Black Lives Matter was soon co-opted by self-serving corporations and middle-class professionals. Credit: Getty
The heroes of Black History Month are the familiar leaders of the civil-rights movement: Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Ella Baker, and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr. Every February, we celebrate these men and women for championing the self-evident: racial segregation was immoral, integration a moral imperative. Law finally caught up with morality when the “separate but equal” doctrine was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education, forcing school integration.
Yet something seems off about these pieties in 2025. Against a backdrop of broad discontent with liberalism, including among black Americans increasingly drawn to Trumpism, it’s worth returning to a provocative set of questions posed by the black writer Harold Cruse in the wake of civil rights: what if separate but equal contained a good idea, a better idea than advocating for racial integration above all else? Shouldn’t black activism focus on building the capacity of black communities, rather than looking to open up opportunities for the black elite?
While Cruse is rarely remembered today, his name was often mentioned in the same breath as those of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X in the Sixties and Seventies. As a writer and professor (who achieved his position without a college degree), he was deeply influential in establishing the field of black studies. The Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. reports that as an undergraduate in the Seventies, he was assigned Cruse’s masterpiece, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, in three separate courses. Indeed, Gates said he “received the call to be an intellectual through Harold Cruse”.
Cruse was unlike the dissenters from the civil-rights consensus we have come to expect. He harboured few fantasies about bootstrapping self-improvement in the manner promoted by black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. Nor did he have patience for black radicals’ overheated rhetoric extolling a black separatist utopia. Rather, the problem with the civil-rights consensus for Cruse was that it advanced the interests of the black professional class over and against those of the black masses.
Middle-class professionals, black or white, push their particular material interests in the name of universal ideals. In the case of black professionals, Cruse thought, the earnestness — and thus the self-dealing — are doubly intensified. They serve at the leisure of the white middle class, which, in turn, serves those in the commanding heights of economy and society. As a result, there are very few public voices advancing the genuine interests of poor and working-class black people.
Whether or not a few more blacks are admitted to elite universities or the boardroom matters far less than ensuring that everyone has access to a safe place to live, sufficient food, playgrounds for children, and dignified work. Yet middle-class, integrationist black politics cashiered these communal goods in the bargain of more and better university placements and corporate jobs for themselves.
From Cruse’s perspective, the black middle class obfuscated the difference between morality and politics to advance its own interests. Just because policing the social boundary between the races is immoral doesn’t mean breaking down those boundaries ought to be the top political priority, as the mainstream civil-rights movement insisted. Rather, Cruse thought, the priority should be the needs of poor and working-class black people. This required strengthening local communities economically, politically, and culturally.
Cruse advocated for boycotts of businesses that were not based in his community, and he urged that businesses in his community shift to cooperative ownership. He argued for community-controlled initiatives to combat violence and drugs, with a leading role for cultural and religious organisations, not least the black church. He saw the development of community-owned media as an important complement to the new institutions of grassroots democracy he envisioned, like community planning boards.
The black history we ought to care about, Cruse argued, is the history of movements with broad popular support, even if they included regressive tendencies or eccentric personalities — and even if the black middle classes would turn up their noses at them. For Cruse, groups like the Nation of Islam, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, and the network of small businesses associated with Booker T. Washington reflected the interests of the black working class in a way that the NAACP and black elected officials never could. The black masses aren’t moved by get-rich-quick schemes, he showed, but by the promise of economic self-determination, especially when it is braided with political and cultural self-determination.
Yet throughout the Eighties, Nineties, and Aughts, black politics trended in the opposite direction from the one Cruse advocated. Multiculturalism reigned, and race politics was largely captured by the black professional-managerial class, including the public intellectuals who laundered that class’s narrow interests with pseudo-sophisticated affirmations of black identity and culture. The corporate ideal of “diversity” was used to legitimise existing power structures: you haven’t received a meaningful raise in a generation, but take solace, your CEO is now black. The minute policing of ordinary language substituted for material reforms.
