A serious red flag (KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
After more than two years of disruption, American schoolchildren are finally returning to something approaching normal education — in-person, and without masks or social distancing or other “non-pharmaceutical interventions”. But many of these children are returning transformed. Last week, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed catastrophic learning loss among America’s nine-year-olds, with the worst declines among minority students.
I thought of these children when a friend from Massachusetts complained to me about the Black Lives Matter flag flying outside her son’s school. These flags have become a common sight outside American classrooms since the summer of 2020, and my friend isn’t the only one who’s concerned. The Diocese of Worcester recently ordered a local school to stop identifying itself as Catholic over its refusal to remove BLM and Pride flags, and similar controversies have erupted in Utah and Tennessee.
My friend’s complaint was that BLM is corrupt, which it almost certainly is. Reporting from earlier this year showed that the group’s founder had been spending BLM funds on lavish real estate purchases and payouts to family members. Only last week, Shalomyah Bowers, the leader of the BLM Global Network Foundation, was accused of stealing more than $10 million for personal use.
But complaints over the organisation’s corruption miss the point. Even if BLM were a paragon of transparency, its flag should never have been flown outside an American school — for the simple reason that its core principles are antithetical to a sound education. In other words, it is not a flawed organisation with noble ideals; it is a flawed organisation whose ideals are, at best, misguided and, at worst, actively destructive, with the most disastrous results for black children.
Take BLM’s views on the family. In the guiding principles of its school programme, BLM states that it is “committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement”. That may seem like an innocuous principle, one that is unremarkable in progressive circles. But in the real world, it is hard to think of a worse idea to teach black kids. As the academics W. Bradford Wilcox and Hal Boyd have noted, the percentage of children in two-parent families in a given community is the “strongest and most robust predictor of economic mobility”. This holds for children of all races, but particularly for minorities. And yet BLM’s manifesto calls for the creation of “black villages” that “collectively care for one another” — even though black boys do much better when their fathers are around.
Even more dangerous to children are BLM’s ideas about a “national defunding of the police”. What does defunding the police mean in practice? The short answer is: more black death. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, various cities experimented with defunding and otherwise handicapping their police forces, only to find their streets filled with blood. In Oakland, the city planned to slash its police budget in half, until murders nearly doubled from 2019 to 2021 — an extreme version of a pattern that has played out across the United States. Indeed, homicides and shootings spiked across the country in the aftermath of the Floyd riots, driven in part by police demoralisation and in part by “decarceration” policies such as bail reform advocated for by BLM.
Focusing solely on curbing the police also takes much-needed attention away from the suffering inflicted on black children and their families in predominantly black areas where violent crime is rife. Why do we hear so much from BLM and so little from, for example, the organisation Voices of Black Mothers United (VBMU)? VBMU’s website states: “While a black death at the hands of police is the subject of national outrage, the numerous black deaths that occur every day in our communities are ignored. The victims are often children, and their mothers are seldom given a platform to voice their opinions.” And as its Director, Sylvia Bennett-Stone, who lost her own daughter to gun violence in 2004, has said: “It would be devastating to any community to defund or weaken the police force.”
If police presence in black communities is necessary to stop such horrific violence, then why do BLM want to reduce it? The undeniable fact is that black lives matter and police save black lives. And black people seem to agree: while distrust for the police in the black community is high, many black people are staunchly against defunding and are deeply concerned about crime on their streets. In Floyd’s home city of Minneapolis, three-quarters of black residents believe the city shouldn’t reduce its police force.
Add to this the psychological effect of BLM’s catastrophism and it beggars belief that schools think it suitable to fly its flag above their buildings. When young black Americans are told that their country is irredeemably racist, with bigotry baked into its very DNA, then what hope can they possibly have? Never mind the great strides of progress made by black Americans over the past two centuries or so; all of that is a lie, and we are doomed to be subjugated forever — unless you embrace their radical ideology.
Will this really help black children? Or will it teach them nihilism and despondency, and thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy where black people don’t succeed because there’s no point in even trying?
The BLM movement, then, does not represent justice for black Americans; it will not lead to a future of racial harmony. It is the enemy of black prosperity and education. America’s teachers shouldn’t be flying its symbol — they should be using it to illustrate the dangers of divisive racialism. The BLM flag is a red flag: it should be a warning, not an inspiration.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an UnHerd columnist. She is also a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. Her new book is Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights.
