An American Paradox: Progress or Regress? BLM, Race, and Black Politics

T he Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was founded in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and the acquittal of his vigilante assailant the following year. The movement achieved dizzying heights in the aftermath of the murder of another Black male, this time under the guise of authority of the Minneapolis Police Department. George Floyd’s lynching unleashed a mass(ive) protest movement during the summer of 2020, the scope of which had never been seen in the United States.1 What’s more, these protests resonated internationally.2 They were also the most racially diverse protests to date, with 54% of the insurgents identifying as white.3 Most protests burn out in short order; not these. Spanning several weeks and thousands of cities, the temporal and spatial scope of the 2020 BLM protests pushed eminent social movement scholar Doug McAdam to declare that this insurgency was “different.”4 To elaborate, at the height of the movement during the summer of 2020, only 28% of the American public opposed the movement.5 (Contrast this with the findings of a Gallup poll in 1963 in which 60% of the American public opposed the civil rights movement.)6 And yet, recent trends in public opinion indicate increasing opposition to BLM, clocking in at 43%, an increase of 56% relative to 2020. What happened? To fully appreciate the unrealized potential for racial progress that might have resulted from the BLM protests (Dunivin, Yan, and Rojas 2022), one must first appreciate BLM in the context of the larger freedom struggle (Lebron 2017). In this way, a retreat from racial progress is nothing new; it’s the norm. It’s a cyclical process in which racial progress is always followed by racial retrenchment, a pattern elucidated by Klinkner and Smith (1999). Yes, as a result of the 2020 protests, some reforms were instituted: many municipalities redirected resources from law enforcement to aggrieved communities, and roughly twenty states adjusted or clarified use-of-force policies.7 Further, Juneteenth was made a federal holiday. This is all to the good. And yet, ten Black people were murdered in a supermarket in Buffalo, NY, earlier this year by an avowed white supremacist; the Republican party opposes teaching kids any part of American history that dares make plain the fact that many whites participated willingly in a system of structural oppression, and those that didn’t participate in oppression, nonetheless benefitted from white supremacy. If that’s not enough, as of February 2022, 53% of whites approved of the recently disgraced former president, the same “man” who imposed a ban on Muslim immigrants, who granted the same moral standing to white supremacists as those who opposed them in Charlottesville, and whose supporters paraded around the Capitol with a confederate flag, wearing anti-Semitic tee shirts, seeking to find and hang the vice president. Trump, as the recent congressional hearings make plain, fomented a coup as a means to cling to power. The attempt to overturn a presidential election by a (largely) white mob was novel. Still, the stench of racism was not a one-off. Consider the following: The Civil War, and the establishment of formal equality in an amended Constitution was accompanied by the formation of the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), followed by codification of Jim Crow that further institutionalized white supremacy. The return of the “New Negro” in the aftermath of the “Great War,” where many were exposed to the humanity of some Europeans, instilled in them a new confidence, and sense of possibilities. On their return, these soldiers in the great fight for democracy were met by the second edition of the KKK, only this version was national in scope. In the 1950s, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education sparked “massive resistance” in the South. Often overlooked is the fact that the Court’s order to implement desegregation with all deliberate (versus all due) speed permitted white supremacists the luxury of time to develop a strategy to derail progress. The success of the civil rights movement, partnering with LBJ’s Democratic Party, drove white southerners from the party, causing a seismic realignment, one that resulted in the present polarized state of American politics. As it turns out, race is the most important factor