Then came the Black Lives Matter movement. Launched as the reality of a black president, Barack Obama, grotesquely mismatched the continuing experience of racial violence, BLM broke with integration and multiculturalism, denouncing “respectability politics”. Behind that movement’s embrace of Blackness-with-a-capital-B was a radical shift in the political frame. Instead of relying on the state, communities needed to develop their capacity to care for themselves and to keep themselves safe. “Abolish the police” wasn’t a slogan meant to win elections. It was meant to fuel a long-dormant imagination about what investing in community and experimenting with new institutional forms at the local level could achieve.
In short, Cruse’s ideas were back. But just for a minute. The professional-managerial class embraced BLM in 2020. Amid the lockdowns, in between enjoying loaves of home-baked sourdough and their newfound science fetish, the professionals transformed insurgent political energy into bureaucracy and branding.
Instead of experimenting with innovative ways for local communities to address the problems they faced, corporations, governments, and, especially, universities hired multicultural managers who knew how to parrot the slogans of black justice movements without threatening the interests of their employers. Amazon led corporate America’s BLM advocacy — even as the mega-retailer terminated a black employee, Christian Smalls, who had sought to organise his fellow warehouse workers on Staten Island, with the company’s general counsel describing Smalls as “not smart or articulate” in an internal memo.
It isn’t hard to see why there would be growing scepticism among black voters of liberal leadership, even as black voters know all too well the continuing effects of racism. As for the alternative? Moral outrage at this or that affront to “our democracy” voiced by the chattering classes — norms created by and for the wealthy and white — rings hollow among the black masses.
What does this history tell us about our present moment? The multicultural model for managing racial diversity was attacked from the Left during the Obama presidency but temporarily resuscitated by the liberal capture of BLM energy. Now an enfeebled multiculturalism is being attacked from the Right, and its prognosis is grim. From the perspective of the black poor and working class, a dramatic shift in elite discourse creates severe vulnerability, but it also opens new opportunities to put forward a vision of justice that centres the black masses.
To create space for that new paradigm, we must be unsentimental about the old paradigm, even as we guard against the barely disguised racism that motivates many of its Right-wing critics. Here again, Cruse can be instructive. His imperative to imagine what community ownership in its richest sense could entail offers a guide for our tumultuous times. Imagine local black organising efforts that call out the oligarchy’s control of our food, our homes, and our entertainment as they grow community-owned grocery stores, apartment buildings, newspapers, and sports teams.
In fairness to the early integrationists, aspects of Cruse’s position are not so different from that of MLK. After the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, King offered an expansive but localised vision of the next steps needed for his city in a hostile national political environment. Black people, King thought, needed to start a credit union, support cultural organisations, do voter outreach, and develop adult education programmes.
At another parlous moment, just after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated with a promise to enact sweeping changes to the federal government and cuts to education programmes, Harold Cruse was asked for his reaction. “There are tough times ahead, and blacks are going to have to change”, Cruse predicted. And he offered advice: instead of focusing on the noise of national politics, as objectionable as they may be, blacks must work collectively to develop local organisations that will “take more responsibility for the community in which they live”.
Professional-class aspiration, corporate “diversity”, top-down multiculturalism — all have failed us. Black Americans cannot afford to fail ourselves.
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SubscribeThe problem with Ethnic Marxism besides the intentional divisiveness is that it’s destined to produce a Leninist type left-wing Vanguard detached from their representatives.
I have respect for the localism argument. I think that is correct. But if the community leaders are committed to “worker control over the means of production” you’re just introducing another divisive system.
If you don’t want to go full Thomas Sowell, fine but it wouldn’t hurt to allow some ideological diversity with input from black conservatives. Any functioning arrangement requires ideological diversity. The real reason Liberation Theologies like Woke fail are because they restrict thought and the variety of solutions available.
Post racialism is the one answer for each and every individual in the West. While Black culture* has produced America’s greatest art forms and has a valuable place in our overall culture that cannot be minimized (as with other American cultures), going forward, caring about how much or little melanin one has in their skin is a game we must stop playing in order for us all to win together.
*America can never recompense people for slavery as the debt is much to large and the victims no longer with us. We can just move forward and always remember the price they were forced to pay.
Except that moving forward shifts the onus onto the individual. It means no more whining about a history none of us can change; it means abandoning the convenient excuse of the race card every time something does not go a black person’s way. The latter point is important. When a white person does not get the job or promotion, encounters bad service, or has some other negative experience, you rarely hear the person say “it’s because I’m white.” The only thing that is institutional in this game, as you rightly call it, is race as the default response to every issue.
