QUORA: ‘How does Black Lives Matter differ from the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s? Which is stronger?’

QUORA: ‘How does Black Lives Matter differ from the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s? Which is stronger?’

I posted this answer:

In a word, philosophy.

The mid-20th Century Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King was a fight to get America to live up to its ideals of equality of individual rights before the law. Following in the footsteps of Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, King reaffirmed American ideals. In a speech titled What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, [Douglass] drew “encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions,” when he said the American Constitution is “a glorious liberty document.” In his “I Have a Dream” speech, King too drew encouragement from “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” when he observed that these Founding documents represented “a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

The Civil Rights Movement was fundamentally individualist and anti-racist. King famously advocated the proposition that all people “will not be judged by the color of their skin,  but by the content of their character.”

Black Lives Matter, in its ever-changing “ABOUT” page, makes no mention of America’s ideals. Instead, it makes unsubstantiated claims that, in 2020 America, blacks are “systematically targeted for demise,” face “deadly oppression,” face the prevalence of “state-sanctioned violence,” and that there is an alleged need of blacks to be “liberated.” They promote the anti-American, Confederate myth of “white supremacy.” BLM is not about specific instances of injustice perpetrated by and against individuals. It is not, as many Americans believe, anti-racist. There is no room for the individual in it’s collectivist worldview. Racism is a subset of collectivism. BLM is fundamentally collectivist and racist, and therefore fundamentally at odds with the Civil Rights Movement and America’s Founding ideals of the natural equality of all human beings.

Coleman Hughes, a leading intellectual of the 1776Unites project, put it well in contrasting Black Lives Matter with the Civil Rights Movement:

What anti-racism meant in the early 1960s when the great triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement were being made, the meaning of anti-racism has changed entirely. It’s no longer about contrasting racism with the ultimate superficiality of skin color. It’s no longer about the ethos that race is only skin deep, and that the reason racism is wrong is because we are all of the same species and [skin color] is nothing. Anti-racism today means [skin color] is everything, and people with your [white] skin color have oppressed me—not just my group but in some deep sense me—for centuries, and I need you to recognize that. [BLM] is about how skin color is injected with meaning by the history of colonialism and white supremacy, and so forth. It’s a very different ethos: I think it’s much more dangerous. In the 1960s Martin Luther King . . . famously dreamed about white kids and black kids holding hands. Just a couple of years ago there was an op-ed published in the New York Times called “Can my Children be Friends with White People?” by a black author. It’s the exact rebuttal and reversal of Martin Luther King. It’s a regression . . . a regression into tribalism. [The moral case against Black Lives Matter,

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Whereas the Civil Rights Movement envisioned an America united by the final realization of it’s Founding values, BLM sees an America divided by perpetual tribal conflict between victims and oppressors and a return to a tribal “cycle of revenge” to “even the historical score.”

I was born in 1949. I grew up at a time when blacks really were oppressed -- legally oppressed by their own government. Racism and bigotry were “mainstream” in the culture. People rarely pushed back against prejudicial slurs--not just slurs against blacks but against Jews, Italians, Irish, homosexuals, et al. People were defined by their group identity. I know. I was there. Since the 1960s, things have improved dramatically. I know. I am part of that improvement, too. I’m one of the ones who rethought every influence I grew up with, explicitly shedding any “accidental racism” and collectivism that infected my soul and character.*

Over the past 50 years, racism has been thoroughly marginalized in the culture, to the point that today racial slurs are immediately called out in private and in public. Since the 1960s victories of the Civil Rights Movement, many blacks have flourished economically, educationally, and so on. Belying BLM’s dark vision of black oppression in America, black African immigration to America, and black immigration generally, is surging. Black African immigrants in particular are “more likely than Americans overall to have a college degree or higher.” Civil Rights Movement leaders would applaud. BLM ignores the progress, preferring to roll back the cultural and political clock to an era that no longer exists, for crass political purposes.

This is not to deny that racism still exists in America today. It does. But today, America has never been less racist. Racism has lost its cultural and political power. I am not just relying on my personal experience and observation, important though it is. Scholars such as John McWhorter see it, too. Unfortunately, Black Lives Matter and, more deeply, Critical Race Theory, are aiming—shockingly, to me, with some success—to re-mainstream racism in America.

This is not to minimize the lingering vestiges of our government’s prior forced segregation policies and laws. But progress is evident to anyone willing to see it. And we have the Civil Rights Movement to largely thank for that. 

Black Lives Matter not only differs from the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s. These two movements are opposites at the deepest levels of principle and goals. And we can only hope that Black Lives Matter is nowhere near as strong as the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement brought progress. Black Lives Matter, with its neo-Marxist roots, promises only destruction and regression.

* [I have my discovery of Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, to primarily thank for that transformation. Her individualist philosophy, which I discovered in the late 1960s, was a profound influence as I shaped and reshaped my character. In particular, I was profoundly impressed by her essay Racism, which I often reread because it is deeply relevant to this day.]

Related Reading:

The Criminal Socialist Agenda Behind the ‘Anti-Racism’ Movement

‘Anti-Racism’, or the re-Mainstreaming of Racism

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: The NJ State Budget

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: NJ Governor Murphy’s Strange and Discriminatory ‘Baby Bonds’ Scheme

The Founding Fathers, Not ‘Diversity,’ is the Solution to ‘Our Racialized Society’

 

Don’t Allow the Left to Own ‘Diversity’

 

SEC’s Boardroom ‘Diversity’ Rule Is Racist, Unnatural, and Politically Motivated

 

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

 

DelBarton Student’s 'Diversity' Initiative, Though Well-Meaning, is Based on Counter-Productive Premises

Starbucks/USA Today’s Racist “Race Together” Campaign

A New Textbook of Americanism — edited by Jonathan Hoenig

Fighting Racism With Collectivism is No Way to Exterminate Racism

From The Objective Standard: Smith College President Says “All Lives Matter”; Racist Left Goes Ballistic, Review of Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter to the Race Grievance Industry by Taleeb Starkes, and To Black Lives Matter, No Lives Matter

Related Viewing:

The Market for Victimhood by Ayaan Hirsi Ali