After Dallas, The Future of Black Lives Matter

The least disputable measure of a bad week is any seven-day period that requires a body count at the end of it. Seven Americans in three different cities died in high-profile incidents this week, all of them captured, at least partially, on video and disseminated by social media. Taken in sum, the deaths of Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Philando Castile, near St. Paul, Minnesota; and Officers Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael J. Smith, Brent Thompson, and Patrick Zamarripa, in Dallas, Texas; seem like installments in a macabre serial: “The Purge” recast as a reality show. There are common threads here: the surfeit of guns in American society, the chasm between law enforcement and many African-Americans, the ways in which social media have transformed the public into a nation of eyewitnesses.

No single organization has been as consistently identified with these questions in the past two years as Black Lives Matter. There’s confusion about what B.L.M. is because it exists both as a discrete national network of activists and as a much more amorphous movement focussing largely on police accountability. In the wake of Sterling and Castile’s deaths—which occurred within forty-eight hours of each other—it was possible to imagine that public opinion might become more sympathetic toward B.L.M.’s cause. (A recent Pew study yielded that only four out of ten people surveyed supported Black Lives Matter.)

The following day, however, a sniper claimed five lives and fundamentally altered the dialogue around race, policing, and reform in ways we have yet to fully countenance. Conservative critics placed the blame for these deaths at the feet of Black Lives Matter—despite the sniper’s statement, and the evidence thus far, that he had worked alone. I spoke with Alicia Garza, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, about the meaning of this week, the charges that her organization encourages violence against law enforcement, and the implications of Dallas for the future of the movement. (The conversation took place on Saturday evening, just before word came that more than a hundred protesters, including DeRay Mckesson, a movement activist, had been arrested in Baton Rouge.) The interview has been edited and condensed.

Was the demonstration in Dallas an official Black Lives Matter event?

No, and I think this is part of the tension of this moment, is that everything having to do with black resistance gets dubbed “Black Lives Matter.” That’s interesting because it means that there is a real salience around understanding that Black Lives Matter is about justice for black people who are being murdered at the hands of the state. On the other hand, it makes it incredibly confusing because, while I’m sure there was probably a lot of alignment with our values and our principles at this rally, it wasn’t caused by an official member of our network. And then certainly when we say, “Are they a part of the Black Lives Matter movement?”—sure. It’s complicated in that way.

What does Dallas mean for the movement? I wondered out loud whether this would make it impossible for Black Lives Matter to continue.

I don’t think so. What I’m seeing and what I’m hearing is people actually rallying around Black Lives Matter at the same time that people are condemning the murders that happened in Dallas. At the same time that we can grieve the senseless loss of life of five police officers, we are also grieving the senseless loss of life that occurred at the hands of the police. Those things can coexist, and in my conversations with folks in our movement and supporters of our movement, people are more energized than ever because they see the ways in which Black Lives Matter, in this case in particular, was unfairly demonized and blamed for the murders of five officers and the injuring and wounding of six others. They see the ways in which that kind of rhetoric really serves a particular political agenda.

I think in general it is a battle that we are consistently having to fight. Standing up for the rights of black people as human beings and standing against police violence and police brutality makes you get characterized as being anti-police or it has you being characterized as cop killers, neither of which we are.

To me the commonality of Baton Rouge, Minnesota, and then Dallas in such quick succession is guns. Does Black Lives Matter have a position on that? Is that something that you all have thought about in the wake of those incidents?

When it comes to gun control, I think it’s too simplistic of a conversation. Both Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had guns on them, which is part of their Second Amendment right. It is a part of a culture that is largely protected by special-interest groups like the N.R.A., but the right to bear arms, it seems, only exists for white people. When black people have arms, legally, they can still also be killed at the hands of the police. That’s what we saw this past week.

At the same time, because it’s a question of police and vigilante violence is so prevalent at this particular moment in this country, it feels asinine to be calling for gun control when black people, in particular, are on the losing end of that conversation, so there’s that. But then there’s the reality that, in this country, we have more guns than people, and we put guns into the hands of more people than any other country on the planet, and so that dynamic needs to be shifted. I’ll be honest with you, I really struggle with the conversation around gun control.

It’s clear to me that this person who committed these acts was not well. And also was experiencing a level of emotional trauma, like the rest of this country, in particular like the rest of black people in this country, who watched two executions on television, so his stated motive was, “I’m really upset by what I’m seeing where police are killing black people.”

Let me push back from that. I think most people whom you have these conversations with are frustrated and saying that they want better policing. Most of the time that doesn’t go to people saying that they want to actually kill the police.

I don’t disagree, but the point that I’m trying to make is, I think it’s an error to look at the state of why this country is so violent and not understand the complexities that lie underneath the violence. The violence that was caused by that lone gunperson in Dallas was very complex. It wasn’t about him being an adherent to black-power ideologies, as the media tried to frame it. He may have been pro-black, but he was also probably a lot of other things, and similarly when we look at the underlying causes for police violence, it’s also not black-and-white. It’s not always only about racism, or it’s not always about “police just hate black people.”

Where does the movement go next in the wake of Dallas?

The deaths of these officers will absolutely create the conditions for increased security, surveillance, and monitoring of protesters. It will absolutely usher in additional post-9/11-like measures that allow the state to profile people based either on their political beliefs or on their political activities, and then, of course, I think we will also probably see a push for an expansion of the police state, rather than the reduction of one.

If we can anticipate that, then that means that it’s no longer acceptable to fight for reforms like body cameras, and certainly I think it means that we have to think bigger. The call that I heard from many, many activists and their supporters over the last few days has been, “We can’t just march and protest.” There has to be something bigger than that.

Does that mean that more visibility and recording interactions with the police won’t change anything?

Being able to watch the execution of a black person doesn’t further any kind of consequences for the murderer. In all of the cases of police violence in the last three years, 0.01 per cent of those officers have been convicted, so body cameras are not the solution. I think as we saw in Baton Rouge, there were body-camera mandates for those officers. Supposedly those cameras fell off during the struggle that didn’t happen, and of course the dash cam wasn’t working, so, again, it’s an interesting idea in the direction of transparency, but in its implementation, it’s deeply, deeply flawed.

There have to be consequences for police who take the law into their own hands. There has to be a shift in the use-of-force policies that are used in departments across the country. There has to be a readjustment of resources that is being diverted to police and policing as opposed to community health services, and there certainly has to be control over the police by the communities that they are supposed to protect and serve. Police can no longer police themselves, and so those are three very clear reforms that can get us closer to the end of a police state and closer to the beginning of a care state.