perceptions are so deeply mired in racial
privilege that the critical perception and judgment needed to correctly
interpret problems is suppressed to the point of motivating asinine obser-
vations and assertions.” For Lebron, America has yet to figure out how to
integrate black people into American democracy; too often discussions
about black death and disenfranchisement focus on black behavior
(Martin’s irrelevant marijuana use) instead of state-sanctioned violence
(policing guidelines that condone using excessive force).
Wesley Lowery (2017) insists that BLM offers an incisive, necessary, and
expansive debate about race that can move the United States toward racial
justice. Lowery (2017: 13) explains, “Ferguson would birth a movement and
set a nation on a course for a still on-going public hearing on race that
stretched far past the killing of unarmed residents—from daily policing to
Confederate imagery to respectability politics to cultural appropriation.”7
The pervasiveness of race, as Lowery’s examples demonstrate, captures
why Garza’s hashtag adopted a life of its own; the devaluation of black life
in the United States is the rule, not the exception. The statement calls for
action—not simply an acknowledgment of racism’s persistence, but for the
development of solutions to achieve racial equity.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016: 17) argues that BLM offers a structural
critique of racism that demonstrates how racism and capitalism reinforce
each other. This perspective calls into question appropriate strategies to
 Robert J. Patterson  Between Protest and Politics 431

diminish inequality. In this way, BLM wrestles with a central question with
which the Black Power movement grappled: “Can the conditions created by
institutional racism be transformed within the existing capitalist order?”
BLM answers this question with an unequivocal no, and Taylor illuminates
why the question takes up new meaning in the context of Barack Obama’s
presidency: black citizens expected Obama to more explicitly show that
black lives matter through his administration’s policies and initiatives.
Presumably, (black) citizens desired policies that moved toward color
consciousness and away from colorblindness.
Barbara Ransby (2018) offers a compelling genealogy that situates BLM
within the context of black radical traditions that emphasized this need for
equity in the aftermath of the modern civil rights movement. As Ransby
explains:

Another critical antecedent to the emergence of BLMM/M4BL goes back

to June 1998 and the launch in Chicago of the Black Radical Congress
(BRC), a coalition of Black left organizers and intellectuals responding to
the devastating impact of neoliberal politics on the Black community,
and to the dearth of responsive Black leadership. The BRC revived coali-
tional Black left organizing, linked disparate radical traditions, made
Black feminism central, and confronted white supremacy and racial
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capitalism head on. (13)

By contextualizing the rise of BLM in a black radical/left tradition,

Ransby disrupts the notion that BLM emerges from nowhere, while also
indicating how black left politics historically have remained on the
periphery of mainstream black political organization, even as the black left
indisputably has played its role in advancing black freedom. Collectively,
these scholarly texts illuminate some of the central ideas and histories
shaping BLM, and articulate the potential for BLM organizations to achieve
their visions for black people to have more equitable futures.

BLM: Movement, Organization, and Goals

The BLM Global Network (BLMGN) rightfully correlates the privileging of
black men and their political interests with the elevation of black men as
formal leaders in the civil rights movement, and therefore has chosen to
have a “member-led” organization to avoid similar masculinist hierar-
chies. Scholarship about the civil rights movement has chronicled the pit-
falls of denying the significance, if not the presence, of black women’s
432 meridians 19:2  October 2020

leadership by defining that work as work; classifying it as bridge leadership;

and devaluing bridge leadership relative to formal leadership. BLMGN
resists this tendency and recognizes how this trend articulates and reflects
more pervasive trends of misogyny and intraracial sexism that contribute to
a broader cultural devaluation of non–heterosexual black men in black
communities. As the website states, “We are guided by the fact that all
Black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender
identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious
beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location” and “we build a space
that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environ-
ments in which men are centered.”4 BLMGN thus explicitly notes that black
lives matter does not metonymically signal that only black heterosexual
men’s lives matter (most).
By positioning the political needs and leadership of black women as well
as queer and trans communities and individuals at the forefront of black
liberation movements, this movement provides and demands a more
capacious notion of blackness and civil rights that considers and prioritizes
the needs of multiple constituencies. This prioritizing of nonnormative
issues and constituencies impacts how citizens interpret and understand
the movement. That is, on the one hand, the consternation that critics have
about the movement’s organization partially may be attributed to their
inability to situate it within existing schematics. On the other, a more
insidious sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia may com-
pound the first issue. By rejecting the formal leadership model that civil
rights organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Confer-
ence used, BLMGN adopts a more egalitarian form of leadership that mir-
rors its political goal of debunking sociopolitical hierarchies for its con-
stituents.5 It foregoes the conclusions that movement leadership requires
black men, that black men’s political concerns supersede those of others
within communities, and that LGBTQI rights and concerns remain
peripheral to black freedom struggles. In this way, BLMGN’s mission and
guiding principles echo those of “The Combahee River Collective: A Black
Feminist Statement,” where black feminists define the philosophical
underpinnings that animate their work, specify the need for a politics of
inclusion that can build intraracial allegiances among and between black
men and women, and articulate an integrative and intersectional approach
to studying and eradicating black oppression for all black people (Comba-
hee River Collective 1995).
 Robert J. Patterson  Between Protest and Politics 433

