Dave Stockton
This year marks the fifth anniversary of the spread from the USA to over 60 countries of demonstrations raising the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter!’ The trigger was two notorious killings by US police in early 2020. The first to gain widespread coverage took place on 13 March, when Breonna Taylor, 26, a Black medical worker, was shot when officers from Louisville Metro Police Department broke into her home. The department refused to charge the officer responsible, giving rise to demonstrators chanting, ‘Say Her Name!’
Then on 25 May came the murder of George Floyd, 46, while he was handcuffed and pinioned on the ground by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. He was captured on video kneeling on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes whilst he gasped, ‘I can’t breathe’ 27 times. Other officers prevented bystanders from intervening but the whole incident was videoed on a mobile and went viral, first on social and then on mainstream media.
In response to these brutal murders, demonstrations, attended by an estimated 15 to 25 million participants, rocked the United States, making it one of the largest protest movements in the country’s history. And then they spread worldwide.
This was the second major wave of Black Lives Matter, as a decentralised mass movement. It had been initiated in 2013, when three women activists, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Ayo Tometi, published the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in response to the acquittal of vigilante George Zimmerman for the shooting of Black teenager Trayvon Martin. BLM developed into a lasting movement of street demonstrations after the deaths the following year of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City.
President Donald Trump, who was in his first term when George Floyd was killed, has since referred to the words ‘Black Lives Matter’ as a ‘symbol of hate,’ claiming that more white people are killed by police than black. This ‘fact’ takes no account of the greater size of the US ‘white’ demographic. A Harvard University Survey demolished the argument by showing that black males are three times more likely to be killed by police than their white peers, on average 250 or so of the former every year.
Blowback
Under President Joe Biden policies changed somewhat, at least in a few states and municipalities, including reforms to the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments, in what was hailed as a national ‘reckoning’ with racism. Partial and ineffective as most of these measures were, especially when the bottom line of cop killings is reckoned with, with Trump’s return to power early this year, his Administration’s officials claimed even the limited reforms were ‘handcuffing’ police departments from fighting crime. They have started to demand their dismantling, claiming they were based on ‘flawed methodologies and incomplete data’.
Trump and his multi-billionaire hitman Elon Musk, who claims white South African big landowners have been subject to a genocide, have also taken aim at federal government policies on Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI), regarded as the fruits of the Black Lives Matter movement. Allied to this is his pressure on universities and schools to give up teaching on ‘woke’ matters, such as America’s horrific record on slavery and the Jim Crow era. Trump even wants to purge their libraries of scholarly works which prove this. It is now clear that a massive racist ‘blowback’ in underway.
Commentators have observed that every advance made by Black people, from the abolition of slavery, where post-civil war Radical Reconstruction was replaced by Jim Crow, to the civil rights movement, where Ronald Reagan and Republican states rolled back many of its gains, is met by a counterattack from white racists defending or restoring their political and economic privileges.
Taken together with attacks on abortion rights, the ICE raids and deportation of so-called illegal immigrants, the sackings of trans people from the military, and attempts to run down the public sector, affecting health workers, educators, etc. where recently trade unionists have been organising and winning, it should now be clear that a powerful united front of all these sectors needs to be built.
The old workers’ slogan, an injury to one is an injury to all, needs to be acted on. As those layers of the working class and ethnic minorities, who were fooled into voting for Trump by his promises to bring jobs ‘back’ to America, realise they have been conned, a mighty class movement must mobilise to thwart his every attack and eventually drive him and his MAGA Republicans from power. But for this a militant party of the working people will also be needed, to replace the second party of US imperialism, the Democrats.