BLM is a global movement against racist police violence and against prisons. BLM stands as an acronym for the slogan “Black Lives Matter”, which translates as “Black lives count”. The BLM movement was founded in 2013 by Black female activists and gained significant momentum in 2015 following the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. The claim that Michael Brown was shot by police despite having his hands up turned out to be a lie. In fact, Brown attempted to seize the officer’s weapon. Many of BLM’s ideas about a structurally racist police force are based on such media distortions. Since allegations of racism received enormous attention, cases of police violence against whites were not publicised to the same extent, reinforcing the false image of a racist police force.
The ideological foundations of the BLM movement are based on Critical Race Theory (CRT). The core assumption is that America is systemically racist. This is allegedly most evident in the daily work of the American police and the criminal justice system. Although there is no evidence that Black people are more often victims of lethal police violence due to their skin colour than other groups, woke activists believe that law enforcement is part of systemic racism because Black men are disproportionately incarcerated. Their overrepresentation in the prison system results directly from their higher involvement in criminal activity.
Precisely because the thesis of a racist police force is not provable, BLM activists rely on anecdotes and so-called “lived experiences”.50 This aligns with an assumption of CRT: narratives (English: “stories”) are more important than objective facts when understanding systemic racism (see Narrative). Anecdotal evidence of police violence against Black people is portrayed in the media as proof of a systemic issue, leading to calls for the abolition of the police despite official statistics refuting this thesis.51
The slogan “Black Lives Matter” implies more than the uncontroversial statement that Black individuals must be protected from violence. The slogan primarily aims to suggest that Black lives in the USA have hitherto been less important than others (see Identity Politics). Notable is the ambiguity of the easily recognisable motte-and-bailey strategy: since the opaque BLM organisations bear the same name, they automatically gain political legitimacy, as agreement with the statement “Black Lives Matter” can be interpreted as a declaration of solidarity with the BLM organisations.
BLM activists demand liberation and seek to transform the system: under the label of “abolitionism”, BLM organisations advocate the abolition of all prisons and the police. BLM fights not only against law enforcement agencies but against everything regarded as the “white, capitalist patriarchy”. BLM co-founder and Marxist Alicia Garza stated this bluntly: “It is not possible for a world in which Black lives matter to emerge under capitalism.”52
In 2020, BLM protests caused damages amounting to billions. Despite its anticapitalist orientation, the BLM movement received enormous financial support from corporations. According to the Claremont Institute, organisations close to BLM received at least 80 billion from companies.53 At the forefront of the movement are two parent organisations, the BLM Global Network and the Movement for Black Lives, backed by a collective of more than 150 revolutionary organisations.54
Since 2021, enthusiasm for BLM has waned significantly. This is partly due to massive corruption within the opaque BLM organisations, which misappropriated funds and could show no positive results. It is also due to the dubious success of BLM: reductions in police resources and politically mandated decriminalisation of offences led to a rapid rise in crime.55