Although debates about BLMGN often compare it to the civil rights and
Black Power movements, BLMGN’s intentional foregrounding of the black
feminist epistemology and political practice of intersectionality better
approximates it to black feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s. My
use of the concept of intersectionality builds upon Kimberle Crenshaw’s
(1991) legal work, and accounts for the ways that identificatory categories
in general—race, gender, class, and sexuality in particular—intersect to
produce different sets of sociopolitical and material advantages and dis-
advantages that accrue or lose value within society’s structures and insti-
tutions. Intersectionality thus holds in tension, for example, how racism
operates alongside, within, and through classism, heterosexism, and
homophobia. Even as intersectionality emphasizes race for analytic pur-
poses, it resists privileging or isolating race, and, as such, differs from the
race-focus that typically is ascribed to (and perhaps cherished by) the civil
rights and Black Power movements. Intersectionality not only undergirds
BLMGN’s leadership philosophy, organizational structure, and political
aims, but it also shapes and influences its aspirations for a (more) just society.
Inasmuch as Audre Lorde ([1984] 2007) has reminded us that the master’s
tools (e.g., capitalism) will never dismantle the master’s house (e.g., anti-
black racism), she insisted that hierarchies of oppression prove ineffective in
dismantling all forms of systemic oppression.14 Both of these black feminist
principles propel the ethical imperative and political strategies of BLMGN.
Skeptics of the movement status of BLM point to its organizational
structure in general, and leadership model in particular, to support their
contention that the movement is not in fact a movement. The absence of a
sole leader (presumably a man) who articulates a unified vision across time
and place, for example, differentiates the black lives era from the civil
rights and Black Power ones; not only does this absence become a source
of angst for critics who desire a more recognizable leadership pattern, but
the desire also reinforces hierarchical forms of leadership that arguably
strained the effectiveness of earlier movements. Civil rights historian
Belinda Robnett (1997) usefully has used the phrase formal leadership to cat-
egorize this type of organizational structure that characterized civil rights
organizations in which men held titled positions, served as media spokes-
people, and interfaced with state agencies and officials on behalf of their
constituents.6 As black formal leaders became more of the face and
spokespeople for the movement, black men, black leadership, and black
interests became synonymous.
434 meridians 19:2  October 2020

An important element of civil rights organization, agitation, and

advancement, formal leadership constitutes only one aspect of that leader-
ship. Yet the tendency to focus on it elides the significance of bridge leader-
ship—what Robnett (1997: 19) defines as the fostering of “ties between the
social movement and community and between prefigurative strategies
(aimed at individual change, identity, and consciousness) and political
changes (aimed at organizational tactics designed to challenge the existing
relationships with the state and other societal institutions).” Mutually
constitutive, it also provided necessary grassroots, consciousness-raising
activities that complemented and sustained formal leadership, as well as
generated additional leaders and members. Because women typically
fulfilled bridge leadership roles during the civil rights and Black Power
movements, the failure to recognize and classify their roles as leadership
miswrites civil rights and Black Power leadership historiography; it could
also lead one to conclude erroneously that women did not lead or that their
leadership was not as important or effective as that of men. The fact that
(queer) black women—Cullors, Tometti, and Garza—founded the BLMGN
but have not become its default spokeswomen for the movement (while
black men have) reflects the persistence of a broad cultural desire to iden-
tify black men as leaders of freedom movements.7
Beyond the significant historiographical omission, this practice con-
currently elevates black men’s social positions and corresponding political
interests as black communities’ most pressing concerns, reinforces the
idea that black men’s leadership is necessary and desired for civil rights
attainment, and attenuates the possibility of representing black commu-
nities’ varying and competing interests. Black men thus become, as Erica
R. Edwards (2012: 33) explains, “the necessary precondition for survival,
progress, political power, and social unity.” Such a contention, as I argue in
Exodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and Cul-
ture, also “undermines the role of everyday activities and ordinary people in
obtaining civil rights” (Patterson 2013: 155). By contrast, BLMGN embraces
more egalitarian forms of leadership that reject hierarchies and their cor-
responding political prioritizations; encourages everyday citizens to
become part of the movement for black enfranchisement; embraces an
intersectional understanding of race, gender, class, and sexuality as the
underlying framework for black political enfranchisement; and locates the
power for political transformation in everyday activities. From these van-
tage points, BLMGN may not in fact be a movement in the ways that the
 Robert J. Patterson  Between Protest and Politics 435

civil rights and Black Power movements were. The difference here pertains
to emphasis and not a complete absence; the mid-twentieth-century
movements for black lives (self-identified or otherwise ascribed) did not
so explicitly prioritize these ideas and practices.
By keeping all black people at the forefront of its political agendas,
BLMGN foregrounds the importance of building coalitions that include
previously excluded vulnerable populations within black communities so
that “every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to
thrive.”8 There indeed may not be a way to account for every interest that a
community possesses, especially when they are competing, conflicting, or
contradictory—what Cathy Cohen (1999) describes as cross-cutting issues.
Yet the inability to meet this goal should not hinder our striving, and
BLMGN’s intersectional mission forces us to think through the complexity
of what it means to do social justice and equity work for black people in the
post–civil rights era. In other words, BLM forcefully pushes us to consider
the following questions: How does our fundamental understanding of
what constitutes civil rights inform the quest for civil rights equity? In what
ways have the achievements and shortcomings of the modern civil rights
movement reshaped ideas about what constitutes a movement? How has
technology fundamentally increased the speed at which citizens gain
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knowledge about civil rights violations and quickened the possibility for
mass mobilization? How does mass mobilization in the context of a
decentralized movement benchmark progress, success, and achievement?
As the BLM era grapples with these questions, it will continue to work
within the system as it understandably tries to dismantle it.
Despite the important ways that BLM compels us to think about black
freedom strategies, black freedom dreams, and black freedom move-
ments, critics who focus on its leadership structure, activist strategies, and
metrics of success view it as ephemeral, ineffective, counterproductive,
and otherwise as a nonmovement. Yet BLM employs a range of strategies
that, within the rubric of bridge leadership that Robnett theorizes, focus
on consciousness-raising at both the individual and institutional levels.
Although consciousness-raising might embody a range of activities, BLM
has become primarily identified as a disruptive force. Yet BLM finds utility
in disruption and eschews this criticism. Activists, leaders, and ordinary
citizen participants, for example, have entered into spaces to which
they have not been invited and spoken at events at which they have not
been scheduled. They have held die-ins at what some would consider an
436 meridians 19:2  October 2020

