In an important sense, the Black Lives Matter movement has finally arrived. It has gone from the kind of initial impotence so easily dismissed by the right as millennial self-importance to a real political threat. It has frightened conservatives into banal attempts at judo-flipping the movement into an example of “reverse racism” — anti-white hostility that keeps those afflicted by it in smugly savored faux-victimization — and prompted the retort “All Lives Matter,” as if black lives aren’t particularly endangered.
Now, however, the movement has claimed its first substantive political victories. It has moved beyond the reach of those who would call it easy hashtivism, and beyond the disingenuous cries of white oppression. It has moved into the realm of effecting change.
This election cycle, two high-profile public servants have lost their jobs: Cook County, Illinois state’s attorney Anita Alvarez and Cuyahoga County, Ohio district attorney Tim McGinty. Alvarez and McGinty didn’t lose their jobs simply because they were terrible at them, which they were, or because they were terrible at them in a racially pernicious way, which they were. They lost them because Black Lives Matter forced the national gaze squarely onto the Michael Browns, the Tamir Rices, the Eric Garners, the Walter Scotts, the Freddie Grays, the Sandra Blands, and the Laquan McDonalds of America’s most neglected corners.
They lost their jobs because lives were taken by a system that errs so far in favor of the law’s enforcers as to leave entire communities convinced that they live not only outside its protection, but in the shadow of its hostility.
Alvarez and McGinty lost Democratic primaries that were focused — thanks to BLM’s tireless protesting — on their respective handling of two cases. Alvarez failed to bring charges against the Chicago officer who gunned down 17-year-old McDonald until over a year after the killing, and that only after a local reporter sued to have the dashcam video of the incident released. McGinty led the nominal prosecution of the officer who killed Rice, the 12-year-old with a toy gun who was shot in less time than it took the officer to fully exit his squad car, let alone make any demands for Rice to drop his “weapon.”
Both Alvarez and McGinty did what is almost always done in these situations. They offered the offending officers refuge behind the wide legal leeway designed to protect well-meaning cops who unintentionally overreach. They declined to perform their most basic function — prosecution — and elected instead to assume that the police were incapable of wrongdoing, that any life they took couldn’t have mattered enough to warrant the slightest hesitation before pulling the trigger.
The perceived tendency of white police officers to irrationally perceive deadly threats from young black men (to say nothing of the perceived tendency of white local power structures to quietly perceive the summary execution of those young black men as a service to society) is a matter that involves no little amount of misperceiving. Beyond any question of perception, however, is an objectively troubling issue: that of prosecutors who intentionally shield police from any sense of accountability.
Prosecutors acting as defenders when police may have acted inappropriately in matters of life and (all too often) death is no cause for equivocation. It’s an inexcusable failure of justice that requires the kind of tangible action Black Lives Matter has taken.
It requires the utmost political engagement, from the protests that rocked the nation out of its complacency to the groundswell of democratic action that led voters in Illinois and Ohio to punish Alvarez and McGinty. It requires going beyond the sterilized, unthreatening forms of activism found in the safe space of Twitter. It requires political heads to roll. Now, for the first time, they have.
The greatest tragedy, aside from the unwarranted deaths of people whose lives did matter, is that it took thousands of people to back up their hashtags with their bodies to force this conversation. The greatest comfort is the notion that this recent display of electoral justice may only be the beginning.
Featured image from The All-Nite Images, available via Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 Generic license.
