Yes, Black Lives Matter…So Don’t Blow It!

(The following is a guest post by David Jay Morris. Considering the horrible polling news, I hope people follow his advice.)

We are faced with a stark choice. Come late January, either Donald Trump has been pried out of the White House and his cult put on the road to disintegration, or their slow-motion coup d’etat will be complete and America finished as a workable democracy.

Which scenario will be better for Black Americans – as well as Latinos, Muslims, Native Americans and other minorities?

Does anyone really need to ask?

If we have a Biden/Harris administration supported by a Democratic majority House and Senate things will get better. It might not all happen overnight, but meaningful police reform, an end to voter-suppression and gerrymandering, universal healthcare, and real action on the climate crisis all become possible.

If the cult of Trump prevails, the country will be well on its way to neo-apartheid, and no-one will suffer more than Black Americans. “What have you got to lose,” Trump asked. Well…a lot already and you ain’t seen nothing yet if he wins.

With that in mind, however politically incorrect it might be, the question needs to be asked – Are the Black Lives Matter protests, as they are now unfolding, helping with the single most important issue we all now face…getting Donald Trump out of power and ensuring the survival of real democracy in America?

Right now, the answer would have to be no.

As long as widespread rioting, looting and destruction of property can be – whether fairly or not - tied to the BLM protests, they become the perfect foil for exactly the kind of dystopian Trump propaganda we are now seeing. Is it really too much of a stretch to imagine that enough wavering voters could be swayed by this to push the electoral college over to Trump – or at least put the election into cheatable range?

I don’t think so. And the latest polls showing a steep drop off in support for BLM would seem to agree.

Given the stakes involved, is this a risk worth taking, especially in the midst of a pandemic?

Would the best thing right now be for the whole protest movement to just put itself on hold until the election is over and focus all that energy instead on the nuts and bolts of voter registration, turnout, and working like hell to overcome all the suppression efforts in the works?

Perhaps so, but there is another question that needs to be asked. Is the outcome of the election – and the very fate of the world – now uniquely in the hands of the African American community?

Does their leadership (diverse as it may be) now have it in their power to either throw the election to Trump - and usher in a new dark age of neo-fascism and apartheid - or take the kind of steps that could result in him and his cult being squashed like a bug and relegated to the dust bin of history?

The answer to this one might be yes.

If things continue as they are now progressing, periodic incidents of violence against Blacks will occur and the BLM protests will continue in pretty much they way they have been doing. They will start out peaceful and remain that way in most cases. As now, however, some of them will devolve into rioting, looting and violence. It doesn’t matter at all if this is actually started by some of the protestors themselves, anarchists, outside agitators or agents provocateur. The Trump campaign and its well-disciplined allies in Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media will paint this as a deliberate attack on America and the expected fate of the nation if Biden prevails.

Enough people are likely to believe this to let Trump squeak out another narrow win in critical swing states and a majority in the electoral college.

Welcome to dystopia.

If, on the other hand, enough people in the BLM movement decide to stand down and the protests fade along with the summer’s heat, the Trump argument will lose much of its fuel, and the election might once again hinge more on other critical issues, especially the pandemic and the devastated economy.

Much better…but still not a definite win.

Is there, however, a third path that might be followed – one that might cut the legs out from under team Trump’s attempts to paint BLM as nothing but the wild-eyed proponents of anarchy, violence and social chaos and the Biden/Harris ticket as its hapless puppet?

It’s a very long shot, perhaps, but maybe.

How could this be done?

It won’t be easy, and it would take a huge amount of discipline and creativity.

African American leadership nationwide and the BLM movement as a whole would need to demonstrate – strongly and continuously, in word and deed – complete moral superiority over the Trumpsters by going full-on Mahatma Gandhi/John Lewis – complete and uncompromising rejection of violence in any form.

The absolutely essential first step in this would be to loudly excommunicate from the BLM community anyone who participates in looting, violence, arson, stone-throwing, aggressive confrontation or anything of that nature that could in any way be tied to the protests.

Every (and I mean every) speaker would need loudly and often stress that these people are NOT welcome and don’t in any way represent the movement. It would need to be said - again and again and again - in every speech, in every interview, every time. No more winks and nods. No more de rigueur brief statements denouncing violence in the midst of fiery – and all-too-often explicitly anti-American - rhetoric that leaves already furious listeners all-to-ready to erupt.

