October 7, 2022
by Alexis Goodman
Kanye West, an American rapper, has poked the hornets’ nest with his decision to wear a “White Lives Matter” T-Shirt to his Yeezy Paris Fashion Week. Reactions have been that he has gone too far, that there is no excuse for the shirt, and that it was ‘extremist behavior’.
Despite the frenzied claims that such a statement is rooted in white supremacy, there has been a spotlight cast once again on Black Lives Matter (BLM), a social movement that caught fire in 2013 in response to the Trayvon Martin shooting. Almost ten years have passed since their beginning, but very few people are aware of their actual goals and purposes.
Surprisingly, the organization still raised $90 million in the year 2020, and this year reported having $42 million in their assets, leading many to wonder what BLMs cause is rooted in. Their donors donate to them for what they believe the movement to be about. But in addition to their namesake, “Black Lives Matter”, and their goals of ending violence against the black community, they have another, more hidden, agenda. Now, thanks to Kanye West, some attention might be finally directed towards it.
Black Lives Matter: What We Believe
The movement’s “What We Believe” page starts out affirming what we already know of the group. They state that, “We’ve committed to struggling together and to imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive.”
The tone changes quickly when coming to page two, and different purposes make appearances. There are three goals in total that are relatively unknown. The first is their desire for an LGBTQ and transgender focus and an elimination of privilege for those outside these identifiers. The BLM group describes themselves as being willing to be, “…self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk…”.
This is a goal that doesn’t fully connect itself to ending racism, and one that is not made widely known to its supporters. They fight against not only white privilege but also apparently the privilege of those who understand their gender to be the one they were born with.
What exactly do they mean by dismantling cisgender privilege? If they follow their own steps for how they are currently dismantling white privilege, that will involve making cisgender people feel inherently evil for being the way that they are and making it virtually impossible to comment on anything relating to gender.
Black Lives Matter does not end there, as they insert their second goal into their belief’s manifesto. “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirements by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children…”
The thinly disguised hate seen here for nuclear families is undeniable. No longer is it your children, but our children. No longer are we allowed to be comfortable in the skin we were born in, but we also must reject those who reared and protected us in favor of a larger, more encompassing group with ideologies of their own that they wish to enforce.
Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner said, “The family is the most powerful, the most humane, and by far the most economical system known for building competence and character.”
Their third goal is “the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).” Even though the LGBTQ community reportedly only makes up about 5% of the population worldwide, we are expected to play that number off as being much more likely than it is.
Research the organizations you support
Black Lives Matter not only wants to block out other races and their importance, but also wants to exclude heterosexual individuals, families, and cisgender people from importance as well. They just don’t tell everyone about this ulterior motive, even though it makes up almost half of their “What We Believe”.
The lesson here is to know and understand the groups you support. Ask yourselves if their values align with your values, and research all their intentions. Black Lives Matter clearly is not an organization that will fight for family rights, the rights of marriage being between a man and woman, and the right to know who and what you are from birth. If these ideologies aren’t for you, I suggest you find another organization to help strengthen the black community.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Alexis Goodman was raised on a ranch in Dadeville, Missouri. She loves spending time with her husband, reading, hiking mountains, and learning new hobbies. She is currently a student at Brigham Young University-Idaho, where she is working to get a degree in Political Science with an emphasis on American Government.