Democrats Hope To Bury Black Lives Matter Under Election Blitz
The movement that is emerging under the
banner Black Lives Matter is not yet one year old, but it will be dead
before it reaches the age of two if the Democratic Party has anything to
say about it. The movement’s greatest challenge will be to survive the
impending mass mobilization of Black Democratic officeholders and
operatives in a $5 billion presidential election season.
The current Black-led grassroots campaign is,
in very important ways, even more vulnerable to Democratic cooptation
and dismantlement than was the white-led Occupy Wall Street movement,
which succumbed to a combination of Democratic infiltration and
repression – on top of its own contradictions – in the early months of
2012. Although its slogans remained imprinted in the minds of much of
the “99%,” by the time the November election rolled around, Occupy had
long been a spent force, swept from the streets and encampments by
mainly Democratic mayors acting on orders from their Party leader and
president, Barack Obama.
The Democratic Party poses a far greater
institutional threat to the Black Lives Matter movement, by virtue of
the fact that the Party permeates every aspect of African American civil
society. Not only are virtually all Black elected officials Democrats,
but all the major civic organizations – the NAACP, the Urban League,
most Black local churches and labor organizations, fraternities and
sororities, not to mention Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow-Push Coalition and
“King Rat” Al Sharpton’s National Action Network – are annexes of the
Democratic Party.
Put another way: the nascent Black-led
movement for social transformation poses a grave threat to the
Democratic Party’s chock-hold on Black politics. Therefore, the movement
is inevitably on a collision course with the Democratic Party, although
this may not yet be clear to many activists.
As I said at the closing plenary of
the recent Left Forum gathering in New York City, the Democratic Party
sits atop the Black polity “like a grotesque Sumo wrestler,” squeezing
out the Black radical tradition. The Black Lives Matter movement
consciously draws on this authentic – and still deeply honored – radical
tradition, seeking to put it into practice under 21st century conditions.
In both its resistance to a criminal justice system designed to contain, criminalize and crush Blacks
as a people,
and its broader demand for social and economic transformation and
global peace, the nascent Black-led movement picks up where a previous
mass movement left off, two generations ago. The Sixties liberation
movements were shut down through a combination of government repression
and the rise of a class of Black office-holders and aspiring corporate
collaborators whose interests lay in joining the existing order, not
transforming it. Their political vehicle was, and remains, the
Democratic Party – the organization through which this “Black
Misleadership Class” became embedded in local and national power
structures. As a loyal and key component of the ruling political
duopoly, these Black Democratic politicians and power brokers have
facilitated the exponential growth of the Black Mass Incarceration State
in all its genocidal aspects, and greased the wheels of gentrification
that is dispersing Black populations to the four winds, limiting the
geography of effective Black political self-determination.
See the rest of the article here