Ayaan 
This is a very good article, except that it fails to make the point that Black Lives Matter is a racist hate group which should be treated like the KKK.
The KKKlan with a Tan is what I call BLM.
The difference is that the BLM actually believes its own b/s. The KKK these days, like Trump, are adept at PR-speak to cover up their uglkiness, which even teh KK is ashamed of. But eth BLM are proud of their woke nonsense.
No one can write that in an article without the risk of being cancelled. We need voices like Ayaan’s. I am grateful for her erudite forbearance.
Total clarity, as always, thank you. And highlighting a clear risk. Most radical political movements are destructively neuropathic, as Freud observed, and deserve our effective opposition. My part-Jamaican daughter and her naturalised African American mother would share your views in totality, as do I. My spectacularly wonderful daughter has moved from leftist-influenced opponent of the ‘American Dream’ in her first US liberal arts degree, to a politically conservative about-to-graduate lawyer with a deep interest in politics, an extremely gratifying sign of growth and maturity.
Coherent and accurate as always from this writer.
The adoption of all-things BLM by the blob and media was at best idiotically naive – or worse deeply insidious.
It also gave the failed Remainers a new tool with which to hate the U.K. (and its population).
Do mean the UK or England? Brexit has strengthened English nationalism, at the union’s expense
I guess I’m referring to the way some people view the English. It’s worth differentiating however between “nationalism” and “patriotism” though – and many choose not to see the difference.
To assert that Remainers hate the UK is plain daft. In your own way, you’re at risk of becoming as self-righteous as any wokester.
Fair comment – it’s only a limited subset of Remainers that seem to persist in badmouthing the country
BLM seems to be a conspiracy to ensure that black people maintain their victimhood culture.
A bit like the Labour Party seeking to ensure that the working class remain poor.
It’s in tune with the times. All identity politics – from MeToo through BLM to Brexit – all of them thrive on a sense of being wringed and finding scapegoats, whether such hate figures are men, whites or the EU / Remainers, the mindset is similar.
BLM states that it is “committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement”.
That good old norm bashing on the modern left is tiring.
Firstly, is it not already the case in many Black Communities: absence of family structure? If would appear that not the absence of the norm but the absence of fulfilling that norm is the real issue (causes for this lie both within the domain of individual responsibility as well as that of society. Which is something both liberals and conservaties recognized before being equally infected with neoliberal thoughts, lets call it what it is: relentless selfishness)
Secondly, BLM seem to think that black people are somehow outside of Western thought. Magically, 300 years on North American continent has had no impact on their thinking and how they live in the world. This derives from their their skin colour, which through almost divine power excludes them from their surrounding, which is now an enemy rather than something to reconcile with. This kind of thinking shows the cynical intellectual relationship between the KKK and BLM (imo)
“This kind of thinking shows the cynical intellectual relationship between the KKK and BLM (imo)”
imo too. Hence my earlier comment that we should treat both these violent racist hate groups the same.
I cannot recommend ‘Bannon’s War Room’ enough to see how the Parents movement is taking over the school boards in huge waves through Mother’s finally seeing what horrors were being taught to their children after they got to actually see the school curriculum themselves by school lockdown and home classes on line.
Search the streaming service Rumble – the service, free, which will not be censored. Really – search Rumble – do ‘recent’ and ‘Long’ to get the full shows, of just see the clips. The Mothers of USA are taking back the Country.
In Virginia the amazing sweeping to power of Govoner Youngkin was on this – mobilizing mothers to take back their schools and get elected to the school boards who were twisting the children with their sick curriculum. Desantis of Florida is charging forward with this cause of Parents taking back the schools by running in all the board positions – and sweeping the state.This is snowballing and is changing the Nation.
The Mothers in USA have Mobilized, and they are going to take back the education! It is like watching a Revolution happening.
Search terms? Mothers in USA?
Frank Zappa
The clowns taking over school boards border on inbred nitwits who believe Critical Race Theory is being taught in K-12.
It is not.
Very true, not theory but practical application of the theory.
BLM – Black Lives Monetised?
Having recently been critical of Unherd, i must in fairness congratulate it for the occasional well-argued and refreshingly intelligent piece such as this one.
