The Blackout (Why #BlackLivesMatter Owes Nothing To You)
“If I woulda known what I knew in the past, I woulda been blacked out on your a …” – Kanye West, “Black Skinhead“
At any given moment, any given rally, for any presidential candidate, a set of protestors under the Black Lives Matter umbrella could bumrush the stage and lay out a list of names, stymieing the rah-rahs of the onlookers and bystanders in the crowd. The focus on Senator Bernie Sanders and former Senator Hillary Clinton have been particularly poignant because, for decades, the Democratic Party has taken the vote from people of color for granted, as if abstaining from the political process isn’t an option. Yet, as Kelly Wickham is quick to remind us, the BLM movement doesn’t actually have to do the bidding of any particular party. The means and ends are justified because the end is equity in survival.
So when my name was invoked in a discussion around the intersections of #BlackLivesMatter and public school advocates, I laughed because the education space has a similar set of leaders vying for the front of the discussion. I’ve seen a crowd of so-called white progressives converge on my blog the last time I pleaded with them to decentralize their narrow concerns and fight for equity by putting race, class, and gender in the center of the struggle for educational equity. For what it’s worth, it’s the same group that will have a visceral reaction to hearing that the New York State opt-out movement was mostly suburban and white, but did nothing to highlight the cases across America where students of color opted out.
In a few blogs I’ve read this year, the authors of certain posts (I’m not giving them views) thought it The Blackout (Why #BlackLivesMatter Owes Nothing To You) | The Jose Vilson: