What role should identity play in our fight for freedom? After the election of Donald Trump as president of the US, the answer for many mainstream pundits has been simple: none. Particularly disheartening since the 2016 election has been the misguided view that black activism and its focus on racial justice, police accountability and – gasp – reparations for chattel slavery and decades of housing discrimination, was ultimately a divisive distraction from the larger goal of keeping a man who is sympathetic to white nationalists out of the Oval Office.
Depending on who you ask, black people shortchanged democracy either directly, by refusing to use their platform to endorse candidates, or indirectly by not voting with the same enthusiasm that ushered Barack Obama into the White House. The day after the election, US News & World Reports ran a story that summed this up: ‘Clinton made her case to black voters,’ the headline screamed. ‘Why didn’t they hear her?’1
This blame is neither new nor particularly compelling. Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Movement for Black Lives coalition, Black Lives Matter and longtime organizer in black and Latino communities, sees it as part of a long history of wrongly blaming black people for the fundamental failings of electoral politics. ‘There’s a contradiction happening where now white liberals and white moderates are saying, “Man, we lost the election because black people didn’t vote, so fuck BLM”, and “We lost the election because we spent too much time on identity politics, but let’s do everything we can to galvanize white working class people”.’2
There has been a not-so-subtle insistence across US media and politics that white working-class voters have been ignored for the sake of radical rabble-rousers calling for justice based on who they love, their gender identity, their class background, and their racial identity. At its core is the belief that whiteness is and should remain the norm and that white supremacy is an immoveable and non-threatening platform on which to advocate for incremental change. The Movement for Black Lives has long argued that this is not a feasible road to freedom.
Black Lives Matter is a history that is still being written. Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Opal Tometi turned their collective outrage into action upon George Zimmerman’s acquittal after killing Trayvon Martin in July 2013.
Garza, Khan-Cullors and Tometi were also among the protesters and organizers who flooded Ferguson, Missouri, for weeks after Michael Brown was shot dead by Darren Wilson, a white police officer in August 2014. Brown’s body was left in the hot Missouri sun for hours.
The immediate shock of Brown’s death gave way to a sobering look at the institutional forces that shape the lives and deaths of black people in places like Ferguson. The Department of Justice eventually issued a scathing report that detailed how Ferguson’s courts and police force strategically targeted black citizens for arrest and fines to add millions of dollars to the city’s coffers.3
