Black Lives Matter UK: Who are its organisers?
by Charlotte Gill, Conservative Home:
Yesterday, Keir Starmer made an important distinction during an interview with BBC Breakfast. While he acknowledged that the Black Lives Movement had been about “reflecting” on the dreadful events in America, he regretted that it had become “tangled up… with the organisation Black Lives Matter”, a statement that he received equal doses of praise and backlash for.
What Starmer highlighted is that there’s a crucial difference between the statement “black lives matter” – which any decent human being agrees with – to “Black Lives Matter”, an organisation that has clear goals.
But here it gets slightly more complicated, as the movement is largely “non-hierarchical”, making it harder for Starmer, and other leaders, to engage with its UK representatives.
What British groups do have in common is their inspiration: the American BLM movement, which was prompted by the acquittal of George Zimmerman after he fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an African American teenager walking to a family member’s house, in February 2012.
This shocking event prompted Twitter users to form the hashtag – #BlackLivesMatter – to highlight racial inequalities in the judicial and policing system – and it increasingly gained traction with the help of three activists, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, who encouraged the growth of networks and calls to action.
Despite the fact that the organisation is decentralised with no formal hierarchy, everyone knows who these founders are. They regularly give interviews, with their biographies listed on the Black Lives Matter website, and people know their political views.
Cullors once described her and Garza as “trained Marxists” and said she would not sit at the table with President Trump who is “literally the epitome of evil, all the evils of this country”, singling out “capitalism” as one of them.
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