inopportune time, and have halted traffic on major highways and thor-
oughfares during rush hour. Whereas critics of these tactics call for BLM to
be more respectable and respectful of established protocols, they neglect
to consider how the tactic relates to their movement’s larger purpose.
Inasmuch as protest, marching, and other forms of resistance have long
constituted the repository for (and of ) black political action, respectability
politics maintain a strong force in black freedom strategies. The appeal of
respectability politics perhaps lies in the perception that they gave black
people a stronger sense of control over their fates. Born from Evelyn Hig-
ginbotham’s (1994) analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century black culture, the phrase respectability politics captures the strategies
that black people in the United States adopted to demonstrate their
deservedness of citizenship rights. Respectability politics propose that by
conforming to Victorian, middle-class Eurocentric ideals (propriety, tem-
perance, monogamy), black people would demonstrate their humanity to
white people; in turn, white people would recognize them as equals and
agree they deserved and could exercise responsibly their citizenship rights.
Critics amply have explained the range of shortcomings that respectability
politics have as a strategy (see Morris 2014). First, they reinforce the notion
that citizenship rights are privileges and not rights. Second, they place the
burden of eradicating antiblack racism and white supremacy on black peo-
ple. Third, as a form of incorporation, they are, in the words of Cathy
Cohen (1996: 443), “simply expanding and making accessible the status
quo for more privileged members of marginal groups, while the most vul-
nerable in our communities continue to be stigmatized and oppressed.”24
Yet given the shift toward behaviorist explanations for black inequality in
the post–civil rights and neoliberalist eras, despite respectability politics’
shortcomings, the increased scrutiny placed on black families, behaviors,
and choices augments their appeal.
Respectability politics suppressed intraracial differences along class,
gender, and sexual lines because they assumed that divergences from the
nuclear family model and heteropatriarchy more generally would contrib-
ute to black disenfranchisement. This logic contravenes the impulses of a
black liberation movement that openly acknowledges the eradication of
gender and sexual oppression as part of (and central to) black liberation
efforts. The co-founding of BLMGN by queer black women remains signif-
icant because those identity politics shape the movement’s understand-
ing of its mission, rejection of formal leadership, and abnegation of
 Robert J. Patterson  Between Protest and Politics 437

respectability politics. BLMGN not only balances the intersectional rela-

tionship between race, gender, and sexuality; it also pays particular atten-
tion to how gender and sexuality historically have been neglected in an
effort to account for and prioritize them in black equity discussions.
As a resonant example, critics of President Obama’s My Brother’s
Keeper Initiative, which emerged in light of BLM (and not necessarily of
BLMGN), note that it provides individual solutions to more “structural
problems” and rehashes the problematic arguments the Moynihan report
presented. More specifically, by privileging black boys, the initiative main-
tained that “women of color on the whole suffer ‘less’ from, or fare better
within, structural racial inequality” and also “justifies policy initiatives
that can only lead to partial solutions” (Méndez 2016: 99). BLMGN desires
to avoid “partial solutions” and disrupt the material and discursive
violences that historically have been enacted upon non–heterosexual
middle-class black men in black liberation efforts. BLMGN rejects the
ideas that black rights mean black men’s rights, that black men’s politi-
cal, cultural, and economic interests take priority over everyone else’s
in the community, and that black queer interests are not black inter-
ests. BLMGN’s foundational ideologies and organizing structures keep
these pitfalls in the forefront of its imagination about black freedom
dreams.

BLM: Neoliberalism and Black Hierarchal Leadership

The persistence, retrenchment, and expansion of black inequality during
the post–civil rights era contribute to BLM’s desire for alternative models of
leadership and organization, and black inequality remains a key aspect of
BLMGN’s desire for economic stability for all black people. The perception
among BLM-era activists, organizers, and leaders that the civil rights
movement’s desire for incorporation within the state diluted its potential
to transform that state has made BLM understandably critical and skepti-
cal of the state. This apprehension, of course, becomes increasingly medi-
ated through the pragmatic need to infiltrate an institution in order to
transform it. From some BLM vantage points, by becoming incorporated
into the state—through entrance into elected political positions—former
and emerging black formal leaders became instruments to enact state vio-
lence. Yet the willingness of BLM members to run for political, elected
positions demonstrates an awareness of the importance to orches-
trate change from within a system they ostensibly want to dismantle.
438 meridians 19:2  October 2020