It strikes me that Ayaan is incapable of committing ‘words to paper’ without soundly demolishing some shibboleth or other. In taking aim at BLM as an organisation, she’s not the first to do so but this is the first piece i’ve read which so clearly exposes how BLM is having precisely the opposite effect on the life chances of black people than intended.
How long will the BLM flag continue to be flown on school gates, i wonder? When these flags become bedraggled through weathering, will they be replaced, or will the perception of BLM have changed?
BLM is not “an organization”.
The term is used by multiple groups, cannot be trademarked and cannot be controlled or owned by one group of people.
The author is shockingly dishonest in selecting one group and painting the entire Black Lives Matter concept to that group.
That’s the same as saying all people who voted for Trump are morons and traitors because Trump is a moron and a traitor.
“Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc. is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.”
— https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/
Thank you – a good piece.
Chicago homicide figures for 2021. (Chicago has about a third of the population of London)
Homicides – 798
Black victims – 684
Killed by police – 9
(Courtesy http://www.heyjackass.com)
Homicides in London 2021: 13
Bravo Ayaan Hirsi Ali ! A needed corrective to BLM worship.
The original BLM Manifesto stated they wanted to drive the State of Israel into the sea.Then when they started looking for funding they decided that publicly talking about destroying Israel might be a handicap not least with getting money off the big media corporations.
The reason we’re not allowed to say all lives matter is that they think black lives matter more than others. The left believes that victimhood conveys moral superiority. From this it follows that blacks as victims are better than others. Hence BLM, not ALM.
To display a BLM flag is to declare war against Western man. The cuckoos are well and truly in the nest.
The Western media fanned the flames in the wake of the death of fentanyl abuser and career criminal St George Floyd. As far as I am concerned CNN, Sky, and their like are just as bad as the swindling crackpots at the helm of BLM.
BLM gain hugely from black’s being fatherless. A sad but probably true joke about the BLM race riots of 2020 was that everything was stolen except Father’s Day cards and condoms. Marxists see no need for either of these things.
The Heritage Site | Adam McDermont | Substack
All so true and serious.
A voice of reasoned, fair sanity. I will research the VBMU and lend support.
Curiously not many black faces in the photograph.
Is it really curious? There are not that many faces in the photograph, so if even one was black it might not be representative of that society as a whole.
In the UK we have become used to seeing a disproportionate number of non-white faces in quasi-official photographs. I went to the alumni website of my old college the other day, and one photo had no caucasian faces at all ! (They must have worked really hard to put together such a non-representative ‘woke’ tableau.)
BLM, CRT and their adherents are not out for equality or even equity.
They are out for revenge, and they are willing to sacrifice the futures of their own children to achieve it.
The same children that attend the BLM flag-waving schools that are run by idiots. Idiots who are slaves to short-termism and just want to appear ‘virtuous’ on Twitter for the next month or so.
If these people could recognise their own fatuousness and failure to think an idea through to its conclusion, and realise that total racial segregation is the only logical end-point to their poison, they would at least be partially useful.
As it is, they should never be allowed within one mile of any child. MLK had the best and only way forward.
BLM is a criminal organization: violent, psychotic, and lawless. They are truly nasty, racist people incapable of contributing to the ascent of man.!
BLM staged HUNDREDS of riots which resulted in dozens of deaths and hundreds of millions in property destruction.
It is therefore a TERRORIST group.
Gosh, even professional footballers saw through #BLM and stopped supporting them.
If professional footballers can work out what’s happening, it must be pretty obvious.
Anti-White thugs such as BLM and Antifa attack White people that peacefully protest against the genocidal policy of mass third-world immigration and FORCED assimilation being pushed in EVERY White country and ONLY White countries. If anti-White ideas are so good, why do they require street violence to make sure nobody will object? It’s obvious that these thugs really only want White Genocide.
A death by police is oppression but no activist cares about black on black deaths. It’s not politically relavant. To white liberals. Who besides a mother cares about some black n…. Not the liberal elite
The foul Floyd wasn’t murdered. He died, mostly by his own hand.
‘10. Black Families
We are committed to making our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children’
I’m not stopping them.
Have they considered becoming Mormons?
This is an interesting article, but misses an obvious point. The term Black Lives Matter does not belong only to the organization the author complains about.
