How Black Lives Matter became big business
May 20, 2022 by Jill
by Tom Slater, spiked:
BLM has raised a lot of money – and done a lot of damage.
It’s been 10 years since the killing of Trayvon Martin, the black American teenager whose untimely death would go on to birth the Black Lives Matter movement. Fittingly, BLM began with a social-media post. In response to the acquittal of the man who killed Martin, George Zimmerman, Alicia Garza posted ‘a love letter to black people’ on Facebook, expressing her feelings of grief and injustice. A friend, Patrisse Cullors, reposted it with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Another friend, Opal Tometi, snagged the domain name and social-media accounts. A slogan, an organisation and a movement were born. In 2020, it went around the world.
But a decade into this brave new era of ‘anti-racist’ agitation, of a now globalised American racial identity politics, what has BLM achieved? First and foremost, it has raised an awful lot of money. Recent controversies over the ‘Black Lives Matter mansion’ – a $6million property quietly purchased by the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLM’s primary organisation) in 2020 – has reminded us how eye-watering the sums are. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, corporate donations from the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Airbnb and Unilever flooded in. According to BLMGNF, it closed out 2020 with $60million left over.
Well before we found out about the mansion – which BLM claims was bought for the purpose of creating ‘content’, even though little content has reportedly been created so far – grassroots activists were angry about how decisions were being made and how money was being spent. In November 2020, 10 Black Lives Matter chapters signed an open letter demanding more accountability. The families of some of the victims of police violence have accused BLM’s leadership of ‘profiting off their dead sons’.
Patrisse Cullors resigned as executive director of BLMGNF last May, following outcry over her own swelling property portfolio. She said she funded her four homes through her book and production deals, but this only highlighted how well she and others have done out of the movement, while those on the ground struggle to make ends meet.
All of this begs the question: who benefits from BLM?
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