He was a school dropout and petty criminal with a hard luck story and questionable taste in women. Upon his violent death, sensing a valuable propaganda opportunity, politicians and activists with no personal connection to him organized a massive public funeral with speeches and 30,000 people lining the streets to see the procession. Statues were erected, schools named, and murals painted for him. “Slavery will last only a short time longer,” goes the last line of a song in his honor. He became a symbol far greater than his modest talents merited, because he died at the right place at the right time in history to be a martyr for a larger political cause. Once the hagiography was complete, it was political and career suicide to question either his saintliness or his origins.
I am talking, of course, about Horst Wessel, a law-school dropout who joined the Nazi SA (the Brownshirts) in the 1920s. After a brief life of thuggery and violence, he was assassinated by two communists in retribution for his earlier attacks upon them. Regardless of the genuine, sordid and inglorious facts underlying his life and death, propaganda genius Josef Goebbels eulogized him as a martyr and created a myth of his heroism and talents that inspired Nazi Germany for a decade. His song, the Horst Wessel Lied (song), became the anthem of the Nazi Party.
Like Wessel, George Floyd was a very ordinary man, a petty thief and ne’er-do-well set up as a martyr by a cause that magnified his significance far beyond his personal character or achievements. These days, one must state the obvious or be accused of not assuming it: Black lives matter. Indeed, all lives matter, but the phrase “black lives matter” encompasses a special meaning given the long history of racism in parts of the U.S. and the especially troubled relationship between black men and the police. In the old South, the police and judicial system were overtly racist, and justice was far from blind. In the last two decades of the 19th century, “1,985 blacks were killed by Southern lynch mobs, most being hanged, some burned alive, for a variety of offences, real or imaginary” according to Paul Johnson in his A History of the American People.
That’s around 100 a year, and it doesn’t take into account all the other assaults, privations, and indignities suffered by black Americans for centuries. The men who killed teenager Emmett Till in 1955 and civil rights volunteers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in 1964 were tried and acquitted in a racist, biased court system. Like Derek Chauvin, the convicted killer of Floyd, there have been other police officers who failed in their professional duty, sometimes through negligence or incompetence, and sometimes outright criminally. This is all history, and it should be taught.
Since the 1960s, however, America has made enormous legal progress, most notably through the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, and social progress via a radical change in the public consciousness on race. The criminal justice system has changed radically – to take one example, in 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, then aged 80, was finally tried and convicted, in Mississippi, and sentenced to three life terms for the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. However, this reality of gradual improvement in race relations is not the story of America that the organization Black Lives Matter (BLM) wishes you to know.
Instead of this complicated reality, BLM adheres to Critical Race Theory’s Grimm fairy tale: America is still a white supremacist country in which police generally have maintained open season on black men. Flying in the face of this, however, are the facts: In all of 2021, in the context of around 7 million arrests, a total of four unarmed black men were shot by police. Meanwhile, over 10,000 blacks were killed last year, the vast majority by other blacks. As Wilfred Reilly of Kentucky State University has pointed out, only a miniscule 3% of crime is inter-racial, meaning someone of one race committing the crime against someone of another race.
However, taking advantage of the public outrage at George Floyd’s murder, BLM and its allies have absorbed hundreds of millions of dollars in small donations from well-meaning private citizens and in grants of tens of millions from major corporations and charitable foundations. Unfortunately, except for some Floyd murals and statues, so far this truckload of money has made little evident progress in addressing any of the challenges that disadvantaged black Americans face in education, family life, employment, or health care. According to Charles Love in his book Race Crazy, the massive donations made to BLM have disappeared into a convoluted swamp largely controlled by two opaque umbrella structures, the Movement for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter Global Foundation.
It is difficult to pin down what BLM actually stands for, as it has no clear central hierarchy or dogma, and its branches keep editing their websites. Still, Love finds some ideological coherence in its broader umbrella movements: They “believe that prisons, police, and all other institutions that inflict violence on black people must be abolished.” They are “anti-Capitalist…” They seek reparations for colonialism and slavery. They “know that cis-hetero-patriarchy (male-dominated society), ableism, exploitative racial capitalism, imperialism, militarism, and white supremacy and nationalism are global structures,” and they want to bring them down. They “believe we can achieve complete abolition and reimagination of current systems.” To put it mildly, how this will all happen is less well explained.