Historically, the simultaneous rise and institutionalization of neoliberal-

ism during this period made such co-optation possible.
As Roderick Ferguson (2012), Grace Hong (2015), and Jodi Melamed
(2006) have argued, neoliberalism allowed the state to codify social class
inequality under the guise of free-market enterprise, and to incorporate
black political dissidents and use them to manage more radical black dis-
sent.9 Neoliberalism in the United States thus relies on black cooperation
with economic policies that work against black cultural and political
interests even as they purport to serve black political interests well. Neo-
liberalism performs a sleight of hand and embraces black politicians,
empowering them to enact the state’s agenda and keep racism intact. Dur-
ing the 1970s and 1980s, for example, black leaders increasingly became
spokespeople for welfare reform and for shrinking the state’s role in pro-
viding for the welfare of its citizens. Black politicians thus provided the
state with a means through which to obfuscate and distort its role in
maintaining black inequality and racial hierarchies. On the one hand,
black politicians’ status as elected officials demonstrates racial progress.
On the other, their leadership on welfare reform purportedly undercut
the argument that reform targeted black populations, or that the purpose
of the reform was to undermine integration.
By having black mayors promote policies that antiblack racism under-
girded, or that disproportionately impacted black (poor) communities
negatively, neoliberal agendas obscured how race, racism, and class
exploitation worked through and against one another, while purporting
race neutrality. As black leaders became increasingly indebted to the state
in order to preserve their political power, they became more invested in
maintaining the status quo; although they at times challenged some of
neoliberalism’s most insidious manifestations and effects, they did not
demand dismantling the status quo (capitalism) altogether. This perspec-
tive about the era seems to inform BLM’s recognition of its uncomfortable
relationship with capitalism, and its social critique rightfully sutures
investment in neoliberalism’s capitalism to black inequality. My brief his-
toricizing of neoliberalism’s rise in the post–civil rights era and BLM’s
anticapitalist stance raises important questions that help us to understand
BLM’s philosophy toward black freedom struggles. Their critique forces us
to ask: How does neoliberalism, implicitly and explicitly, function to
undermine black leadership? What possibilities, if any, does the BLM era
provide for us to think about a leadership that has not been co-opted?
 Robert J. Patterson  Between Protest and Politics 439

For example, BLM’s use of social media, in many ways, attends to a triple
complexity of the interrelationship between capitalism, co-option, and
radical politics. Social media of course provided a fast, inexpensive mech-
anism through which to disseminate information, mobilize the masses,
and raise consciousness about justice. The use of social media helps to
reframe radical politics as movement between protest and politics; it sig-
nals a strategic continuum on which the movement works against and
within existing structures as it demands a more radical transformation of
the status quo. First, BLM’s politics are simultaneously radical, revisionist,
practical, and ideal, and at times require participation in and acceptance
of the broader institutions upon which they level critique. Second, as
Charles Linscott (2017: 116) points out, social media lends itself to surveil-
lance, as “the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, the FBI, and local/state
law enforcement agencies” follow the hashtag, noting “the same tool that
provide[s] logistical support for the movement also enable[s] its capture.”
Third, the social media sites themselves have profited tremendously from
BLM’s social trafficking, and have thus participated actively in the eco-
nomic exploitation that is not an insignificant aspect of the devaluing
of black lives against which the movement fights.
Historically, nonetheless, the relationships between the state, black
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leaders, and black communities have functioned best for the state when
black leaders police black communities and allow the state to suppress
black dissent, support minimal black progress, and naturalize inequality as
a function of individual effort and merit. In the post–civil rights era, neo-
liberal policies and practices facilitate this process by binding economic
and political prosperity to an individual’s hard work (as opposed to the
state’s pittance); ignoring the state’s role in creating and therefore its
responsibility for ameliorating black inequality (redlining, housing cove-
nants, predatory lending); and making rights once available to all only
available to a select (white) few (public schools close while private schools
open to avoid integration). As Melamed (2006: 15) explains, neoliberalism
“most commonly refers to a set of economic regulatory policies including
the privatization of public resources, financial liberalization (deregulation
of interest rates), market liberalization (opening of domestic markets),
and global economic management.” Neoliberalism’s rapid ascent during
the 1970s gains greater significance when we also consider the ways that
the legal eradication of Jim Crow allowed the United States to reposition
itself globally regarding racial equality.
440 meridians 19:2  October 2020

Between the 1940s and 1970s, the United States found itself in an
increasingly complicated position globally as it fought fascism, Nazism,
and communism; embraced democracy and democratic principles; and
supported Jim Crow segregation, lynching, and second-class citizenship
for black people. Although President Harry Truman had used Executive
Order 9981 to end segregation within the military, the antiblack racism that
governed American life, culture, politics, and law undercut this measure.
As anticolonial and antiracist movements also gained traction, the legality
of Jim Crow illuminated white supremacy’s ubiquity; it also made it more
difficult for the United States to intercede in racial unrest in other countries
without addressing its own.10 The modern civil rights movement, in com-
pelling the state to eliminate its explicit discriminatory laws and Jim Crow
segregation, provided the state the opportunity it needed; by appearing to
have solved its racial problem, the United States demonstrated how a soci-
ety without racism also might thrive economically. However, the reconfi-
guration of racism, through racial markers of difference that do not
explicitly call attention to race—such as images of the “welfare queen,”
“crack addict,” and “thug”—but are organized by antiblack racial logics
and ideologies, entrenches racism while simultaneously obscuring its
presence.
Liberal capitalism thrives by exploiting the bodies of people of color and
women, and neoliberalism operates within this same discursive frame,
except that what liberalism concedes neoliberalism conceals. That is, if
liberalism tacitly acknowledges that the hierarchies on which capitalism
depends necessarily exploit racial, gender, and sexual differences, neolib-
eralism hides the racial, sexual, and gender-coded ideological and material
violence it enacts. Yet as Melamed (2006: 15) rightfully contends, “We can
recognize neoliberalism as a rationalization of biological and social life on
the basis of the violence that individuals and communities have had to
absorb with social and economic restructuring for neoliberalism.” Not only
do neoliberalism’s financial successes justify the expendability of black
lives as a necessary consequence of progress, but they more insidiously
foreground black expendability as a prerequisite. Whereas the civil rights
movement’s desire for integration into the body politic also called for equal
access to participate in the capitalistic economic order, various movements
for black lives reject the ways that capitalism’s exploitation of people and
privatization of resources undermine progress toward (racial) equality.
This historical context becomes useful in decoding the significance of
 Robert J. Patterson  Between Protest and Politics 441

