Black Lives Matter protesters gather at Times Square in New York, Aug. 9.
Photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty ImagesEditor’s note: In this Future View, students discuss the Black Lives Matter movement. Next week we’ll ask, “How do you think technology affected your experience in lockdown? Did it make the isolation less difficult or make it harder to keep up a productive routine?” Students should click here to submit opinions of fewer than 250 words before Aug. 18. The best responses will be published that night.
Put Down Instagram, Pick Up Real Work
Does posting a black screen on Instagram or spending an hour parading a Black Lives Matter sign help improve the lives of black Americans? BLM seeks to expose longstanding racial inequality in the U.S. and spark efforts to address it. But the movement has descended into partisan finger-pointing that labels everyone who doesn’t publicly express complete support as part of the problem. Little is achieved.
Undeniably, BLM has pervaded all facets of America. Joseph Epstein recently detailed in these pages how the movement has invaded sports, once a sanctuary for nonpolitical talk. Baseball players and coaches didn’t all kneel on Opening Day, but the few who stood were called out and had to explain their motives. In only a few years, the status quo shifted from standing to kneeling.
These cultural displays—be they kneeling or posting on social media—aren’t what the country needs. Americans, including me, need to take actionable steps. For a year, my older sister Anika has spent every Sunday with a young black girl from inner-city Milwaukee through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. This support goes beyond words, and will hopefully have long-term benefits for the young girl. There is tangible work that needs to be done. Actually helping people is what supporting BLM means to me.
—Nikhil Kharkar, University of Michigan, business
Fallacious Slogans
Black Lives Matter relies on a classic motte-and-bailey technique—an uncontroversial position is conflated with a wildly controversial one, the former shielding the latter from criticism. I agree that black lives do indeed matter. But I don’t agree with the calls to defund or abolish the police, and I don’t accept the “1619 Project” assessment of U.S. history as fundamentally racist and irreparable. Yet when anyone voices concerns with these radical ideas, we’re met with a very convenient reply: “But don’t you think that black lives matter?” I agree with the statement, but the movement is a Trojan horse for the adjoined fringe ideas.
—Rafael Arbex-Murut, Virginia Tech, computer science and mathematics
We Are All Responsible
The Black Lives Matter movement stands for taking accountability. It’s an attempt to take responsibility for the ways in which we, nonblack people, have perpetuated antiblackness within our communities, to acknowledge that it isn’t enough to be merely “not racist.” We must be antiracist. It’s an effort to recognize that practices like felony disenfranchisement, gerrymandering and redlining are meant to silence black voices, that black people led the fight for many of the freedoms we enjoy today, and that we hold privileges George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin never had.
Americans must acknowledge that we have been complicit in upholding the racist systems that have made the Black Lives Matter movement—a plea for basic human rights—a necessity. Until we do, justice will never be fulfilled.
—Daniel Torres Balauro, Swarthmore College, public policy
What Those Three Words Conceal
It doesn’t matter what the Black Lives Matter movement means to me. What it publicly stands for is alarming enough. In describing its beliefs on its website, the national group uses language and phrases adopted from critical race theory and intersectionality, which divides people into the oppressors and the oppressed based on ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation and other identity groupings.
Once a person is labeled either as oppressed or oppressor, it becomes impossible to shed that designation. If your group is deemed to have more privilege than the others, your only recourse is to confess your inherent bias and guilt and show your support for those less privileged by “shutting up and listening.” Any criticism directed toward Americans with less privilege, BLM or left-wing policy ideas can qualify you for “cancellation” and ostracism.
This worldview, prominent in academia for many years, has now become mainstream. Look at the bestseller lists, topped by “White Fragility” and “How to Be an Antiracist.” Hear the statements about “racial justice” coming out of pop culture and corporate America, adopting the language and style of this dangerous ideology and helping it grow.
Black lives matter, of course. Any decent human being should agree with those three words. The movement, however, needs to be scrutinized for its radical positions. People should think twice before throwing their unqualified support behind it.
—Tim Bayer, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Christian ministry
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