The actual BLM website is a series of platitudes combined with a vague intersectional agenda - “We affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. Our network centers around those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements” – which leaves out the sub-set of black America most at risk; young men. Love challenges BLM for making “no mention of violent crimes, property damage, gang activity, lack of moral guidance and parental accountability, or failed educational institutions.” BLM is big on postmodern deconstruction but not on specific plans to spend any money that comes their way.
The anti-capitalists who run BLM pretend black conservatives don’t exist or are at best brain-washed into internalizing white supremacy. In fact, there are generations of black conservative intellectuals, from elder statesmen such as Thomas Sowell or Bob Woodson, to Boomers like Larry Elder and Glenn Loury, to X-ers like John McWhorter, Wilfred Reilly, and Charles Love, to Gen Zer’s like Coleman Hughes. These thinkers accept and decry the historical wrongs and burdens unique to black Americans, but they also believe that there is ample room for personal agency and self-help. They dispute the contention that all the disparities between blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians can be attributed only to racism or white supremacy.
For example, kids without fathers at home are more likely to have behavioral problems at school, twice as likely to drop out before completing high school, and four times as likely to be poor, all of which undermine academic achievement and life chances. The percentage of black children living with two parents is 37.7%, whereas for non-Hispanic whites it is 75.1% and Asians 84.5%. According to a Brookings study, black children spent an average of 30 minutes on homework a night while white kids spent an hour and Asians two hours. Obviously, none of these realities are primarily driven by racism. Meanwhile, BLM activists are holding Zoom sessions to tell students that their problems are all due to misogyny, white supremacy, and capitalism, and the University of Washington is worrying that a “brown bag lunch” is a “problematic” term.
According to recent press reports, while she was Executive Director of BLM and in “charge of all funds and securities of the Corporation” according to its bylaws, co-founder Patrisse Cullors earned $20,000 a month from a jail reform group funded by BLM, outrageously funneled millions of dollars in contracts to a charity controlled by the father of her child, spent over $3 million on houses, and then ditched her responsibilities last May, leaving activists Makani Themba and Monifa Bandele in charge. However, both of them deny that they accepted the job.
No wonder, since BLM has serious financial and ethical problems to explain. In December 2021, BLM took in around $60 million in accumulated donations collected by two allied charities during the time before it acquired charitable status. What has or will happen to the money is a mystery. BLM has not filed required tax forms with the IRS that were due last November that might have revealed some of the truth. Incredibly, BLM does not actually seem to have a physical office, even at the Los Angeles address listed on its tax forms. Things are so shady that they have been banned from fundraising in California, a state hardly unsympathetic to its views.
Unlike Horst Wessel, George Floyd was neither an ideologue nor a fanatic. However, like Wessel, his memory has been co-opted by a powerful political movement; not a manifestly evil cause like Nazism’s conquest and genocide, to be sure, but to no one’s evident benefit, either. His death brought great public attention to rare but reprehensible cases of police misconduct as well as the plight and needs of many black Americans, and his name helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars that could have done much good. Sadly, there does not appear to be anything to show for it.
Instead, educated, middle class, activists, trainers, and consultants have made a lot of money and embedded themselves within academia and corporate America’s growing diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies to enrich themselves in perpetuity from the nation’s guilty conscience. For poor and working-class blacks, meanwhile, any real benefits from BLM and its web of allied organizations have yet to materialize. Furthermore, they - more than any other group - must now endure the rising theft, looting, violence, and murder rates resulting from BLM-inspired ‘successes’ in defunding and undermining police in big cities. But that’s a topic for another time.
—J. L. Reiter has East Coast origins but has lived and worked abroad for 25 years. He writes a regular column here, ‘The Society,’ on US domestic culture, society, and politics.