BLM’s critique of capitalism and rejection of how its principles reinforce

racism and racial stratification across American institutions. The move-
ment for black lives’ economic justice agenda, for example, calls for the
“reallocation of funds at the federal, state, and local level from policing
and incarceration (JAG, COPS, VOCA) to long-term safety strategies such
as education, local restorative justice services, and employment pro-
grams.”11 First, this thinking rejects the logic that mass incarceration pre-
vents or diminishes crime and instead points to antiblack racism and
criminalization of drug offenses as disproportionately affecting black peo-
ple in the United States. Second, the privatization of prisons makes it a
lucrative and profitable industry that incentivizes imprisonment, lacks
accountability, and exploits black people. Third, by shifting money to pub-
lic sources, the reallocation theoretically provides all citizens with access
to institutions that improve the lives of everyday citizens and society alike.
Exploitation and privatization (of prisons and schools) thus collaborate to
make basic citizenship rights a privilege or commodity, forcing those
without financial means (and not just access) to have separate and unequal
rights. The civil rights movement’s investment in capitalism (which Martin
Luther King Jr. later rejected) weakened its ultimate goal of enfranchising
the majority of black people, and unsurprisingly benefited primarily the
black middle class; neither trickle-down economics nor trickle-down civil
rights works.
Attentive to the pitfalls of stratification that capitalism produces vis-à-
vis neoliberalism, BLM-era freedom strategies encourage disinvestment in
capitalism and neoliberalism. In March 2017, for example, BLMGN’s web-
site notes that black exploitation “beg[an] with the theft of millions of
people for free labor,” and that the persistence of capitalism has led to “an
unsustainable economy.”12 More explicitly stated, black lives cannot matter
in a capitalist society that depends and thrives upon their expendability.
Capitalism encourages the antiblack racism that makes black life unsus-
tainable. The broader movement for black lives echoes this claim, and also
calls upon “the government [to] repair the harms that have been done to
Black communities in the form of reparations and targeted long-term
investments.”13 The BLM era thus demands a disruption of the status quo, a
redistribution of current resources, and economic reparations for past
economic injuries rendered to black communities. Whereas the insistence
upon reparations parallels the modern civil rights movement’s call for a
package deal, the disinvestment in capitalism remains a crucial and critical
442 meridians 19:2  October 2020

point of departure for the BLM era, for it views capitalism as necessarily
and fundamentally antithetical to black thriving.
Whereas the dismantling of the welfare state through neoliberalism’s
inclination toward privatizing previously public services better explains
the worsening of black inequality during the post–civil rights era, incor-
porated black formal leaders also invoked the popular notion that black
people themselves were the cause of and explanation for the failures of
black thriving vis-à-vis integration. Distinguishing between the welfare
state and a more privatized one, Gayatri Spivak argues, “If the state is a
welfare state, it is directly the servant of the individual,” yet “when
increasingly privatized, as in the New World Order, the priorities of the
civil society are shifted from service to the citizen to capital maximization”
(quoted in Reddy 2011: 152). This shift, as Chandan Reddy (2011: 161)
explains, does not mean that the state will attempt to regulate and control
(black) bodies any less than it previously had. To the contrary,

the continued deterioration of the welfare state will not result in the
withdrawal of state power from the lives of immigrants of color—
particularly queer immigrants of color—but instead will foster the
expansion of social regulation through a growing reliance on social
forms that are sponsored by the state, such as religion and family. More-
over, the state’s dependence on these forms for social regulation and
political economic reproduction suggests that the forms will increasingly
be burdened and restructured by the state’s interest and demands.

While the shift from the citizen to capital repurposes the state’s role in
providing welfare for citizens, it also retools the citizen’s role in explaining
and maintaining inequality. Presume, for example, that all conditions
remain equal and all citizens have equal access to the opportunities that
produce equal outcomes. Black people’s behavior and choices in general,
and family structures in particular, become powerful explanatory forces
for black inequality when black people’s outcomes lag. This claim of equal
access and opportunity ignores how the historical inequalities that sedi-
mented prior to the 1970s, and their legacies, persist. Instead, this line of
reasoning holds that because black citizens now have equal access to the
law, any failures or difficulties can be attributable primarily or solely to their
(in)action. Black political standing thus becomes increasingly sutured to
black behavior and choice; the state’s role in providing welfare recedes to
the background and personal responsibility discourses take center stage.
 Robert J. Patterson  Between Protest and Politics 443

