Anti-racism

BLM looks like a religion to the unfamiliar observer. A glance at their website and you will see they have saints that sacrificed their lives (Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, George Floyd etc), congregations (it boasts 40 chapters around the world), holy days, such as Juneteenth (the celebration of the end of slavery in the US), and even an art movement to idolise their heroes, much like the iconography or frescos sponsored in the middle ages.

There is no problem with fighting to end racism, celebrating the end of slavery, or commemorating unjust deaths. The problem with BLM is all this rests on a hard ideology, that of the doctrine of CRT, and unless someone swallows the whole lot, they are not anti-racist. Every criticism of BLM is derided as 'white supremacy. The basis of this is CRT as it expressly says that "white supremacy is at the root of systemic racism that still thrives today."

BLM leaves no room for people, like Coleman Hughes, who oppose reparations (something BLM demands) or those "who don't share a vision that is radical and intersectional."

Whilst to the untrained eye this looks like a political movement, particularly as many of their demands are political, this is a by-product of an extremely constrained vision of the world "where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise." If the whole of society is white supremacist and cops everywhere are just waiting to gun down innocent people, then the most radical political intervention is warranted. Even more important to the religious vision of BLM is that the outer world bends to their extremely unconstrained vision of justice.

BLM and the Unconstrained Vision of Justice

The liberal view of justice takes its job very seriously and begins with an assumption of innocence. It believes firmly in the adage that it is better for 10 guilty people to go free than have one innocent deprived of their liberty. It doesn't attribute collective guilt. There is no such thing as group justice, only individual justice. It is a constrained vision of justice that hems in the judiciary either by precedent or law. There is no room for creativity for that would mean going beyond the role and power prescribed to a judge. They only interpret the rules to an individual circumstance, not make them up.

Much of the political demands of BLM are justice orientated. Their vision of justice is unconstrained, unlike the constrained system and ideals of justice that historically stand in the anglosphere. It presumes guilt, ascribes group punishment, and celebrates judicial activism if the result is desirable.

The narrative that police "systematically and intentionally" kill Black people leads to a presumption that when a cop shoots a black person, it is always the cop in the wrong. There is a presumption of guilt against the police officer in all of these cases. But most of the cases that involve police altercations are rarely this black and white (no pun intended).

The result of this hard narrative of white cop victimiser and black person victim is that acquittals of the police officer that was involved in altercations (such as the case of Trayvon Martin) are taken as further proof that the system is irredeemably racist, not that the narrative of systemically racist cops is wrong.

Group guilt rears its head in several ways but most significantly in the arguments about reparations that are had in the US. The idea that all white people must pay all black people to make up for slavery makes people guilty for what their ancestors did, a wholely illiberal idea. Even more so, it denies the years of mixing and immigration since slavery ended. Not every person with black skin is a victim of slavery. In fact, there is modern slavery happening in many countries around the world, a first-generation immigrant could even be a perpetrator - I know an extreme example.

Neither is every white person a historical slave trader. Where do you think the term "slav" came from?

BLM commemorates court cases such as Brown v Board of Education, at the same time as saying that this historical decision didn't go far enough. There is a clear taste for an expansive role of the judiciary to intervene in decisions involving race relations (despite the Supreme Court's terrible track record such as the Dred Scott case). The effect of this expansive conception of justice and the court is that BLM campaigns against Republican appointees, even ones like Amy Coney Barrett that have a track record of curbing police powers.

BLM creates a religious movement out of CRT doctrine; the result is a constrained religious vision that sees everything - particularly in the US - as irredeemably racist. This is a kind of original sin. The demands that came from this vision of an unconstrained justice system that offers redemption from the original sin.