I wonder how many people who say they support BLM are aware of the sort of position taken by one the organization’s LA founders.
And I wonder, if they are aware, whether they care [emphasis mine]:
“It’s not about a trial or a verdict decided in a white supremacist charade, it’s about how we treat our community when corrupt systems are working to devalue their lives,” the co-founder of BLM’s Los Angeles chapter said in a statement released Tuesday.
She said that Smollett should not be on trial, explaining: “We find ourselves, once again, being forced to put our lives and our value in the hands of judges and juries operating in a system that is designed to oppress us, while continuing to face a corrupt and violent police department, which has proven time and again to have no respect for our lives.”
“In our commitment to abolition [of the police], we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom.”
Taking a definitive stance, Abdullah said: “While policing at-large is an irredeemable institution, CPD is notorious for its long and deep history of corruption, racism, and brutality.”
“Chicago police consistently demonstrate that they are among the worst of the worst. Police lie and Chicago police lie especially.”
So there you have it. The police and the legal system are the enemy. Everything is stacked against black people. The facts and the trial and the evidence and the rule of law don’t matter. There is no rule of law. The individual cases don’t matter; the black person is by definition innocent and the police always lie.
One of many obvious results of this kind of rhetoric is the stoking of the anger of career criminals such as Darrell Brooks, the Waukesha murderer who apparently bought that sort of line. It’s simultaneously exculpatory and inflammatory – you, the criminal, aren’t guilty; you are the victim of racists who hate you.
And yet the PR of Black Lives Matter has been so good for so long, with incredible amounts of money being donated both by ordinary citizens and by virtue-signaling corporations, that the BLM line might just be one of the greatest and most dangerous con games in US history.
Which isn’t to say the Chicago police are angels. They are not. But what Abdullah describes is way over the top.
By the way, Abdullah has quite a personal background:
Melina Rachel Reimann [her birth name] was born on September 18, 1972 at East Oakland, Oakland, California, U.S. Her father, John Reimann, was “a union organizer and self-proclaimed Trotskyist.” Her mother is Linda Fowler Blackston and she was raised by Oji “Baba” Blackston. Her paternal grandfather was Günter Reimann (born Hans Steinicke), a German-Jewish Marxist economist and member of the Communist Party of Germany who opposed Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
She graduated from Howard University, where she earned a bachelor’s of arts (B.A.) degree in African American Studies. She subsequently earned a master’s degree (M.A.) and doctoral degree (PhD.) in political science from the University of Southern California. Reimann changed her surname to Abdullah due to her marriage to filmmaker Phaylen Abdullah and kept the name after their divorce.
“Abdullah” is certainly much better for her street creds than “Reimann.” And this is no surprise:
[Melina] Abdullah is a supporter of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
Of course.