The contemporary movement for black empowerment more pro-

nouncedly demonstrates, in my interpretation of its mission, tactics, and
purpose, what Cathy Cohen (1996: 445) describes as a transformational poli-
tics: “a politics that does not search for opportunities to integrate into
dominant institutions and normative social relationships, but instead
pursues a political agenda that seeks to change values, definitions, and
laws which make these institutions and relationships oppressive.” Critics
of BLM, however, have interpreted its transformational politics as Marxist,
socialist, or communist revolutions that desire to destroy society.14
Although BLM does want to undo the racial hierarchy embedded through-
out American institutions that underwrites black inequality, it does not
desire anarchy. Instead, the rejection of capitalism’s sovereignty demon-
strates an acute awareness that integration into a capitalist society neces-
sarily requires investing in a racialized hierarchy that ultimately under-
mines the goals of black liberation (community as a whole). As Barbara
Ransby (2015: paras. 1–2) notes, the movement insists that “there can be no
real economic justice without racial justice,” and that “any serious analysis
of racial capitalism must recognize that to seek liberation for black people
is also to destabilize inequality in the United States at large, and to create
new possibilities for all who live here.” This context explains why the
destruction of neoliberalism figures prominently in BLM’s freedom
[52.1.53.209] Project MUSE (2024-04-14 19:03 GMT) Kansas State University Libraries

dreams.
By bringing capitalism to the forefront of political conversations, BLM
usefully forces us to understand its grip on many of America’s institutions,
and to clarify the goals of black liberation. For instance, should freedom
proponents destroy capitalism and create conditions for actual equality?
Or, should proponents fight to grant some people more access to capital-
ism’s benefits while fundamentally keeping inequality intact? If, as Omi
and Winant (1994: 86) argue, “many demands are greater threats to the
racial order before they are accepted than after they have been adopted in
suitable moderate form,” BLM-era thinking helps us to consider how pre-
vious black liberation movements’ investments in neoliberalism also qui-
eted dissent within black protest movements. The visceral critiques of
capitalism in BLM turns attention toward the embeddedness, too, of neo-
liberalism in society; whereas the criminal justice system embodies neo-
liberalism’s principles, they extend to housing, education, health care, and
employment too.
That injustices within the criminal justice system became the starting
444 meridians 19:2  October 2020

point for BLM’s critique of antiblack racism and neoliberalism should not
be surprising when we consider the longstanding historical relationship
between neoliberalism and capitalism; intensified criminalization of black
people; rise of the prison-industrial complex; and increased policing
within black communities. These trends occurred alongside the simulta-
neous disinvestment in social, community, and educational services in
black communities. In the late 1960s, Richard Nixon had campaigned with
the promise to restore law and order—a not so subtle, racially charged
pledge to curtail the putative upheaval that the civil rights, Black Power, and
other sociopolitical movements had engendered. By the time Ronald Rea-
gan defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980, the national anti–civil rights backlash
had become more embedded in the American fabric and neoliberalism’s
traction had become more pronounced.
By many accounts, Reagan’s presidential campaign thrived on racial
fears and animus, and, once he ascended to the presidency, he promoted
neoliberal policies, practices, and principles (trickle-down economics);
defunded social welfare service programs (the undeserving black welfare
queen); encouraged mandatory minimum sentencing (white cocaine ver-
sus black crack); and criminalized addiction (increase police funding yet
decrease rehabilitation services). He accomplished this agenda through a
combination of presidential appointments, executive orders, and con-
gressional influence. Manning Marable (2007: 181) observes not only that
“the impact of Reaganism was felt across the black community as a series
of devastating shocks” but also that the economic policies he supported
“were aimed specifically to cripple blacks, Latinos, low-income workers,
and the unemployed.” If, as Marable (2007: 178) also contends, “to bolster
economic growth and corporate profits, Reagan ordered the severe reduc-
tion in federal enforcement of affirmative action regulations,” the move-
ment for racial and economic equality becomes increasingly antithetical to
white capitalist supremacy. Under the aegis of deregulation, Reagan
wove neoliberalism and white capitalist supremacy into the post–civil
rights cultural fabric; black lives matter only when they do not interfere
with capitalism. By embracing and institutionalizing neoliberalism’s most
salient aspects, Reagan cemented the post–civil rights era expendability of
black life ideologies and practices that the BLM era wants to implode.

BLM: Movement, Organization, Goals, and Potential

By disrupting seemingly normal and putatively apolitical quotidian activi-
ties (blocking traffic, picketing brunch), BLM illuminates the multiple
 Robert J. Patterson  Between Protest and Politics 445

