Let’s Just Say It — Black Lives Matter Has Been A Disaster For Black People

Police brutality is not a racial issue.

They say that given enough time, you can get used to anything. Pain, indignity, the sight of police officers beating young black men to death.

From Philip White to Manuel Ellis, Eric Garner to George Floyd, we’ve gotten so used to police brutality that it barely piques our interest except as an excuse to talk about “race.”

Maybe that’s why so many people seemed unsure of what to do with the footage that Memphis Police Department released recently.

Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old black man, was beaten to death during a traffic stop a few minutes from his home. Nothing new there. But what blew many people’s minds is that the five officers who killed him were also black.

I mean, how do we contextualise this abuse of power when their skin colour doesn’t mark them as oppressor and oppressed? How do we condemn this atrocity without hyperbole about lynchings and race soldiers? How are we supposed to protest this injustice when we’re not even sure if we can blame it on “white supremacy”?

Tyre’s case hits differently because it invites us to look past skin colour and focus on boring old police brutality. It forces us to ask whether constantly conflating police brutality and racism is helpful. It offers none of the usual opportunities for division and grandstanding and race-baiting.

I guess that’s why the media has already lost interest.

Thankfully, at least one organisation never gets tired of talking about “race” and police brutality.

In the days following the attack, D’Zhane Parker, a Black Lives Matter Global Network board member, released a statement to reassure us that, Tyre’s murder was about white supremacy after all:

…Five police officers brutally beat Tyre to death. Although the media has spent a great amount of time drawing attention to the fact that the police officers are Black, as if that is important, let us be clear:

ALL police represent the interest of capitalism and impel state-sanctioned violence. Anyone who works within a system that perpetuates state-sanctioned violence is complicit in upholding white supremacy. Assimilation into a system that is anti-Black is one of the most dangerous weapons stemming from white supremacy.

She’s absolutely right. The fact that the officers who beat Tyre to death are black isn’t important. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where 100% of our attention in cases of police brutality was on the brutality.

But the reason we don’t live in that world is that Black Lives Matter has spent the past eight years painstakingly crafting the narrative that police brutality involving a black person is always evidence of racism.

They’ve become so dependent on this framing that even the murder of a black man by five other black men has to be labelled “white supremacy.”

They’ve been so successful at this framing that millions of Americans believe the number of unarmed black men killed by police is several thousand higher than it is.

And they make so much money from this framing that when an officer shoots a black girl seconds before she plunges a kitchen knife into another black girl, the verdict is still racism. When an officer mistakenly shoots a black man after mistaking her gun for her taser? You guessed it. But when a victim of police brutality can’t be exploited for viral, race-related outrage, they pretend they don’t exist.

People like Kelly Thomas, who was beaten to death by six members of the Fullerton Police Department in 2011. Or James King, who was beaten and choked unconscious by plainclothes officers in 2014. Tony Timpa, who died in 2016 after Dallas police officers knelt on his back for nearly 14 minutes, cracking jokes as he suffocated. Or 75-year-old Martin Gugino, who was shoved to the ground by police in 2020, leaving him with a fractured skull and permanent brain damage.

Most people have never heard of these men. Nobody chants their names at protests. None of the officers suffered any consequences. Because, as with so many issues, police brutality has been hijacked by divisive “activism” that doesn’t achieve anything.

After eight years, over $90 million in donations, and unprecedented press coverage, the police continue to kill civilians in record numbers, black lives continue not to matter in crime-infested neighbourhoods, and well-meaning onlookers continue to believe that an organisation called Black Lives Matter must be helping black people, even when they can’t think of a single measure by which that’s true.

Wait, scratch that. All those BLM donations did help at least one black person buy a few million dollars worth of real estate.

Black Lives Matter is a simple statement of fact. But however you look at it, the organisation has been a disaster for black people. It’s taken an issue that everyone should care about and turned it into yet another battlefield in the culture wars. It’s taken an issue that affects everybody and convinced millions of people that they only have a stake in it if they fail the paper bag test.

But what if this fixation on melanin levels is nothing more than a distraction? What if innocent people being brutalised by the police is enough justification for action? What if, instead of arguing about whether All or White or Black or Blue Lives Matter, we all agree that Ending Police Brutality Matters?

It matters because ending police brutality will save black lives, even if we still need to talk about racial profiling and the suspicion by default that many black people experience. I’m not arguing with anyone who says black people “have it worse,” I’m saying that whoever has it worse benefits most from ending it.

It matters because ending police brutality will save white lives too. So maybe more white people (especially poor white people) can stop seeing police brutality as a “black issue” and add their support.

It matters because reducing police brutality and increasing police accountability will go some way to rebuilding desperately needed trust in “Blue Lives.”

So maybe we can focus on the one thing all police brutality has in common; not skin colour or politics or “white supremacy,” but a culture that empowers bad police officers to kill civilians and punishes good police officers for calling them out.

Maybe we can agree that police brutality is a problem, whatever the colour of the perpetrator or the victim.

Maybe we can drop the performative outrage and the divisiveness and the race-baiting and focus on the rising tide of innocent victims.

Because if not, we’d better get used to seeing more of them.

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