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Demonstrators take a knee outside the Target Center and First Avenue during the Black 4th protest in downtown on July 4, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. \u00a9 Getty Images via AFP \/ GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA \/ Stephen Maturen<\/p><\/div>\n
The Black Lives Matter movement has made millions off black Americans\u2019 suffering. A St. Louis activist explains how it comes from a long tradition of white liberals coopting grassroots movements to push a Democratic Party agenda.<\/p>\n
The foundation-funded social justice activism of Black Lives Matter is using black pain to cash in on white liberal guilt, dividing American society in pursuit of a Democratic political agenda, St. Louis activist Nyota Uhura told RT.<\/p>\n
Uhura founded her website\u00a0handsupdontshoot.com<\/a>\u00a0in August 2014 to counter false narratives coming out of the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson following the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.<\/p>\n Having witnessed BLM\u2019s rise up close as the nascent organization swooped into Ferguson amid the calls for justice triggered by Brown\u2019s killing, methodically coopting the genuine protest energy while ignoring or even obstructing those protesters\u2019 demands, Uhura has fought to warn others of what the organization really represents \u2013 leveraging black activism into a boost for the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n Plucking a few Ferguson residents from the streets for a veneer of local credibility, BLM raised $33 million on the back of Brown\u2019s death \u2013 money Uhura says her community never saw. Six years later, black St. Louis remains poor and plagued with violence, while BLM has found a new community to exploit.<\/p>\n \u201cThey overshadow the work of the grassroots, then they insert themselves as leaders and they go out in the media and claim to be leading these movements,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Uhura said.<\/p>\n Outlining the methodology of BLM and other astroturfed movements, she added that sometimes they literally just showed up at a protest they didn\u2019t plan and did a news conference. This is a tradition she traces back to white liberals\u2019 hijacking of the 1963 March on Washington.<\/p>\n That tradition has been boiled down to a science, she says, with organizations like NetRoots turning out phony \u2018activists\u2019 with the ruthless efficiency of an assembly line.\u00a0\u201cNetRoots is where activists go to audition to be puppets of the Democrats, special interest and white elite nonprofit,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>she continued.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cIt happens so fast that all the pieces are in place before you even have a chance to know what hit you\u2026 Before you even know it, you\u2019re watching the news and they have coopted your movement.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n White liberal and progressive groups\u00a0\u201cuse the energy of our movement to push their agenda\u201d<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 in BLM\u2019s case, weaponizing the concept of\u00a0\u201cintersectionality\u201d<\/em>\u00a0to broaden the movement\u2019s scope from race to feminism, immigrant rights, LGBT issues, and other causes that directly affect white people.<\/p>\n \u201cIn order to mobilize people, they need those black faces out front \u2013 because what are they going to look like protesting? Just in terms of optics it\u2019ll look like a Klan rally,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Uhura joked. She has a point \u2013 just 17 percent of last month\u2019s protesters were black, according to a Pew Research poll published last week, a statistic the\u00a0organization\u2019s foes<\/a>\u00a0are unlikely to let it forget.<\/p>\n Uhura is far from the only grassroots activist to publicly speak out against BLM for pulling a bait-and-switch, substituting the Democratic Party\u2019s pet causes in place of justice for the victims of police violence. The group\u2019s Cincinnati chapter\u00a0dropped the iconic phrase<\/a>\u00a0from its name in 2018, alleging the national organization \u201ccapitalized off a nameless groundswell of resistance sweeping the nation, branded it as their own, and profited off [black people\u2019s deaths]<\/em>\u201d without making an effort to get justice for victims\u2019 families.<\/p>\n The Cincinnati chapter also says that BLM\u2019s 2015 conference in Cleveland \u2013 where 12-year-old Tamir Rice had just been gunned down by a cop for holding a toy gun \u2013 focused almost exclusively on black transgender rights, further dividing a suffering community.<\/p>\n Los Angeles activists slammed BLM\u2019s local chapter\u00a0for ignoring the killing of Ezell Ford<\/a>, a mentally-ill man shot by police in 2014, to travel to Ferguson and piggyback on the Michael Brown shooting. Upon their return to Los Angeles, where the activist community was demanding the city\u2019s district attorney indict Ford\u2019s killers, BLM Los Angeles not only continued to ignore the injustice, one of its leaders actually bestowed a \u2018Women in Action\u2019 award on the same DA who exonerated the cops who killed him.<\/p>\n Others take issue with what they see as obvious grifting by some of BLM\u2019s most prominent representatives. DeRay McKesson has promoted brands from Apple to McDonald\u2019s, and even got himself arrested in a Twitter T-shirt in\u00a0what many activists believe<\/a>\u00a0was a staged promotion.