Since George Floyd’s suffocation murder by former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin May 25, 2020, Black Lives Matter [BLM] sponsored riots, looting, arson and anarchy around the country that went on for months. When the looting and anarchy died down, BLM pushed its own version of Critical Race Theory [CRT], conveniently fitting into their militant narrative based on former New York Times writer Nicole Hannah-Jones’ “1619 Project,” a distorted piece of U.S. history that blames the plight of African Americans on slavery in America. Floyd’s death was exploited by BLM to twist CRT to justify de-funding the police and demanding slavery reparations for African Americans based on Hannah-Jones “1619 Project.” Hannah-Jones insists the government of the United States, founded Sept. 17, 1787 on the Constitution’s signing, was responsible for slavery in America.
Before the Bill of Rights was signed Dec. 15, 1791, slavery was brought to the colonies by various groups, including the British, Spanish and French but was not authorized by the U.S. government because it wasn’t formed. Yet if you buy the logic of Hannah-Jones the United States government was responsible for the sin of slavery in America. Whatever the origins of slavery in the new world, BLM wants CRT to be part of K-12 compulsory U.S. education, essentially blaming white supremacy for the disparate treatment of African Americans since colonial days. BLM doesn’t want to hear that CRT was a scholarly area of research started in the 1970s for civil rights lawyers and academics to study the effects of race in public and private institutions. CRT was not intended to push today’s anti-racist agenda that blames white people for preventing the African American community from success.
Recent polls show that 57% of Americans don’t know or aren’t familiar with CRT, largely because what they hear in the news is BLM’s version that says that white supremacy in America prevails to keep blacks from succeeding in U.S. society. BLM was formed in 2013 by self-declared Marxists Alicia Garza, Patricia Cullers and Opal Tometi, taking off after Floyd’s death. Today, BLM is the most visible black advocacy group preaching militancy to achieve socio-cultural goals of equal opportunity and social justice. BLM’s 43-year-old New York Chapter Director Hawk Newsome said June 25, 2020, one month after Floyd’s death, that he was prepared to “burn down the system” if he doesn’t get the demands to de-fund the police and get $15 trillion of reparations for African Americans. Newsome backed the riots, looting, arson and anarchy that lasted for months last summer.
Most white Americans don’t mind teaching a factual presentation of U.S. history that includes what happened with slavery. But those same Americans reject the idea that CRT blames white Americans for the failures of the African American community to take part in the bigger part of the American Dream. Most Americans support current civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination based on race, sexual orientation, gender, ethnicity or religion. What they object to is BLM’s version of CRT that paints all white people as racists, demanding that they receive anti-racist training in educational institutions and businesses. When it comes anti-racist training pushed by 38-year-old Boston Univ. Prof. Ibrahim X. Kendi it involves indoctrinating whites into accepting their racist ways, white guilt and white fragility, or resistance to accepting racism. To Kendi and the anti-racist movement, all white people are racists.
Objections to CRT stem from BLM’s self-serving use of respected areas of research like CRT but instead use it to push the BLM radical agenda of pressuring Congress to approve $15 trillion in reparations for African Americans. Even recent student debt forgiveness or new IRS child tax credits amounting to $300 per child a month, doesn’t come close to leveling the playing field for African Americans. “This is a manufactured crisis by the political right in response to the Black Lives Matter movement,” said Paula loanide, professor of race and ethnic studies at New York’s Ithaca College. Blaming the right is a fashionable trend since the presidency of Donald Trump, where he became “white supremacist in chief” not president over his four years in office. Black activists like loanide deny completely BLM’s new militancy, demanding reform or threatening more riots, looting, arson and anarchy.
When you consider that African Americans represent 13% of the U.S. population, they act like the 87% majority, demanding they get their way or, like New York City’s Hawk Newsome, threatening to “burn down the system.” “It’s a proxy for a debate that the country is reckoning with on the right and the left over the degree to which racism is alive and well,” said Prof. Loanide, speaking only for the African American community. Most Americans don’t like branded as racists under BLM’s new definition. Many white Americans worked for the civil and voting rights laws that afford black protections against discrimination in education and the business world. Today’s new BLM militancy creates their own definitions of racism and link to slavery to justify the demand for $15 trillion in reparations for African Americans. BLM rejects Dr. Ben Carson’s American black success story as pure fiction—but it’s fact.