“While Black culture* has produced America’s greatest art forms”
i think a lot of people would bring that into question, name some.
because i think if you classed Literature, Paintings, Music , Architecture ,Film, it would not indicate that
Rap is frankly terrible, and at worse it’s Grandpa’s ‘music’ a form that fundamentally has not changed in 40 years
I loved Mototown, which i think was the last time ‘Black’ music was actually good, that’s older than me
Black music is incredibly non diverse, and i don’t mean the colour of the artist, Can you define say White music, no because it could be pop, rock, indie, folk, metal, classical ,pretty much anything, but ‘Black’ music has allowed itself to be constrained into pretty much Rap, R&B, i’m oversimplifying, but the point has an element of truth
I also think the implication is again the problem , your statement is basicaly “black people are good at Rap and Sport” isn’t that the problem, a community cannot substain itself on those 2 things.
You never hear Black people in reference to Science, Engineering, Inovation
So Music/Sport a lottery, i.e the majority of people who play Basketball will never have a career in Basketball, but Black kids esp males are being told these are your 2 choices, you if you succeed will get very rich, but honestly 99.999% of people will never achieve that
We see it in the UK, when they do outreach, community towards black kids, what do they do, put them in a recording studio, here make the next big Rap album, of course they don’t go hey that’s a silly pipedream, and here’s some books on Physics instead
Jazz!
Ahem. Did you mean to say “some great American art forms?” That might be a more defensible statement.
The civil rights movement did NOT fail. It succeeded to the point of becoming a racket that is bent on perpetuating the myths of old while refusing to accept victory. The good professor is part of the hustle. His scholarship is built around the woe-is-us victim mentality that pervades black society.
BLM was a con job, not a movement. It pushed the lie that cops actively target blacks, especially black men. By the numbers, blacks are about 20-25% of the civilians killed by law enforcement officers. That figure is higher than their proportion of the population, to be sure, but this is also the group that carries out more than half of the US’s homicides. Typically, the victims are also black.
The leading cause of death among young black men is not interactions with cops or accidents or even overdoses. It’s violence at the hands of other young black men. It is part of a self-inflicted cultural dysfunction that makes talk of the civil rights movement irrelevant.
Re BLM:
1) While about half of the blacks who became cause celebrities after being maimed or killed by police were innocent and certainly deserved to be raised as true victims, the other half were almost certainly engaged in illegal and mostly violent activities that put them at risk from legitimate police actions. Some were even ‘suicide by cop’ incidents.
2) Whites were also maimed and killed by police in similar circumstances, but have not become cause celebrities with major media outlets. Case in point: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/our-out-of-control-federal-law-enforcement-agencies/
3) “Typically, the victims are also black.” YES! This fact is, in the spirit of this essay, the greatest problem in American culture! Harold Cruse appears to have been aware of it, but how much did he really object to the perpetrators of ‘black-on-black’ crime? The media never, ever, conveyed the supposed BLM ‘ideal’ of “Instead of relying on the state, communities needed to develop their capacity to care for themselves and to keep themselves safe.” Was this a media failure, or was BLM never really of this position?
Indeed all the upper class blacks became closed minded Trump supporters.
There is no better example of the common capture of Black elites by liberal White interest groups than the case of vouchers. Low income Black families are shackled to poor schools while the NAACP works overtime to prevent their escape into better, local faith-based schools, and the possible formation of more church-based or locally-owned and operated neighborhood schools. The incentive system for ambitious young black Democrat politicians who start out understanding the importance of vouchers, gradually or rapidly impose a distance from that position. A prime example is Cory Booker but there are many others.
“Low income Black families are shackled to poor schools while the NAACP works overtime to prevent their escape…”
Yes. When the NAACP came out against charter schools, my first thought was that this organization should simply close its doors and turn out the lights.
you bemoam Black intellectuals and the fact that Civil rights served the elite Black Majority, but BLM was the epitome of this , definitely not intellectual in any form, but a small non representative group pushing ideas that where simply out of step with the majority of Black people in the US.
