BLM Burning Down Cities

Welcome to Black History Month.

How long will Black Lives Matter burning cities down remain the narrative of the racist right?

It seems like it’s inevitable in any discussion group. All you have to do is open a discussion about violence of any sort and you’ll likely get some proud white boy trying to minimalize it by comparing it to “BLM burning our cities down”. They don’t have to be a neo-Nazi or overt ethnostatist to bark back this dog whistle. I’ve seen self-identified liberals do it too. In addition to “BLM burning our cities down” always being nothing more than histrionics and false equivalence.

I posted an article once about anti-vaccine protesters actively preventing people from receiving the COVID-19 vaccine and it predictably got a comparison to BLM.

Verbatim, “It's like "BLM" protestors smashing Starbucks windows.”

Except these two things are nothing alike.

The person when on to argue that both serve no purpose in their objective. That it’s just for attention – never mind that bringing attention to something is supposed to be the purpose of a protest. It sure as hell isn’t directly blocking basic healthcare from Americans.

This thinly veiled disdain for the civil rights movement has been going on as long as the 2020 BLM protests themselves. We’d get an indication of how permanent the image of a black man thumping his chest atop a flaming police cruiser would be etched into their racist imaginations after January 6.

Not only is BLM invoked when talking about any instance of police brutality or mass shooting, but now it’s met with comparison to right-wing radicals attacking the US Capitol in attempt to destroy democracy and install a fascist despot. Sure, an act of actual (but somehow patriotic) insurrection on your own country is bad, but BLM were alleged to set fire to a small business …o- o- owned by a starving black family, even (yeah, that’s the ticket).

Putting aside that only 7% of BLM protests had any incident of violence in them (That’s something happening at all within a largely peaceful protest, mind you, and not 7% of protests turning into all out city-destroying rampage like they’d have you believe), these comparisons overlook the fact that there have been outside agitators, bad actors, and even police caught in the act of damaging property and instigating violence during these protests.

Even as Malaysian Twitter instigator and propagandist, Ian Miles Cheong, has been trying to reverse the narrative since January 6, many of his followers are set on pushing this narrative that the those who just want black people to be treated fairly are actually communists getting their revenge for, I don’t know, the Cuban missile crisis or something?

There’s a cartoon being passed around from 1967 that illustrates this is nothing new. It tries to paint the narrative that MLK’s objective was to destroy property under the guise of civil rights. Most of us today understand how wildly absurd and hyperbolic it is when looking at the 1960’s, but for some reason, racists (Trumpian and liberal alike) don’t see the problem looking at today’s climate.

To date, the number of cities burned down by BLM remains at 0.