A BLM Insider Opts Out
The more Rashad Turner learned about the backward priorities of Black Lives Matter, the more he realized he could do a lot better.
We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Black Lives Matter is a racket. And credit must be given to BLM’s trio of opportunistic black female Marxist founders. They’re rapacious capitalists at heart, and they cornered the market on woke corporatism, liberal white self-loathing, and runaway virtue-signaling.
Yep, BLM is a business, and business is good. How else to describe an organization that hauled in a cool $90 million in 2020?
All it took, as Nancy Pelosi put it, was George Floyd “sacrificing [his] life for justice,” and BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors was laughing all the way to the bank. And to a $3.2 million home-buying spree. And to an early retirement.
Not everyone is laughing, though. Take Rashad Turner, for example. As the founder of BLM’s St. Paul, Minnesota, chapter, he was right there at ground zero during last year’s George Floyd riots, and he witnessed the organization’s meteoric rise from its humble pre-Floyd beginnings to its lofty perch atop White Guilt Mountain. But he quit the organization after 18 months, when he saw that its priorities were out of whack with black empowerment and advancement.
“I believed the organization stood for exactly what the name implies,” he said in a brief video. “Black lives do matter. However, after a year on the inside, I learned they had little concern for rebuilding black families, and they cared even less about improving the quality of education for students in Minneapolis.”
If there’s one lesson to be learned about BLM, Turner just articulated it. The organization is ardently anti-family, and thus ardently pro-poverty and pro-crime. Before BLM deleted its own “What We Believe” page, this was how the group put it:
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
This hostility toward the family structure, coupled with BLM’s subservience to the teachers unions, proved too much for him. “I was an insider in Black Lives Matter,” he says, “and I learned the ugly truth — the moratorium on charter schools does not support rebuilding the black family. But it does create barriers to a better education for black children.”
Turner’s story is moving and inspirational, and it should be deeply empowering to all other Americans, black and non-black. Here he is, in his own words:
Today, Turner is still fighting for black lives, but in a much more purposeful way. “Today,” he says, “I serve as the president and executive director of Minnesota Parent Union. We’re dedicated to helping parents move their children from failing schools to successful schools. It’s hard work, and we’re up against forces that don’t want us to succeed, but success is possible. Just look at me.”
There comes a tipping point for every racket – a point at which their schtick no longer works. Let’s hope Rashad Turner and others like him can continue to raise awareness of Black Lives Matter’s destructive ends, while at the same time pointing out a more promising approach.