Defund the Police being the prime example, it never had any support within the Black community, it was damaging rhetoric towards black people in general
BLM was not only embarassing , but shameful and anyone like our current PM who supported it , submitted to it, are beyond reproach
What was the Legacy of BLM, Obama , all this Race politics, who did it help, like the nonsense of Reparations , not poor black communities, in fact it damaged them
The concept of only dealing with Black owned business further perpetuates division, it sends the message, if your a White, Asian, Hispanic , Native American sure shop at Walmart, but Walmart or whoever is not for you Black folk. You are not ‘real’ Americans, you are somewhat different.
It’s simple, the Race issue in America is pretty much solved, apart from people who profit by it’s continuation, it’s very easy to solve, hire people based on Merit, no Afirmitive Action, no lowering of standards, no Black history month (which is really condesending)
We see what Black Racist Identity poltiics give you, S Africa , a country where in the name of helping Black people, the quality of life for those people is now far lower than it was than under White rule
So true. What did BLM do to improve the lives of even one black person? All they did was get very rich and stir up trouble which took their black constituents out on the street robbing and looting local black-run businesses. Where their “defund the police” b/s come to reality the people most adversely affected were the back communities. The only way the black communities of normal, everyday people will improve their lives is if we all follow MLK and go back to ignoring their skin colour. Sadly, in the name of equality, we have had students in American universities demanding separate black libraries. When people gave their lives in the name of colour-blindness I despair of students like these.
Just where do you get your statistics, UNHerd Reader, that allows you to say “they All got very rich?” Poverty is still rife in Eastern NC and 70 percent of the impoverished are Black
The point being made was not that all the black people became wealthy, but that leaders of the BLM movement essentially stole millions of dollars largely donated by guilt stricken white liberals! This is well documented.
If you have very little to offer in society, do not think you need to work hard, you think that everything is stacked against you (against all the evidence), you contribute to the breakdown of families by not upholding your parental responsibilities, you think gangsters are chic etc, no you are unlikely to be able to earn a particularly good wage. The disastrous approach of affirmative action, and the modern incarnation at least of civil rights and diversity is a major cause of this, not a solution.
Many progressives actually really deep down believe that black people can’t do on their own and they need endless help to be able to compete in society, including the most extraordinary proposals to hand over a million dollars to poor black families, that presumably relatively poor white families have to fund! It is exactly this thinking that is actually patronizing and racist, as well as having proven very poor outcomes.
When I started to read this my first reaction was to look at the picture of the author, I found it interesting that why the civil rights movement failed came from a white person who study an influential book written by a black author 40 or 50 years ago. It would be like a male explaining what a pregnant woman goes thru from reading a book. People tend to focus more on the color than the fact they every one is a human being that wants basic things; a safe community, the ability to feed their families, good jobs, worship how they please and the feeling that their children will do better than them.
I’m certain that Vincent Lloyd is black, at least in the American context.
https://www09.homepage.villanova.edu/vincent.lloyd/
If that is true why do all the black activists insist on segregation and special privileges?
There’s no way to, “…[ensure] that everyone has access to a safe place to live, sufficient food, playgrounds for children, and dignified work,” without the community, itself, ensuring those things. When those goods are provided from outside the community, those within it draw no moral connection between the existence of the goods and the effort and discipline needed to obtain and preserve them. This disconnect has been why billions of dollars have been wasted in the US alone over the past fifty years trying to guarantee housing, food, schools, playgrounds, and workplaces in communities plagued by antisocial behavior that won’t allow these things to survive. In the UK, Theodore Dalrymple, a former prison doctor and psychiatrist, wrote quite incisively about the mindset that underwrites this phenomenon in an essay collection called Life at the Bottom. He shows that this isn’t a racial issue; the underclass he writes of in Life at the Bottom is composed of white Britons who, handed everything, value and preserve nothing.
This is probably one of the most important sentences written since Brown V. Board of Education. Energized by the chance of “utopia”, both well meaning and also opportunistic people of all races rushed toward a mirage and bypassed the chance to heal the nation. Instead they demanded everyone build, not real communities, but some mythical paradise… that was always just around the corner.
Black communities disintegrated, white communities fled to the suburbs, and those leading this charge got rich. We violated our own Constitution in a vain attempt to prove how “good” we were. Everybody lost. Is there a way back? This article may be a start.
