Perhaps you're getting down voted for pointing out that the BLM organization is different than the sentiment that yes, black lives matter. I've found you can't criticize the BLM organization or else it's equated that you think black lives do not matter.
There were a lot of people during the civil rights era who were upset that they couldn't criticize Martin Luther King or it would be equated as being against equal rights.
Maybe the problem is that you're overly concerned with how you can safely criticize the movement. Do you personally think black lives matter? Have you spent as much time criticizing the problems that created the movement as you have spent criticizing the movement itself?
As somebody with a cursory interest in communist movements across the centuries, I’d be curious to know how BLM leaders are “communists”. Do they advocate for collective ownership of the means of production?
> I’d be curious to know how BLM leaders are “communists”.
One possible explanation:
Patrisse Cullors specifically has credited Marx, Lenin, and other Communist figures as ideological inspiration (which isn't the same thing as being a Communist, to be sure.)
I think it was also Cullors who made a comment about herself and one of the other founders (Alicia Garza, I think) being “trained Marxists” in, as I recall, the context of explaining some of their strategic/orgabizing approaches, not ideological goals.
Exactly. It’s an organization with a website, a donation page, and a published set of beliefs on that website, but I can’t seem to say anything about it that isn’t emphatic agreement without getting back loaded questions about how how racist I might be. When Fortune 500 companies are donating to the cause and its brand imagery is showing up everywhere from video games to github, then we have a right to critique it without fearing social ostracism.