ways that seemingly mundane and nonracialized practices become politi-

cally charged to disrupt black life and thriving. That is, part of BLM’s
strategy to raise awareness, to get citizens woke, requires illuminating how
systemic antiblack racism makes everyday activities a privilege for black
citizens. Three points here deserve elaboration.
First, disruption purposefully and strategically makes ordinary pro-
cesses inconvenient and uncomfortable to parallel the experience of being
black in an antiblack white supremacist nation. The dissemblance that the
strategy causes theoretically awakens observers to the injustices that
everyday black citizens experience by the extraordinary violence police
officers specifically and white supremacy more generally render. On the
one hand, angst at disruption stems from a lack of understanding of,
acceptance of, or agreement with the strategy. Critics see it as chaos with-
out a cause, particularly in the case of the traffic blocks. They also insist
that disruption does a disservice to sympathizers who would support the
cause but for the strategies used.15 On the other hand, the perturbation
demonstrates how white racism masks the ways that basic citizenship
rights become privileged and more readily available for white citizens, who
can disavow the movement’s strategies but never address white supremacy
and privilege itself. As Juliet Hooker (2016) explains, democratic societies
expect citizens to sacrifice for the greater good, and typically sacrifice black
citizens’ interests disproportionately to whites’ interests. As Hooker
observes, “It is precisely because of a political imagination not shaped by
loss that demands that whites renounce racism can be viewed as an
infringement of their personal freedom and a devaluing of their status as
citizens” (455). Metonymically, this critique of BLM fits within neoliberal-
ism’s broader trajectory to diffuse, disintegrate, and defer black transfor-
mational politics by disciplining the subject(s), method(s), and topic(s)
of black dissent. All the while, it leaves white racism unshaken.
Second, the BLM era fits within the civil rights, Black Power, and black
feminist movements’ histories to the degree that critics, pundits, and so-
called supporters obfuscate the persistence and reconfiguration of white
supremacy by focusing instead on black people’s behaviors and choices.
Hooker (2016: 458) rightfully contends that “Black politics that doesn’t fol-
low the script of the romantic narrative of the civil rights movement, with
its implicit expectation of democratic sacrifice, then comes to be viewed as
both illegitimate and ineffective.” But such critiques of the BLM era fail to
recall that the civil rights movement strategies we now embrace were then
deemed too radical.16 Or, perhaps more cynically, as Michael Harriot (2017)
446 meridians 19:2  October 2020

writes, “There has never been a black movement in the history of America
that white people found acceptable.” Thus, for all its critics, the BLM
movement is, in the words of Malik Miah (2015), “the most significant
political challenge in decades to institutional racism and the status quo.”
By forcing the U.S. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and
Bernie Sanders to more explicitly recognize how race intersects with crim-
inal justice and economic justice, respectively, BLM’s critique of racism
shows how racial logics inform putatively liberal thought, policy, and
practices. Clinton later articulated a more substantive platform for crimi-
nal justice reform, and Sanders added racial justice language to his plat-
form for economic parity. Both actions demonstrate the long-standing
relationship between consciousness-raising and policy formation, show-
ing how grassroots mobilization might specifically impact sociopolitical
changes. Credit BLM for these changes.
Third, BLM-era thinking pushes the boundaries of what constitutes
legitimate leadership, movement organization, and strategies to effect
change. Since the 1980s, when “it became clear that the policies of the new
administration of President Ronald Reagan would further threaten Black
interests,” black liberation projects have grappled with how to best resist
disenfranchisement, create conditions for black thriving, and transform
society (Walters and Smith 1999: 157). Even with a sense that black radical-
ism historically suffers at the hand of the state, BLM offers a different set of
strategies and techniques to engage in political transformation because it
views traditional tactics as outdated and long-serving leaders as complicit.
As Martha Biondi (2016) observes, “By embracing a confrontational pose,
challenging urban political elites (who tend to be Democrats) and advo-
cating for the marginalized, BLM activists have filled a leadership vacuum
in struggling African-American communities. Many Black politicians, and
even Black church leaders, have been compromised by the rise of neoliber-
alism in American politics.” Incorporation of black leaders into the state
has persisted since the 1970s, and the BLM era seems less tolerant of black
incorporation.
Most movements as we know them (historically and through historiog-
raphy) have evolved since they began. The history of BLM is yet forming; its
fullness, complexity, and nuance have yet to be fully written. That the Black
Lives Matter slogan entered the sociopolitical cultural milieu in August
2014 by way of a Twitter hashtag bears consideration here too. This
technological advance perhaps presaged one of many ways the budding
 Robert J. Patterson  Between Protest and Politics 447

movement would differ from earlier ones (Stephen 2015). Whereas the civil
rights movement used television and visual media to expose the violence
committed against black people, BLM uses social media in an analogous
way. Social media reaches a wider audience, organizes more swiftly, and
provides more information than other freedom movements could. And yet,
as described earlier, social media remains susceptible to the surveillance of
the state, as well as influence by Russian hackers. Additionally, as Jonathan
M. Cox (2017: 1849) astutely avers, “While research addresses the sharing
capacity for social media, it does not specifically address the implications
of social media as a source of information for users.” Cox helps readers to
consider how and whether the information one receives through BLM
social networks, for example, raises consciousness and engenders addi-
tional actions. As Garza recently explained, “If people did nothing but
retweet, share and like, there would be no movement,” yet she recognizes
that “what it takes to get people from liking and sharing and retweeting to
organizing is a long and hard process” (Hunt 2016). Consciousness-raising
remains an important part of black freedom struggles, and the continued
move from information to informed action will further movements for
black lives. Social movement theorists and black freedom struggle chroni-
clers alike may conduct research to quantify social media’s effects on
[52.1.53.209] Project MUSE (2024-04-14 19:03 GMT) Kansas State University Libraries

consciousness-raising and how it engenders engaged and sustained activ-

ism in the BLM era.
Finally, perhaps it would be better to posit that BLM conjoins the femi-
nist imagination for transformational politics with the Black Power move-
ment’s explicit revolutionary goals of eradicating structural racism and
economic inequality. If, as Angela Davis observes, the current movement
allows people to “act as if it is possible to build revolution and to radically
transform the world,” BLM’s now significantly developed platforms, policy
initiatives, and calls for reform parallel the Black Power movement’s plat-
form (Topps 2016). BLM affirms the humanity and value inherent in black
life through its consciousness-raising and, like the Black Panther Party’s
ten-point program, outlines specific areas for intervention, including
housing (tenant organizations), education (free lunch and literacy pro-
grams), and healthcare (mobile clinics for black people) (Elder 2016). In
2016, Taylor noted that “organizational autonomy and decentralization
raises questions of how actions will be coordinated and the concentrated
weight of the entire movement brought to bear on targeted institutions,” as
well as questions of how “local actions [are] woven into a coherent social
448 meridians 19:2  October 2020