Skin colour politics is the scourge of modern USA. Until we are all color blind it will always be the case.
Excellent! While I disagree that the Civil Rights movement failed, Its success was the fact that it raised the consciousness of all and allowed for dialogue, whether messy or violent. The problem and it always seems to be the same issue, is that some Blacks had to sell out their communities for fame or fortune. The Dems recognized this in the 1960’s and have used it effectively, up to now, to ensure the majority of blacks voted for the party. I have always wondered why the black civil rights icon of the 1960s became the very same people they detested and held responsible when they started their courageous journey. It is money, fame, ego, and power. Extremely hard to turn down..
Bullworth, a movie, starring Halle Berry and Warren Beatty was released in 1998, thirty years after the beginning of the great society. The subject is exactly what the author is eluding too. Senator Bullworth, a white senator, raps to an audience in a black church about how the Dems are shucking and jiving black people for their votes. They haven’t kept their promises and yet blacks still vote for them. He told them to wake up and it has taken another 27 years for them to do so.
There is a good case to be made that the “elite” blacks sold out for money, power, and fame, yet did absolutely nothing for their communities. They took the money and power and spread it around to their families, handlers, and friends. This is would be a great debate, I have a feeling it will happen in some form soon.
However, this is not a Black issue, it happens in every race and country. However, it is has had a negative impact on millions of Black families and those folks responsible should be held to account.
I had not heard of Harold Cruse, so thank you for the introduction and I am looking forward to reading his books.
I am optimistic that this cycle will be broken and as a nation, we can heal, educate, and work together for a better future than we have had these past 50 years.
Mr. Lloyd, thank you for this excellent essay. In the US, where TV shows, corporate branding, and awards ceremonies abound with Black people far beyond their actual demographics, test scores for Black students — a far more meaningful signifier — continue to decline. The term “virtue signaling” does not begin to describe the essential dishonesty. I look forward to reading more from you on this site.
what if separate but equal contained a good idea, a better idea than advocating for racial integration above all else?
I live in a town with a black community that after all these years is massively separated by economic status but I shudder at the thought of signs restricting access to restrooms and restaurants and buses returning At least all poor people can share adjacent stalls in Bojangles bathrooms.
Black Americans could always try to emulate the attitudes and behaviours which make successful White, and Asian, and Hispanic, and Black communities successful. Like taking responsibility for themselves, their children, their health, their jobs, their education, their futures. Or is that ‘acting white’?
Ho-Hum…Another black writer that doesn’t understand that we are in the same squeeze relative to the elites and managerial classes.
He says for example,”As a result, there are very few public voices advancing the genuine interests of poor and working-class black people.”
Well, I have some news for him. There are few public voices advancing the interests of poor and working class white people either. As seems typical for a black man, he imagines that everything is about being black when a wider view would show that the rest of the entire working and poor classes are in the same boat.
The black vs white narrative is what the elites use to keep the rest of the people in the US from realizing that we all have the same problem and it isn’t race it is class. Of course in the UK that has always been recognized.
But in the UK it is busy being unrecognised and has been since Anthony Blair captured the Labour Party.
Concepts like Black History Month, Black Lives Matter, etc. are racist in concept, focus and execution. Same as Klu Klux Klan
Pie-in-the-sky.
Americans, regardless of skin color, are not going to support socialist-style policies. And I think we would find that such policies wouldn’t help, simply because the intended beneficiaries would start to scam the system. It’s the American way.
Also, our Glorious Leaders would quickly legislate loop-holes to enrich their preferred constituents.
We’re in the middle of a serious crisis of governance. Dreamy wish lists aren’t really helpful.
If the possibly originally idealistic but eventually corrupt (and even more self-serving!) BLM movement is the solution, then God help the black community!
And the same tired old insistence that an all encompassing, poorly defined “racism” is the the main problem. Am I “racist” because I’m wary of groups of black youth when I’ve been attacked twice in the past by such groups? The unlikelihood that amoral (not immoral!) capitalism cares very much about the colour of the skin of workers or consumers. And in so far as there is prejudice as there is between all different groups of people not least by black people themselves, we cannot force one group of people to love another.
