On a scale of counterproductive to productive, -5 to +5, what does Black Lives Matter (BLM) have to offer?

Offer for what? To remedy problems of black people, such as prevalence of single-parent households, unmarried mothers, teenage mothers, poor education (illiteracy), low income, unemployment, high crime rates, high murder rates, welfare dependency, and gangs.

In the UK, BLM “…offers rural communities support to take a stand against racism at a local level.”

Here’s an opinion from Hong Kong: “Black Lives Matter protests offer an opportunity for Hong Kong to examine police attitudes to the city’s racial minorities.”

BLM itself doesn’t offer new remedies. It asks for the same old counterproductive remedies in the form of social spending financed by wealth transfers: “We know that police don’t keep us safe — and as long as we continue to pump money into our corrupt criminal justice system at the expense of housing, health, and education investments — we will never be truly safe.”

BLM’s main “offer” is to create a consciousness of racism. BLM is just going to keep hammering away in all sorts of annoying and disruptive if not downright violent ways at the idea that white people are racists and that their racism is the source of black problems. This misses the mark completely. First, black people are first and foremost responsible for their own lives. There is no way in the world that what whites think of blacks in terms of race is responsible for black successes and failures. Other things matter a great deal more. The BLM focus on racism is counterproductive. Second, out of the many millions of whites, only a relatively few are out-and-out racists. If anything, it’s the white tolerance of social programs and regulations that purport to help black people that’s a cause of black problems.

Such spending as BLM is promoting has been going on for 60 years at least since the War on Poverty and the Great Society. Whole federal government departments have been created and become racially-oriented fiefdoms. The greater the wealth transfers, the greater the social problems and the greater the dissatisfaction of Marxist black intellectuals who have concocted ever more elaborate ideas of black victimhood and ever greater charges of systemic racism. Now they’ve come up with such harebrained schemes as defunding police and letting lawbreakers go free for “petty” crimes that are not so petty.

If there is one class of people whose ideas should be ignored by Americans, it’s Marxists. Black Marxists should be criticized and not let off the hook because of white guilt or to spare their feelings. Their nonsense is as bad at solving social problems as is that of white Marxists or those of any race, ethnicity, nationality, educational level or sex. The black Marxist intellectuals have transformed a Marxism of class into a Marxism of race. They’ve replaced Marx’s class antagonism with a theory of social conflict stemming from racial antagonism.

So far, if anything is apparent, it is that BLM actually has nothing to offer to alleviate the problems of black people. On the scale of -5 to +5, I rate BLM at -1, maybe -2. They can always get worse.

The Best of Michael S. Rozeff