How the Liberal Class Hurts Black Americans

Young Black activists of today understand what Martin Luther King Jr. warned of decades ago

I was reminded this week of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s warning of the subtle but profound danger of White liberals and so-called "moderates” while listening to Nick Cruse of the fantastic Fred Hampton Leftists podcast (full episode below). Over a half century ago King expounded on what he called the polite racism of White liberals whose very “moderation” proved to be the real threat to Black liberation even more so than the explicitly racist right wing activist groups who wore their bigotry on their sleeves.

“A leading voice in the chorus of social transition belongs to the white liberal,” King wrote.

“Over the last few years many Negroes have felt that their most troublesome adversary was not the obvious bigot of the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch Society, but the white liberal who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers tranquility to equality.

“The white liberal must rid himself of the notion that there can be a tensionless transition from the old order of injustice to the new order of justice.”

Liberals who claim to love Black people but who preach patience and moderation and, when it comes down to it, fear tumult more than they do continued oppression and injustice were the truly pernicious threat to Black freedom. According to Nick of the Fred Hampton Leftists show, they still are.

We need look no further than this past year’s campaign to either or both abolish/defund American policing in the face of rampant police murder and brutality. Despite the movement to defund police having been popular among the Black people disproportionately negatively affected by police oppression this entire time, the liberal class and Democratic party has and does continue to distance itself from the efforts, indeed even consistently demonize them.

Despite that, the movement has picked up steam and increased its support among the general US population and many other significant demographics in addition to the majority of Black folk who always did. What Nick sees is a White liberal class uninterested in advancing life-saving policies that Black people advocate for despite feigning ally-ship.

“There is a lot of people on The Left it seems the only thing they care about is saving a little bit of money on healthcare. And as someone who is a strong advocate of police abolition and Defund the Police, at the very beginning of this movement, I saw how they approached this issue,” he said.

“So what is happening, there? That mean we have a White liberal class who is fighting against the interest of the Black community while propping up Black death and trying to politically capitalize on that. I recognize that as a giant problem - as big as a problem as a hardcore right-winger…those people are easy to beat. Those people actually help our movement because they are so dumb and they are so radicalized it’s easy to shift public perception against them. And that’s exactly what we did.

“Now we have a majority of independents that support it. Why’d that happen? Because they see all the…right wingers. They say ‘oh, these people are bootlickers, I don’t agree with them.’ So, they help us, the right wingers do. The liberal class hurts us. What do I mean by that?

“These are the people who have Black Lives Matter in their profile. They claim they’re allies. They share videos of our brothers and sisters dying because it helps them get a lot of likes and clicks. They use Black death, they use Black exploitation to give the illusion that they’re an ally. So then what do they do with that political capital that they just now received because the Black community believed they were allies?”

Instead of going to the mattresses to upend the systems responsible for the oppression of their Black neighbors that they claim to be opposed to, the White liberal class pays polite lip service to notions of equality while continuing to materially support the structures of Black oppression. “They do things like propose the George Floyd Act that gives more money to the police that kills and oppresses our community,” he continued.

“The Liberal class they hijack our movement, convince people they are on our side and then use that political capital to prop up the system that’s oppressing us.”