Rashard Turner founded a Black Lives Matter chapter in St. Paul back in 2015 and led the organization for more than a year and a half.
Today, Turner is the president and executive director of the Minneapolis Parent Union and he has released a video talking about “the ugly truth” behind Black Lives 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. That was made clear when they publicly denounced charter schools alongside the teachers union. I was an insider in Black Lives Matter. 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. I resigned from Black Lives Matter after a year and a half. But I didn’t quit working to improve black lives and access to a great education.”
Eric Hoffer, who was a brilliant man, wrote one of the best quotes you are ever going to see about political organizations: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
This happens on the Right, it happens on the Left and it’s what happened with Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter started with black Americans believing that they weren’t getting fair treatment from the police. We could have arguments about how much of an issue that really was, but the sentiment was real. Then, Colin Kaepernick supercharged the issue by disrespecting the flag as a protest tactic. Why did he do that? It got lots of attention, the right people liked it, and perhaps just as importantly, the right people (all the people liberals detest) hated it. It would have been the worst tactic imaginable if Kaepernick wanted to accomplish anything, but kneeling was always about elevating the profile of the people doing it, not accomplishing anything.
Since then, Black Lives Matter has rioted, looted, blocked traffic, and encouraged Americans to hate the police. They have accomplished almost nothing positive, but have managed to encourage more black and white Americans to hate each other, have normalized rioting in parts of the country, and have gotten some cities to defund the police, which inevitably led to a crimewave. It’s a shameful legacy, but as long as Colin Kaepernick was given his Nike shoe contract and BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors got her houses, it was all worth it, right?
John Hawkins is the author of 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know. You can find him on Parler here and on Twitter here.
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