Violence damages the Black Lives Matter movement

A supporter of the “Black Lives Matter” movement at a rally in Seattle.

Lindsey Wasson / Reuters

In the bacon green belt around the capital, Washington, they can be seen with particular frequency during this time: panels in the front gardens that evoke the common slogans: “Black Lives Matter”, “Equal Justice Now” (end with Discrimination in the judiciary) or also as: “There is only one race, human.” The left-wing liberal establishment, which lives here in overwhelming majority, knows what it owes to the zeitgeist. And the bars cost next to nothing, financially or figuratively.

Deep defensive reflex

Finding dark-skinned people in the same suburbs is a bit more difficult unless they are busy gardeners, cleaning crews, or child care workers. It’s not by chance. There is a limit, not only in the official zoning plans, that prohibits the construction of cheap apartment buildings in these suburbs with the best schools or with a multitude of barriers. Border lines also exist in the mind. Stereotypes are deeply ingrained, as Michael Emerson, a sociologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, explains. He has been studying segregation phenomena for four decades, including in schools and homes.

In an article by columnist Thomas Edsall in the New York Times, Emerson said that most whites in America could not imagine that there could be residential areas with good schools and rising property prices that also had a high proportion of residents. Black or Latino. . Although there are now well-integrated multiracial residential areas that could disprove the cliché, there is a threshold value for many whites, around 30 percent of dark-skinned people in a residential area, that triggers a defensive reflex.

Edsall raises the issue, among other things, because in the enthusiasm for the “Black Lives Matter” slogans it is easy to forget that America’s black population did not stagnate in the 19th century or the first half of the 20th. As many other conservative voices pointed out to black Harvard professor Henry Gates in an interview with “Time Magazine” in February about a fact that is hardly ever noticed: Since the 1970s, America’s black middle class has doubled, and the upper middle class has quadrupled.

In contrast, the proportion of black people living in poverty has more than halved since the 1960s. Taking 1959 as a starting point, the poverty rate even fell from 55 to 20 percent. It goes against the zeitgeist understanding of the racial problem in the US, but it is a fact nonetheless: the question of inequality in American society is by no means limited to the relationship between black and white, but also it has a strong black-black component.

What is reflected in the media and the “Black Lives Matter” movement with particular intensity affects the urban population, who often live below the poverty line, but not the part of African Americans who have made their way towards middle class. To also allow for promotion for those left behind, the modified zone plans would do much more than virtuous slogans in the front yard.

Segregation is good for house prices

But that’s the exact opposite of what President Trump’s campaign has in mind. In the rich and leafy suburbs there is a group of voters who, in the eyes of many experts, will tip the balance in the next presidential election. They are white women, not necessarily housewives, as Trump put it in a treacherous reference to times gone by, but far more often employed people.

To understand Trump’s approach, you need to know that for many Americans, home ownership and appreciation is the essential building block of wealth creation. The president’s message is: Joe Biden wants to get rid of the suburbs, ruin them, destroy them. And how does he do it? By – always in agreement with Trump – repealing the construction zone regulations, in addition to the nice bungalows, walkers, split levels and mansions, he also allows apartment buildings. No one knows what kinds of people they attract to the neighborhood, Trump emphasizes, and that makes them more unsafe. The result of the policy, which should actually at least soften deep-seated segregation, is, in Trump’s presentation, a direct attack on the value of real estate – that is, on the wallets of current suburban residents.

Elsewhere, Trump became even clearer: A change in construction zones would lead to “the value of their homes falling and crime rates rising.” People who had worked their whole lives to fulfill their dream of owning a suburban home would have to see him go to the dogs. Thus, Trump appeals to the same reflex that sociologist Emerson had described: all you have to do is conjure up the specter of a larger presence of dark-skinned people in the suburban neighborhood and then, as Brecht puts it, the price of the property comes first, then morality.

Experts still argue about the extent to which this message becomes popular. But it could land on soil that has become more fertile in recent weeks. The extraordinarily broad solidarity of many whites with African Americans triggered by the highly emotional images and reports of excessive police violence in the cases of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, or Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. seems to be disappearing again. Online polling company Civiqs has seen a shift among registered white voters. The majority approval of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which was measured after George Floyd’s death, has once again turned to skepticism.

Undoubtedly one of the main reasons for this is what happened in many cities over the course of weeks or even months: senseless destruction that has apparently become a nightly ritual, and violent excesses in hot spots like Portland, Seattle or Kenosha, all under the banner of the fight against discrimination. In the justifications for such action it has become clear that many of those involved are not primarily committed to the promotion of civil rights, but to the overthrow and end of capitalism, if necessary with violence.

Looting as a repair?

This finding is not new, it became widespread between 2014 and 2016. It was suppressed for a time by the events of the beginning of the summer, but now it has returned to the consciousness of those who constantly advocate for the end of racial discrimination and segregation. Creepy comments from activists helped. A representative of the “Black Lives Matter” movement said after an orgy of looting on the Magnificent Mile shopping street in downtown Chicago that the destruction and theft were a kind of reparation for the injustice suffered.

Reparation must be fought for, but ultimately it is granted in an act of admitting some guilt and atonement. What manifests itself in the rituals of destruction is, at best, revenge.