Stephen A. Crockett Jr. (photo, left; profile here) is an opinion writer for Huffington Post.
He didn’t originate the argument below; I’ve seen conservatives use it to attack Black Lives Matter. (I’m not familiar with Crockett’s work, and don’t know what his political orientation is.)
I’ve also seen it picked up by rightwing-biased media outlets like the Daily Mail, a U.K.-based yellow-journalism tabloid.
You can read Crockett’s essay here. It’s titled, “The Business of Black Death and a $6 Million Mansion.”
He starts out by calling Ferguson, Missouri, a “barometer of black life.” Then he segues into Michael Brown’s fatal encounter with police officer Darren Wilson, stripped bare of material facts, and says “the next night, Ferguson was on fire.” Then he jumps to Darren Seals, “a former Ferguson activist,” who Crockett says “used to make sense of the financial windfall and the galvanization of Black faces that converged on his city shortly after Brown’s death.”
Then Crockett says, “Seals would argue that Black Lives Matter as an organization was nothing more than a money grab with a catchy hashtag used to seize the moment and capitalize on Black pain,” then says “Black Lives Matter organization was not the sacred cow that it appeared to be,” then jumps to “the hashtag’s founding in 2013 by three Black women — Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi,” who’ve been prominently featured in rightwing media as financial exploiters of the “Black Lives Matter” name.
Which they are. See, e.g., story here.
But Crockett is as dishonest and exploitive as they are, except he’s in it for journalistic or political points, not money.
Let’s start with Ferguson, and what that “barometer of black life” was. At the time of Michael Brown’s death, Ferguson was a majority-black city run by a cabal of white thieves posing as a municipal government. Simply put, its city government was an extortion racket. Its “business” was fining black residents at every opportunity, and deploying an all-white police force to write tickets for Living In Ferguson While Black.
I wrote extensively about Ferguson’s appalling and thoroughly racist corruption on this blog after Brown became another victim (he was stopped by Wilson for walking in the street); see, e.g., the article I posted here, and you can find more of my comments about Ferguson and its corrupt city officials by typing “Ferguson” in the search function at the top of this page.
Crockett’s failure to mention Ferguson’s in-a-class-of-its-own corruption and black exploitation isn’t just a material omission, it renders his “barometer of black life” comment into a coverup.
But that’s only the beginning of his material omissions. He makes a far worse misrepresentation than that one.
He’s conflating three crooks calling themselves a Black Lives Matter organization, and using the Black Lives Matter hashtag to line their own pockets, with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Those three sticky-fingered women are not Black Lives Matter, and Crockett is flat-ass lying when he represents they are.
The Black Lives Matter movement is international in scope, active in many countries, and involves millions of people. The real Black Lives Matter isn’t an organization at all, and doesn’t have leaders; it’s an idea. And it’s guilty of none of the things that Crockett insinuates it is by citing Seals and holding up Cullors, Garza, and Tometi as representative of the people who protest unjustified police killings of black people.
I consider Huffington Post a reputable source, but I’m done with Crockett. This one essay has soured me on him for good. It’s a vicious smear of a peaceful (see article here) social movement with the legitimate goal of ending police murders of black people, and it’s of a piece with the right’s vicious smear campaign against BLM (see article about that here).
I can’t forgive him for that, no matter who he writes for.