But words are not enough. This would have to have teeth. Let every march feature a cadre of very tough Guardian Angels types ready to shut down anyone who starts making the wrong kind of trouble immediately. Heck – don’t stop there – if you really want to undercut the Trump position, turn the worst of the rioters over to the police and cooperate in their arrest.

And if things do start to get out of hand, everybody who cares for the movement would need to go home - and make sure on the way that the media knows exactly that’s what’s happening.

Don’t let armed, out-of-town white militia types be the ones to “protect” businesses in the community, either. That’s also something that could – and should – be done by a coalition of local Guardian Angels…and grandmothers.

Spend a lot of time talking about guns. One suspects that at least some of the police violence is due less to racism than fear. Is it too much to think that many cops are so trigger-happy mainly because there are so many triggers out there?

If people want to present a very powerful, but completely unexpected, message that team Trump would be at a loss over how to respond to, why not replace the angry chants with – silence.

If too many people really, really want to make a lot of noise, however, banging pots and pans with wooden spoons would be an excellent alternative to chants that would have the added benefit of not spreading any germs.

And, especially before November 4th, never, ever chant, “No Justice. No peace!” That’s exactly what Trump wants you to be saying. Let him and his minions be the ones spouting all the angry rhetoric.

If a confrontation with authorities does occur (for example if Trump wants to clear a square for a photo op…), don’t fight, shout or confront. Adopt the classic strategy of the sit-down strike. Everyone sit or lie down on the ground, go limp, and make the authorities have to carry each protestor off one-by-one. If there is any violence, it has to be absolutely, 100% from the other side.

Also crucially, don’t let protests become Covid-19 super-spreader events. It’s very good that most participants in events like Al Sharpton’s recent March on Washington were wearing masks, but the social distancing was a disgrace. And sorry, no hugging or linking arms – and again – no shouting or chanting. Even with masks on, those are easy ways to spread the virus.

There is no point at all is saving innocent members of one’s community from police violence only to subject them to the worse violence of Covid-19. There is also great merit in letting it be seen that BLM supporters are the ones trying to protect their neighbors from the disease while the Trump people do their best to ignore it.

Stop the talk about “defunding the police.” It’s a wildly unpopular message, and also has the equation completely backwards. What’s needed is not defunding of the police…it’s re-funding of all the other government programs that the police now end up handling. With adequate resources, disadvantaged communities could have access to much-needed mental health, homeless, educational, youth support, violence mitigation and other services that the police now end up providing by default - but in a militarized, law enforcement sort of way.

Forget the statues for now, and if people must go after any of them, please, please, please stick to the ones which glorify the Confederacy. You will win no friends in middle America by trying to conflate George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis.

Ultra-rich celebrities should be careful when they talk about how much they have been victimized and aggrieved by American society. Their hearts may be in the right place, but it can really rub the wrong way a lot of working class people who are struggling to pay the rent and put food on the table to hear athletes, singers and movie stars who are being paid millions of dollars complain about how badly they’ve been treated. Also, work stoppages by elite athletes should be handled with care. Taking away the best entertainment many people have during the pandemic can just make them angry and be counterproductive at this point. Save that sort of thing for a general strike in the event Trump refuses to leave office or otherwise steals the election.

Deracialize the concept of reparations. Instead, focus – as Dr. King often did – on all long-term disadvantaged people and locales. Due to the effects of centuries of systemic racism, Blacks and other minorities are vastly over-represented in these groups, so there is no need to base programs aimed at overcoming them on race. A similarly disproportionate amount of the benefits would naturally flow to the African American community, but the help it would provide to generationally disadvantaged whites (think Appalachia, etc.) might go a long way towards promote cross-group unity and understanding.

Of course, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other Democratic candidates, political leaders and spokespeople need to draw a sharp line between genuine peaceful protest and that which devolves into violence – maybe even have a “Sister Souljah” moment or two. Basically, however, this distinction needs to be made by the BLM community itself and its leaders.

The election – and the fate of our country and the world – hinges on it.

So there it is – my challenge to the Black Lives Matter movement and all its supporters. Do you have the courage and the strength of character to transform your protests into ones that won’t result in Donald Trump’s re-election?

If not, however righteous your cause might be, wouldn’t it be better to wrap it all up until November 4th and focus for now on the election?