That motley collection of social media demagogues known as Black Lives Matter (BLM) has come up with a new idea for this Christmas season: a nationwide boycott of all white-owned corporations. As they tell the story, running a business constitutes complicity in the murder of blacks. Ironically, their intended targets might be their most generous friends.
The brainchild of this initiative is one Melina Abdullah, a leader of BLM’s Los Angeles chapter and a professor at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). She’s urging shoppers, as part of the chapter’s #BlackXmas campaign, not to shop or otherwise do business with companies owned by whites. On a recent broadcast of her weekly radio program, “Beautiful Struggle,” she proclaimed: “We say ‘white capitalism’ because it’s important that we understand that the economic system and the racial structures are connected. We have to not only disrupt the systems of policing that literally kill our people, but we have to disrupt the white supremacist, capitalistic, patriarchal, heteronormative that is really the root of these police killings.”
Another BLM activist and CSULA professor, Anthony Ratcliff, offered this take: “Black Lives Matter and other organizations build a strong critique and understanding of racism and white supremacy and sexism and homophobia and transphobia, but we have to have as much hatred or vitriol against capitalism. Until we start to see capitalism [as] just as nefarious as white supremacy, we will always be struggling.”
It’s hard to believe that so much nonsense, a virtual self-parody of far-Left “root cause” verbiage, can be squeezed into two sentences. Let’s cut through the hype: Every one of the victims of the “police killings” to which these activists refer, from Michael Brown to Freddie Gray to Alton Sterling, was triggered by an unruly black suspect threatening and/or assaulting one or more cops. The idea that there is an ongoing plot by police departments across the country to kill off an entire race speaks of the mad paranoia that defines Black Lives Matter. The group’s national co-founders, Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors and Opal Tometi, regularly traffic in such absurdities as well. And they have a lot of people of all races believing them.
The irony is that some of the group’s most reliable allies are executives of corporate enterprises and related nonprofit groups. Examples:
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation. This nonprofit organization, which holds substantial equity in the Kellogg Company, in June 2016 set aside a $930,000 grant to the International Development Exchange to benefit Black Lives Matter. In the foundation’s words, the money will “enhance local and place-specific interventions to address issues impacting the lives of Black community members, families and children by building the infrastructure and capacity of the national #BlackLivesMatter to support and strengthen their local chapters’ organizing capacity.”
Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social media giant, prohibits his employees from expressing disapproval of Black Lives Matter. In February 2016, after receiving word that several “Black Lives Matter” postings adorning the free-for-all signature wall at company headquarters had been crossed out in favor of “All Lives Matter,” Zuckerberg sent out a company-wide email warning them of severe discipline for such infractions in the future.
Political donations. In 2016, Black Lives Matter spokesman DeRay McKesson ran for mayor of Baltimore – as if the city didn’t have enough problems. He didn’t come close to winning, but not for want of corporate media help. Executives of Netflix, Slack, Twitter, YouTube each donated four-figure sums to his campaign.
Generosity such as this is completely misplaced. Black Lives Matter has no intention of reciprocating. Indeed, its leaders have made clear that crippling capitalism is a chief goal. About the last thing any capitalist should be doing is donating rope to their would-be hangmen. They, along with Christmas shoppers, should ignore these ignoramuses and get on with their business.