movement, not just a series of disparate demonstrations with no relation-

ship to each other” (178). Swiftly, BLM has addressed these types of con-
cerns, and Taylor’s thoughtful study raises the question of whether social
movement theories still need more capacious definitions of movement and
leadership.
As a scholar (and activist) who believes firmly in BLM, I do not apologize
for the movement, nor do I find myself opposed to criticism of it. Yet I do
wonder what subconsciously motivates the more generalized disdain for
BLM and movements for black lives. It very well might be what Carol
Anderson terms white rage, or white people’s perception of “black advance-
ment” as threatening. As Anderson (2016: 3) explains, “The trigger for
white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence
of black people that is the problem; rather it is blackness with ambition,
with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full
and equal citizenship.” BLM unabashedly demands full citizenship
rights for black people. BLM exposes how preferred methods of social
resistance embed racist ideologies that ultimately work to thwart black
advancement. Because white rage does not limit itself to white people,
antagonists and critics of the movement, knowingly and unknowingly,
may possess this sentiment; black critics, too, can internalize white rage
and police BLM; antiblack racism remains a ubiquitous, constitutive, and
defining feature of modernity that BLM aims to expose as it dismantles
capitalism.
As this essay’s provisional thoughts close, let us bear these points in
mind as we think of the work BLM has done, the work it has yet to do, and
the work it potentially can do. First, humanity and inherent value can never
be overemphasized (chanting that black lives matter remains an important
strategy to raise consciousness). Second, the relationship between black
dehumanization and black exploitation demands that the humanity of
black people remain at the forefront of black freedom struggles. Third, the
ubiquity of antiblack racism ensures that public policy, laws, and cultural
practice inform and are informed by race and racism. Fourth, white rage
masks itself though neoliberal policies and philosophies that reinforce
the expendability of black lives. Fifth, this web of entanglement shows the
difficulty of and possibility for the BLM era—it may engender a paradig-
matic shift so that black lives matter and thrive in spite of the obstructions
to it; or, it may remove altogether the obstructions that prevent black lives
from mattering and thriving.
 Robert J. Patterson  Between Protest and Politics 449

.........................................................................................

Robert J. Patterson is professor of African American studies at Georgetown Univer-

sity. He is the author of Destructive Desires: Rhythm and Blues Culture and the Politics of
Racial Equality (2019) and Exodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American
Literature and Culture (2013), coeditor of The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American
Expressive Culture (2016), and editor of Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights (2019).
Currently, he is working on a book manuscript titled “Black Equity, Black Equality:
Reparation and Black Communities.”

Notes
1 Please note that this essay connects the official Black Lives Matter movement,
founded by Cullors, Garza, and Tometi, with a broader set of organizations that
consider themselves to be part of the larger movement for black lives. Black
Youth Project 100 (BYP 100), Organization for Black Struggle, and Million
Hoodies Movement for Justice are some of the member organizations in the
“United Front” of the movement for black lives.
2 This thinking echoes Achille Mbembe’s (2003) claim that part of the state’s
sovereignty lies in its ability to regulate who lives and dies.
3 “About,” Black Lives Matter, blacklivesmatter.com/about/ (accessed October 22,
2017).
4 “About,” Black Lives Matter, blacklivesmatter.com/about/ (accessed March 13,
2017).
5 Rejecting the notion that they are “leaderless,” Black Lives Matter people use
the term “leader full” to convey that everyone has the capacity to “lead,” that
leadership is not available only to a select few (who, historically in black leader-
ship movements, have been black men). Leadership begins at and within grass-
roots, and, in many ways, this philosophy echoes that of Ella Baker. See Cooper
2015, which explains the multitude of problems that emerge in a sole leader
movement.
6 See Robnett 1997, in which she contextualizes the rise of black men’s formal
leadership within the context of American patriarchy. Black leadership thus
becomes part of a larger heteropatriarchy, which it ultimately replicates.
7 Critics have argued that DeRay McKesson, for example, has garnered quite a
media presence in the Black Lives Matter movement, notwithstanding that he
is not an original founder. The critique seems more about the history of devalu-
ation of black women’s political and cultural work—which the black lives move-
ment rejects—than about a different leader fulfilling his role.
8 “What We Believe,” Black Lives Matter, blacklivesmatter.com/about/what-we
-believe/ (accessed October 20, 2017).
9 Ferguson (2012) demonstrates how universities incorporate racial differences
as a way to channel dissent and control protest in the neoliberal age.
10 Reddy (2011: 19–21) insists that America’s image abroad played a central role
in sharpening its investment in supporting civil rights domestically.
450 meridians 19:2  October 2020

11 See policy.m4bl.org/invest-divest/ (accessed October 22, 2017).

12 “Herstory,” Black Lives Matter, blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/ (accessed
March 10, 2017).
13 See policy.m4bl.org/platform/ (accessed March 10, 2017).
14 See Powers 2016.
15 See Starnes 2016 and Slavens 2016 for representative examples of conservative
critiques of this strategy. By contrast, see Altman 2015b.
16 This claim is particularly true when we think of King’s critique of the Vietnam
War and his call for a redistribution of economic resources. This point has not
been lost on Black Lives Matter activists who have reclaimed this radical King.
See Fox News 2017.

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