Black Lives Matter (BLM) has also been targeted by the Right as a radical movement intent on undermining the US of A. The worldwide uprising sparked by the police murder of George Floyd sent the BLM movement into overdrive. But the political effects have been meager so far. Despite what Conservatives have claimed, the calls to defund the police have fallen on deaf ears. A few police budgets have seen minor cuts, while the vast majority have enjoyed increases.
Meanwhile, to no one’s surprise, the social justice movement has found surer footing in scholarship. “The 1619 Project” by The New York Times is just the highest-profile example of the decades-long endeavor to dismantle White Supremacy in the Academy. BLM’s failure to achieve appreciable gains in the legal and political arenas is discouraging, but its ability to convince many Americans (including me) that racism remains pervasive in our society is surely cause for hope.
Conservatives are often cast as hair-on-fire, Chicken-Little alarmists, and, most of the time, they are. But, on the issue of BIPOC liberation, they may be onto something. Confronting these racial issues could very well end America as we know it. After all, this country was founded and built on slavery and racism. What is the USA without racism? In my opinion, it would be a vastly different country that may be unrecognizable to any American living today.
Liberals are playing a dangerous game, I think. They’re pulling at these threads in the fabric of America. They don’t seem to realize how integral racism is to the Republic. Maybe they expect most Americans to come to grips with the horrors on which the Land of the Free was built (not to mention the horrors that continue to sustain it), but that seems awfully optimistic to me. Do Libs even fully grasp these horrors?
The problem is that Libs are still essentially nationalistic (or, if you prefer, “patriotic”). They believe that Uncle Sam is basically good. The BLM movement is their attempt to save America from its past, to redeem it through penance, truth and reconciliation, a la post-apartheid South Africa. But Conservatives don’t want that. They wanna have their American Pie and eat it too.
Why would the Republican base enter a power-sharing agreement with BIPOC people? White Supremacy is the only thing they’ve got left. They’ve been robbed of economic security, meaningful work and community. Libs don’t get that. They’re blind to the plight of their fellow White Americans.
They seem to think that you can just remove racism from America like a burst appendix. But the Home of the Brave may not survive as a cohesive, coherent polity without the glue of racism. The wounds of the Civil War were only “healed” through the North’s acceptance of (and complicity in) Jim Crow in the South. Since then, White Supremacy has remained largely intact nationwide despite the work of the Civil Rights Movement.
“The 1619 Project” and BLM are essential to further humanizing American culture. Still, no one knows what a non-racist America would look like because it has never existed. We don’t even know if it’s possible. We might save America’s soul and lose the patient.
But, in the words of George W. Bush, I say: Bring it on. As I’ve written before, I’m not a fan of the Stars and Stripes. I’d love to see the USA crumble into a million pieces. (The political entity, that is, not the people.) Most people on the planet would benefit. We certainly owe it to them to dismantle the American Empire after all the evil we’ve wrought.
The end of the Empire and the dissolution of the Union would almost certainly lead to violence and suffering. The only question is: Would they result in more or less violence and suffering than their continued existence would? I happen to believe that their end would cause less pain to humanity as a whole than their continuation would.
Liberals say that racism is foundational to America, but their attempt to excise it from the body politic implies that they think it’s just a tumor. They don’t want to destroy America, but they must realize that, if you’re trying to remove a fundamental tenet of the country, you run the risk of bringing down the whole darn thing.
I’m convinced it would be like amputating a limb (or two), and, on some (probably unconscious) level, the Right seems to agree. If Conservatives believed there were still “reasonable, not radical” Libs left, one of them would’ve surely drawn an editorial cartoon with a commie-red devil whispering in a Lib’s ear, telling them to support CRT, BLM and “The 1619 Project” in the hopes of destroying the Red, White and Blue.
I think we on the Far Left should be that devil. It’s not like we can do anything to make the MSM portray us as anything else. The Right keeps calling Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and all those other milquetoast Democrats “radical socialists.” Let’s show them what real Radical Socialists look like.
We should encourage Libs and whoever will listen to stay on the road to social justice and see what happens. It may be that rooting out racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia will also bring down imperialism, Capitalism and all those other “-ism’s” that we’d like to get rid of. Let’s keep pulling on these threads until America, as she was originally conceived, is a distant memory.