The term cannot be trademarked, is used by multiple organizations and people and hence, her carping regarding the so called positions and alleged corruption of one organization is irrelevant to the concept of BLM.
The issue is very simple.
Do Black Lives Matter?
The rest of her article is nonsense.
Of course black lives matter.
I’m disappointed that Ms. Hirsi Ali conflates the slogan and philosophy of Black Lives Matter with specific organizations that use (and perhaps have co-opted) the name. The BLM flag does not belong to any one organization, just as the rainbow flag doesn’t belong to one organization.
I’m grateful she provided a link to the web page that discussed disrupting the norm of the nuclear family structure requirement, because she seems to be reading something differently into it that what I suspect was the authors’ intent. It sounded to me like a call for community to support families, not calling for the literal abolition of the family, although like the author, I would have liked to have seen fathers explicitly mentioned rather than just “mothers” and “parents.” This is the excerpt:
10. Black Families
We are committed to making our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We are committed to dismantling the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” that require them to mother in private even as they participate in justice work.
11. Black Villages
We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, and especially “our” children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable.
Finally, as with other movements for change, I don’t see BLM as cultivating a fatalistic worldview among Black youth (although it isn’t really my lane as a White man to argue this, since Black Americans are well suited to speak for themselves). By definition, a movement for change is based on a belief that things in fact can get better. Yes, there is racism, both structural and interpersonal, and the broad BLM movement is addressing it. That includes addressing “privilege,” and please note that the statement of values also encourages Black Americans to analyze their own privilege, so we White Americans need not get ourselves tied up in a knot over that:
5. Globalism
We see ourselves as part of the global Black family and we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black folk who exist in different parts of the world.
Like the author, I don’t believe “defunding the police” is necessarily the answer either, but I hope my fellow White Americans who are reading the article can maintain an open mind about the goals of the BLM movement and not write it off completely.
I find it interesting that my carefully thought out answer (and anyone pointing out that BLM is not an actual organization) gets downvoted in a big way without so much as a thoughtful rebuttal, yet two-second potshots comparing BLM to the KKK get upvoted all the way to the top. Some of the comments here with which I disagree seem at least to be thought out, but others indicate many British conservatives aren’t any more open to thoughtful dialogue than American conservatives and the UnHerd readership not much different from the OAN readership in the U.S. It is disappointing because I very much respect UnHerd as a publication and thought the comment section would be less shrill than its American counterparts. As a moderate who seeks to understand both sides, I find that disappointing.
The problem with your comments is that people understood them.
Hence the downvotes.
Patrick, welcome to the tribal mentality of Unherd readers. Your points are very reasonable and stem from fair assumptions.
Upvotes and downvotes on this forum are merely a barometer for whether people share your views, not any measure of whether your argument is strong or weak. Indeed, sometimes good arguments are the most downvoted because they touch nerves and lazy unthinking people react emotionally without having the respect of the argument they disagree with to even bother countering it.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of small minded people here for whom Unherd is a “safe space” to vent views that are not permitted elsewhere. And, many of these people attempt to keep it that way by bullying people like yourself with barrages of downvotes for views that dare to be “main stream” (as they see it).
I hope you’ll continue to make a contribution despite this. I for one appreciate different perspectives, as I have of yours on this occasion (though, I do disagree with a few of your central premises – if I find time this week I will explain why).
Sadly, Unherd provides less and less of this in the comment section now, and I think it’s because the bullies with the downvotes leave so many people feeling unwelcome.
‘Yes, there is racism, both structural and interpersonal, and the broad BLM movement is addressing it.’
No it isn’t
Name one city where BLM has improved the daily lives of black people.
For example, how has Chokwe Antar Lumumba improved the lives of people in Jackson, Mississippi? Oh I forgot, it was white racists who stole the drinking water……
From the perspectives of two of the founders, Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza who both happen to be lesbians, one or possibly both with trans male partners ( technically also lesbian(s) – (the third founder, Opal Tometi too?), I’,m pretty sure that “dismantling the patriarchy and the nuclear family are very much their aims.
I’ve seen a video clip where she prefaces her poisonous spittle with “speaking as a trained Marxist…”
However, I’m pretty sure that although these aims appeared in an earlier version of their website, I think they received so much flack from the black community they removed the anti patriarchy / dismantle the nuclear family portions.
I can’t be bothered to check, but this was the case a year or two ago.