What Ever Happened To Black Lives Matter ? - Irrelevant, Jailed, Gone With The Wind Like It Never Happened

'What ever happened to Black Lives Matter?', a colleague asked Marfa Phelps a frontline worker for the black man, the climate, gays, and women.  'You don't hear much about them these days'. 

The colleague was right.  Not more than a year ago every house in St. Thomas Park, a leafy residential neighborhood in Northwest Washington was festooned with BLM banners, oversized placards and stickers on all the windows. 

The community was one in solidarity with black people and BLM, a movement reminiscent of the great marches and protests of the Sixties, the heady days of Martin, Ralph, and Jesse, moments of hopefulness, joy, and jubilation.  

No one who was on the Mall when King gave his 'I have a dream' speech will ever forget it, and as elderly as the St Thomas women now were, they made it out to Pennsylvania Avenue to join the BLM procession to the White House. 

The event felt different - much more angry, ragged, and violent than any of those in years past; and white people were certainly not welcome.  Although a few busloads from Bethesda and Arlington drove to the assembly place downtown, the white women passengers were ignored and even shunted aside by the black bodyguards who formed a cordon around LaShonda Jackson, First Lieutenant of the DC chapter of BLM, event organizer, and head of the radical deep cover cadre linked to Weathermen and Black Panther-like extremism. 

Jackson stood in the middle of the gathering crowd, and spoke:

Ya'll here for the black man and his sisters, but we here for the white man, the white devil, Simon Legree, the overseer, the plantation owner, the slave driver, the oppressor. Not for the white man, but out to get the muthafucka...

The crowd whooped and hollered, raising their fists in solidarity.  Marfa and her white sisters moved slowly back to the path leading to the National Gallery at the far edge of the assembly, but could still hear LaShonda who was just getting warmed up

The ofay, the white man has promised us everything but has given us jack shit - sent us off to fight his wars, paid us off with a few food stamps and walkin' around money while he sits his white ass in mansions and Mar-a-Lago, fucks the sistahs who suck white dicks for a buck then head home on the crosstown bus.

This was not what Marfa was used to.  Martin had spoken with eloquence, propriety, respect, and passion and she had come to expect this from the black man.  Yes, there was H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael in the old black rabble-rousing days, Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammed, and race-bating ambulance-chaser Reverend Al Sharpton, but they were anomalies. 

Black people were more like the Southern marchers across the Pettis Bridge, not the rock-throwing thugs trashing the inner cities. Where was interracial harmony, ebony and ivory, hands linked facing the ax-wielding Bull Connors and their attack dogs?

 

'Let's burn some shit', she heard from somewhere in the crowd surrounding Evans, and a group of young black men broke off from the rest and headed up Fourteenth Street joined by a few hundred more head-banded, balaclava-wearing, marchers.  Along the way they smashed car windows, overturned a van, and threw rocks at storefront windows.  

The DC police, under orders of restraint (the City Council had defunded the police, given them George Floyd cease and desist instructions) simply stood by as the cluster passed. Word spread, and before long the line of rioters was in the many hundreds.  It was reminiscent of the 14th Street riots of the Sixties, racial mayhem, destruction, fire, and rubble.  

In the days of the Sixties race riots in Watts, Newark, DC, and Detroit, white people took notice - not of the black anger against racism, Jim Crow, and continuing discrimination, but of the seeming endemic violent character of black people and the perennial expression of dysfunctionality and social incompetence. 

 

While politicians wrung their hands in a collective mea culpa, white Americans got out of town, as far away from the steaming, pestilential inner city as possible. 'White flight' was hardly the word for it. 

But things had changed, Marfa thought before heading to the Mall. The inchoate violence and racial hatred of the Sixties was no longer. She and her progressive colleagues had made sure of that, what with affirmative action, generous social welfare, and public visibility (on every commercial, and in every television series and Hollywood movie there were black faces), so why the violence, the racial hatred, and the virulent enmity?

Because BLM was a cash cow for LaShonda and every one of the leaders of the movement, that’s why. The cons, scams, and schemes devised by BLM operatives were Enron/Bernie Madoff worthy.  They escaped the notice of law enforcement because the FBI had been told by the Biden Administration, 'Hands off.  These are good people'.  

What a financial jamboree.  Money was skimmed off the top of social programs, donations were routinely 'edited' and monies sent to offshore bank accounts, and in the most brazen show of defiance, thousands of dollars worth of wigs, extensions, and home improvements were bought. 

So the more BLM acted up, made a fuss, and made the 6 o'clock news, the more money from progressives like Marfa poured in. They had been so well trained to believe than any black miscreance was nothing more than a natural, justifiable response to racism, and that financial support was necessary to consolidate and strengthen the movement for justice and a more equitable piece of the American dream, white money poured into BLM coffers, then out the door. 

The charade couldn't last and BLM leaders, members, and operatives were charged with fraud and financial finagling. It was a good ride while it lasted, lots of financial gain, good times, fame, and political glory; but like any great bamboozling con game, it had to come to an end. BLM was in the best American tradition of Ponzi schemes, shell games, credit swaps, and insider trading, and should be given credit. 

 

They knew there comeuppance was coming, and with some deft wizardry hid millions from even the best federal sleuths; but they finally got caught, and just like that BLM disappeared from view. Of course a few lawn signs in St. Thomas Park still remain - partisans simply cannot believe what they consider conservative white-engineered fake news - but all in all BLM is gone, a blot of ink, a smudge if that. 

Now that Donald Trump was in the White House and conservatism was ascendant, there were fewer causes for Marfa to join - or perhaps better said, the causes were still there, but progressives had been so badly beaten, disoriented, and scattered by the Trump victory and aftermath that there was no oomph to them. 

As the BLM scandals became public, George Floyd dismissed as a minor criminal, and blackness itself relegated to a back room, Marfa was increasingly disconsolate and at loose ends.  There must be something I can do, she thought; but a Florida retirement kept sneaking into her head, a chaise lounge on a beach in Tampa, some pina coladas.  Even progressives have retirement accounts, so perhaps it was indeed time to cash hers in.