No, it is post-racial, colour blind politics that are more likely to be the solution. This indeed this involves some of the entrepreneurial and self-help that the author advocates, but certainly not a constant proper promulgation of victim culture
An interesting essay. My first feeling about the blm discourse is that he was polishing a t**d.
That said, I’m sure a few who supported blm had good intentions. Ever if all they achieved was bad.
Course I guess we can thank blm for the trump election ….
As a Canadian a lot think that was bad but supported blm. The irony is funny. The women keep on delivering.
Should say “the woken”.
Inasmuch as the civil rights movement failed, it did so in large part because they forgot what Dr Martin Luther King urged in his “I have a dream” speech:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
‘Defund the police’, de-criminalisation of petty crime, cashless bail, gender and identity politics etc etc are all policies designed to divide the opposition to an increasingly rapacious liberal ruling class: ‘You guys fight amongst yourselves while we get rich at your expense’ is the message.
Wealthy blacks profit from this no less than wealthy whites. More so, in fact. That’s why they are so keen to gaslight their brothers and sisters. It gives us the absurd spectacle of $30 million dollar pa black media personalities pleading victimisation. It’s the same in the UK. Politics is always about class in the end.
The best way of enabling people to be free is to provide and education, technical and social skills training and fitness so they can enter well paid work and eventually set up their own businesses.
The Industrial Revolution was created by people had the freeedom to invent. Perhaps the best examples are James Brindley who when he invented canals reduced the price of coal by 75% which ,meant it went from a luxury purchase to one which enabled the poor to keep warm and George Stephenson who invented railways which greatly reduced the costs of basic goods. Cheap transportation of of low value bulky goods such as coal, iron ore, cement, sand , gravel, cereals , wool, cotton, low value manufactured goods such as pottery and metal pans provided jobs and reduced the costs of basic necessities.
Today, inner city schools providing the maths and science education which enabled people to enter the top 10 university departments for engineering, maths, bio-medical sciences and medicine would be the best way of creating upward social mobility. Or very high level training in trades such that people can be employed in building data centres and other advanced centres of technology.
It is also good idea to teach fitness and social skills such as how to make polite concersation, table manners, a knowledge of cuisine and wine, what to wear, a knowledge of classical literature music, theatre , etc.
The aim is to produce skilled, adventurous, athletic, charming people who are at ease in all companies, whether a construction site, boardroom or a ball.
A person who has these qualities has a far greater freedom to decide on the course of their life.
What’s always so curious about these debates about the state of black America is the fact that they seem to offer so few actual suggestions. What does he say here?
“Black people, King thought, needed to start a credit union, support cultural organisations, do voter outreach, and develop adult education programmes.”
OK… so why don’t they? The answer is not: because they focus too much on national politics. What the answer actually is, is a highly controversial and difficult topic that even gadflies like this author do not want to discuss.
“Yet middle-class, integrationist black politics cashiered these communal goods in the bargain of more and better university placements and corporate jobs for themselves.”
I would say this a common feature of the bourgeoisie no matter what race, creed or colour it happens to be.
Another example of this would be the culture war dimension to the UK’s 2016 EU referendum, which possessed the feature that the middle classes predominently supported Remain while the working classes supported Leave. And the middle classes were acting on clear-eyed self-interest because EU membership was indeed a good deal for the various parts of the professional, managerial, political and media classes.
The problem was that continued EU membership also demanded a compromise in which the democratic rights of British voters were to be gradually traded away for the advantages of continued EU integration – a bargain that most other voters could see was a terrible deal for themselves, they rightly said no to it, and then had to put up with several years of being told they were stupid for refusing to vote in other people’s interests.
And in general, the growth of the bureaucratic state in most western nations in modern times is to an extent based on a process in which social problems are identified, governments start trying to solve them, and in doing so creating bureaucracies that come to possess the odd characteristic that it is not in their survival interests to actually solve the problem they were originally set up to solve. This is pretty much always a bunch of middle class people earning salaries and pensions from budgets that were originally intended to improve the lives of the neediest people in society. I’m not saying this is always bad or that they are corrupt or anything like that, just observing that it seems to be an intrinsic feature of how politics seems to work.