<\/p>\n Shaun King is so legendary for making large sums of money raised \u201cfor the movement<\/em>\u201d disappear that the Daily Beast\u00a0wrote a story<\/a>\u00a0about it. King recently announced a \u201cTruth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission<\/em>\u201d in conjunction with three of the same \u201cprogressive prosecutors<\/em>\u201d that activists like Uhura\u00a0have denounced<\/a>\u00a0for failing to police the police.<\/p>\n Like all controlled opposition movements, one of BLM\u2019s primary functions is to derail meaningful change, Uhura explained:\u00a0\u201cThey always march us back into the voting booth.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Well-heeled movement activists consistently divert money and energy into electing Democratic Party candidates or \u201cprogressive<\/em>\u201d prosecutors, none of whom hold police accountable when they murder innocent black men, whether it\u2019s in Ferguson, Los Angeles, or New York City.<\/p>\n For this reason, she\u2019s not convinced by the group\u2019s recent calls to defund police, or the Minneapolis City Council\u2019s pledge to do just that \u2013 the governments of Ferguson and St. Louis promised all manner of reforms they didn\u2019t deliver. Many that did pass were hopelessly watered-down or have since been rolled back, and Uhura sees \u2018defund the police\u2019 as just another fundraising tactic.<\/p>\n The only electoral solution to the black community\u2019s problems is\u00a0\u201cweaponizing our politics,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0according to the veteran activist \u2013 all incumbents have to go. They\u2019ve had their chance to make a difference, and proven themselves unwilling to deliver.\u00a0\u201cIt might take one or two election cycles to mold a person into what we need, but right now we\u2019re losing anyway,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0she reasoned.\u00a0\u201cWe have to just clean house and get rid of everybody. How can it be worse?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n BLM recently came\u00a0under fire<\/a>\u00a0for doling out just six percent of its donations to local chapters over the past three years, with a whopping 83 percent going to pay consultants and travel costs. The complicated route the money takes from donor to chapter has elicited\u00a0extensive speculation<\/a>\u00a0about the possibility of money laundering, and BLM representatives have been almost cartoonishly cagey when asked by reporters about their finances<\/p>\n Co-founder Alicia Garza has denied the group is backed by foundations at all, even though billionaire currency speculator George Soros alone has given over $33 million to BLM, its founders, and associated groups, and the Ford Foundation pledged to raise $100 million for the BLM-affiliated Movement for Black Lives Coalition in 2016. Fellow co-founder Patrisse Cullors has held up a fact-check by\u00a0PolitiFact<\/a>, funded by the same\u00a0Omidyar Network<\/a>\u00a0that funds BLM, as \u201cproof<\/em>\u201d the group isn\u2019t linked with the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s the group\u2019s function as an ideological launderer that has thus far insulated it from accountability. From the corporations pouring millions of dollars into its coffers to burnish their woke cred, to the politicians donning Kente cloths and pandering their way to re-election, BLM positions itself as \u2018the\u2019 black activism group, overshadowing grassroots campaigners and sucking up all available cash \u2013 literally starving out the competition, as genuine movements struggle to be heard by the media and greater public over the foundation-funded din.<\/p>\n This model of activism has been so successful over the decades that it has come to dominate every cause from environmentalism to civil liberties, offering young people a \u201cromanticized view of activism where it\u2019s all hashtags, all patty-cake, all sugar and cream, when nothing could be further from the truth.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n In reality, grassroots activists place themselves at significant risk, Uhura says – especially when they start calling out their foundation-funded rivals. Between that risk and the financial incentives to leave the topic alone, most media outlets are unwilling to delve into the deep-pocketed networks underlying BLM and its ilk. \u201cFor 6 years, people like myself have been trying to educate people on what\u2019s really happening, and it\u2019s a shame it takes RT to tell this story, when this should have been main-page news here. Now, I\u2019m hoping that it will be.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n She believes the phony movement\u2019s\u00a0true nature will be exposed, citing its own inherent discrimination:\u00a0\u201cHow does Black Lives Matter get to decide WHICH black lives matter when they purposefully omit straight black people and straight black men whose death they profit from?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n But as long as grassroots activists are losing ground to foundation-funded rivals, new BLMs will keep popping up. Real activists must\u00a0\u201ccreate an alternative\u201d<\/em>\u00a0to foundation-funded movements, she says \u2013 or risk losing the next generation to the Democratic operatives and keeping justice out of the reach of black communities forever.<\/p>\nThe science of coopting movements<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Real activists disenfranchised<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\u2018They always march us back into the voting booth\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n