Yeah, I think this is it right here. While the protests might not have done much for those of us who were already painfully aware of the cops’ racism, behavioral issues, and lack of accountability, it did make it so that everyone else had to pay attention. You couldn’t ignore the protests, they were everywhere. I don’t have numbers, but I think a whole lot of white people who by default didn’t believe there was any real injustice in the system finally saw it, at least for a little while.
That said, it was unfortunately fleeting, and there hasn’t been enough sustained motivation to address the systemic issues that would need to be fixed for law enforcement to ever be properly held accountable. The people doing that admirable work are still doing it while the cops still have too much power. They might think twice before murdering someone in front of a camera. Maybe. They’ll still do the murder, they’ll just make sure there’s no evidence.
So, a net positive, but the bar was already so damn low.
Just to add a tiny bit of clarification, I think what BLM did was change the subterranean psyche of America, you can’t measure it in policy or material changes because those were resisted absolutely by the ruling class, but they could not stop the change in perspective and thinking that occurred.
These comments remind me of the Occupy Wall Street protests back in 2011. That movement also didn’t lead to immediate law or policy changes at the national level, but it seems to have left a more subtle mark that is still with us. Income inequality has remained a hot topic, states have raised minimum wages, and UBI proposals are being discussed more seriously (at least in certain circles).
Exactly and as time goes on I have shifted from a perspective that Occupy Wall Street was an unfocused failure to a perspective that the control of the finance industry and money on politics is absolute and those in power will not tolerate it being questioned, so Occupy Wall Street could never have resulted in immediate policy changes, Wall Street would have prevented it any cost even if it meant physically walking into the street and shooting protestors until they went back to work. Of course “financial instruments” would probably be used instead of guns, but murder is murder and the weapons the finance industry uses to make their living make mass shooters with assault rifles look like amateurs playing around with toys, see the 2008 financial crash as example A.
The role of Occupy Wall Street was thus to lay bare this power relationship and the associated threat of violence towards those who seek to modify it. The impact of Occupy must be understood in terms of how the internal psyche of the US was irrevocably radicalized from a collective witnessing of this truth.
In the same way that a crowd of fans will remember a ref on the soccer field making horrible calls that screw their team over (…and even though the crowd has no actual codified power to stop the ref from making bad calls and swinging the game), the crowd will remember:
the injustice itself
the collective shared awareness of the injustice among fellow strangers in the crowd
the disempowerment forced upon the crowd in that moment to preserve the status quo of the injustice
These are not things that crowds forget easily, in sports or in broader political contexts. Movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have to be understood as acts of reality crafting that first and foremost validate individual’s feeling that the majority of the public understands the power structure of the status quo as an existential threat to the common good.
Once people have seen the validation from essentially 1 out of every 10 people in the country showing up to Black Lives Matter with them it flips a switch in their head and talking heads on tv permanently lose a degree of power to manipulate people into believing their feelings are fringe in regards to rejecting police violence and systematic racism.
Yeah, I think this is it right here. While the protests might not have done much for those of us who were already painfully aware of the cops’ racism, behavioral issues, and lack of accountability, it did make it so that everyone else had to pay attention. You couldn’t ignore the protests, they were everywhere. I don’t have numbers, but I think a whole lot of white people who by default didn’t believe there was any real injustice in the system finally saw it, at least for a little while.
That said, it was unfortunately fleeting, and there hasn’t been enough sustained motivation to address the systemic issues that would need to be fixed for law enforcement to ever be properly held accountable. The people doing that admirable work are still doing it while the cops still have too much power. They might think twice before murdering someone in front of a camera. Maybe. They’ll still do the murder, they’ll just make sure there’s no evidence.
So, a net positive, but the bar was already so damn low.
Just to add a tiny bit of clarification, I think what BLM did was change the subterranean psyche of America, you can’t measure it in policy or material changes because those were resisted absolutely by the ruling class, but they could not stop the change in perspective and thinking that occurred.
These comments remind me of the Occupy Wall Street protests back in 2011. That movement also didn’t lead to immediate law or policy changes at the national level, but it seems to have left a more subtle mark that is still with us. Income inequality has remained a hot topic, states have raised minimum wages, and UBI proposals are being discussed more seriously (at least in certain circles).
Exactly and as time goes on I have shifted from a perspective that Occupy Wall Street was an unfocused failure to a perspective that the control of the finance industry and money on politics is absolute and those in power will not tolerate it being questioned, so Occupy Wall Street could never have resulted in immediate policy changes, Wall Street would have prevented it any cost even if it meant physically walking into the street and shooting protestors until they went back to work. Of course “financial instruments” would probably be used instead of guns, but murder is murder and the weapons the finance industry uses to make their living make mass shooters with assault rifles look like amateurs playing around with toys, see the 2008 financial crash as example A.
The role of Occupy Wall Street was thus to lay bare this power relationship and the associated threat of violence towards those who seek to modify it. The impact of Occupy must be understood in terms of how the internal psyche of the US was irrevocably radicalized from a collective witnessing of this truth.
In the same way that a crowd of fans will remember a ref on the soccer field making horrible calls that screw their team over (…and even though the crowd has no actual codified power to stop the ref from making bad calls and swinging the game), the crowd will remember:
the injustice itself
the collective shared awareness of the injustice among fellow strangers in the crowd
the disempowerment forced upon the crowd in that moment to preserve the status quo of the injustice
These are not things that crowds forget easily, in sports or in broader political contexts. Movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have to be understood as acts of reality crafting that first and foremost validate individual’s feeling that the majority of the public understands the power structure of the status quo as an existential threat to the common good.
Once people have seen the validation from essentially 1 out of every 10 people in the country showing up to Black Lives Matter with them it flips a switch in their head and talking heads on tv permanently lose a degree of power to manipulate people into believing their feelings are fringe in regards to rejecting police violence and systematic racism.