Black Lives Matter’s woke industry may finally be crashing down
In the tense uncertainty of spring 2020, when the first Covid lockdown began to ease but the virus was still at large, I was among those who found themselves without a romantic chair when the music stopped. Though it would be a while before I was ready to exchange saliva with anyone, dating apps became a reassuring diversion.
Or at least they were until George Floyd’s tragic murder in May 2020, at which point such apps began, with extreme intrusiveness, to preach the agenda of the ascendant Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The worst of them regularly interrupted swipe-athons with messages demanding allegiance to the ethics of BLM, with the implication that we had better make sure our sexual choices were not racially biased.
One app even boasted about its sizeable donations to various organisations deemed to be furthering the ends of BLM, such as the Black Women’s Health Imperative, “to help rectify the health disparities Black women face, especially in this time of heightened stress”.
We got the message loud and clear: not just that racism is bad, which most dating-app users probably know, but that corporate allegiance to the highly politicised social-justice movement had become almost mandatory.
And if dating apps disturbed our chase for love in the name of furthering racial justice in America, corporate America more broadly signed on to Black Lives Matter with a financial vim that, if a little OTT at the time, has since proved to be downright mad.
It is important to highlight the difference between the BLM movement and the BLM groups who claim to represent that movement. The people marching on the streets and the professional organisers are not the same – but to many they must have seemed indistinguishable. It is therefore a problem for the whole movement that one of the leading BLM groups stands accused of being a poor custodian of the windfall that came its way in the wake of the summer 2020 protests. Of which more later.
During that summer, support for the movement – rooted in a proper and righteous desire to eradicate racist police brutality in America and make amends for the truly heinous history of race relations in that country – became overwhelming. As well as the upswell in individuals making donations to an array of “anti-racist” organisations, woke corporatism itself exploded.
Suddenly, the homepages of America’s most iconic companies filled with statements on the sacrosanct nature of BLM and those companies’ commitment to furthering the movement’s aims. The dating apps’ virtue signalling was awkward and inappropriate, but it was small fry next to the behemoths of corporate America, whose combined donations to the BLM movement could be in the billions of dollars, according to a database at the Claremont Institute, a conservative California think tank.
And yet, in their choking haste to be seen as being on the right side of history, the corporates dishing money out to the head honchos of the movement seem to have made a bad call.
Last week, there was fresh news of the dubious financial situation of the BLM Global Network Foundation. After years in which questions have been raised over the group’s transparency, reports emerged of a rising risk of insolvency after its debt rose to $8.5 million (£6.8million).
There has been other trouble: the former executive director of the group, Patrisse Cullors, resigned from her role in 2021 following anger over the management of funds. In an interview last year with the Associated Press, she acknowledged the foundation was ill-prepared to handle the groundswell of support for the movement, but denied any wrongdoing.
Still, eyebrows were raised when it was reported that Paul Cullors, the brother of Patrisse, had companies that were paid large sums for providing “professional security services” to the organisation.
Moreover, a $6million (£5million) BLM mansion in Los Angeles has also – quite understandably – been at the centre of controversy. It reportedly accompanies another luxury property in Toronto.
The irony of a group representing one of the world’s most successful-ever social-justice movements facing such financial scrutiny is perhaps too ticklish for most people to dwell on – though history has been riddled with apparent double standards among do-gooders. Communist chiefs are perhaps the most glaring example of paying lip service to the interests of maligned ordinary working people in order to seize power, before focusing on their own priorities.
Then there are the eco elites, preaching to us all about the apocalypse we’re causing by driving cars and flying on the cheap to Spain – who merrily jump on private jets to get to luxury
A $6million BLM mansion in Los Angeles has been at the centre of controversy
climate conferences in far-flung corners of the world.
Individuals, of course, have a right to send money wherever they want in a free society. But what’s extraordinary about the Black Lives Matter movement, and in particular the organisations that benefit from it, is how much money they got from businesses whose first priority used to be about profit, shareholders and consumer satisfaction.
Since 2020, wokeness has become a dye leaking throughout the most powerful organisations in the West, proving to be not just ideologically intoxicating, but financially alluring, too. Yet, in choosing to get seduced by activist agendas, firms have never looked weaker, sillier or more financially irresponsible.