Black Lives Matter: Pandering Applause

         The fallout from Philadelphia’s June riots has worked to radicalize the city’s cultural and arts communities. 

    Shortly after the rioting, museums, art galleries, theater companies and historical societies sent out statements in support of Black Lives Matter. These messages of support grew exponentially until the tsunami had every arts and community organization joining the chorus of praise and adulation.

    

    The rallying around BLM was no surprise for those familiar with the city’s arts and culture scene. Many city theater companies have been staging plays with leftist themes for a number of years. Some of these theaters have also become community centers where the promulgation of all things Left occurs in workshops, book clubs, discussion groups as well as the marketing of mass e-mailings that seek to instruct the unwoke.

    The leftist imprint is so entrenched in city’s theater community it’s not unusual to hear an artistic director introduce a new play with a reminder to the audience that the land on which the theater sits was once Native American ground. After this might come a moment of silence or a formal ‘thank you’ to the particular tribe in question. As a lifetime lover of Native culture, announcements like this strike me as pretentious pandering. What these artistic directors often forget is that the so called stolen land in question was also stolen by a number of warring tribes going back hundreds of years. Natives stole from Natives just as colonists stole from Natives. 

  

   The support for BLM that erupted after the riots even affected public relations agencies, massage businesses and small neighborhood associations that usually avoid ideological alliances.  

   The body massage outfit in question sent out an email mass mailing labeled, “I stand with BLM” while urging its sore muscles plagued customers to donate to the Philadelphia Chapter of Black Lives Matter

  

     Philly Arts for Black Lives, an organization formed after the riots, was organized primarily to support defunding of the police. In its policy statement Philly Arts for Black Lives makes the demand that “all arts and cultural organizations in Philadelphia sever known ties with the police.” Many of the theatre companies I know (and like) signed on as supporters. It occurred to me as I read though the list of supporting theatres that the riots helped mainstream the ongoing American Cultural Revolution. A friend of mine who grew up in Hong Kong and who remembers the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution there told me that what is happening in the United States today happened in his homeland decades ago.

     The Marxist Revolution in China included attacks on free speech, freedom of expression in books and film, and in some instances the demolition of statues.  In China presently there is no free speech when it comes to political issues.  Ordinary citizens cannot speak out but must text their thoughts and feelings privately to friends and others. The Marxist censorship overlords have apparently decided to overlook the world of text messaging. My Hong Kong friend insists that the United States is headed down the same path. “It’s déjà vu all over again,” he says.    

  

   InterAct Theatre Company, which bills itself as a theatre for today’s world, stated in its BLM support statement: “What is the power of new plays at this moment? What can a theatre do?” Well, it can do what The Philadelphia Artists’ Collective (PAC) is doing: come out swinging by providing website categories like “Find a protest” (making it easy to grab your sign and run to the location in question) or join a Pandemic Reading club that includes a section entitled, “For White People, Educate Yourself,” that features Ibram X. Kendi’s book, “How to be an Anti-Racist.” Because, of course, given the situation and your privilege, you can’t be anything but. You’re a racist even if you think you’re not a racist.  

    The award winning Wilma Theater, once known as the zeitgeist of the avant garde, stated its solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

    “The Wilma Theater stands in solidarity with those who have lost loved ones to racial violence and with those seeking a freer society through protest, outrage and art.” The Wilma set up a fundraiser for Black Lives Matter, a virtual showcasing of “Kill More Paradise” by James Ijames that one critic said puts “a buzz saw through the contemporary myth that all lives matter.”

     Racism matters and black lives matter but what needs to be examined is the Black Lives Matter movement, which has become much more than just a fight for racial equality. When you capitalize black lives matter you are tapping into a Marxist agenda and a platform of beliefs that go way beyond the fight for racial equality.  

   This is why President Trump made a mistake when he came out and called Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization but then refused to say anything more about it. He never answered the question why he thought Black Lives Matter was a terrorist organization.  He did not elaborate, but if he had bothered to explain we would have heard that Black Lives Matter goes beyond racial equality (a necessary goal in any society) to include issues that used to be promulgated by the Gay Liberation Front in 1970.

       GLF’s radical agenda in 1970 went beyond the issue of equality for homosexuals. While GLF did not promote defunding the police, BLM supports defunding the police. BLM also supports free abortions for minors, the end of so called cisgender privilege, heteronormative thinking, and the destruction of the nuclear family. BLM is also committed to overthrowing US imperialism and capitalism.

     GLF in 1970 issued statements against the nuclear family and even against monogamy for gay couples. Monogamy, GLF insisted then, was simply an aping of the heterosexual establishment’s system of viewing spouses in capitalist ownership terms, as if a spouse was commercial property. Gay people, GLF said, had to find a new way to love. Nobody owns your body; a lover has no right to demand that you be faithful. Your body is yours, nobody owns it.  

   GLF was committed to overturning US imperialism and capitalism. BLM in 2020 is also committed to overthrowing the United States government as we know it. 

    Just as GLF was only partially about equality for homosexuals, BLM is only partially about race equality.

     I wonder how many of the white millennial heterosexual couples that put BLM posters in their townhouse windows are aware that BLM doctrine basically disapproves of their heteronormative nuclear family affiliation.   

  

   The highly politicized Zuka Theatre issued a statement after the riots—“there’s “much work to do to counter the racism that pervades so many cultural institutions.” On the surface, this appears as a not so radical statement but a common sense sentiment many people would not disagree with.   

   The award winning Arden Theatre Company near South Street let it be known that “racism kills…it is insidious, blinding us to our own biases,” and promised to “listen more.”  Bravo! But curiously enough, the Arden stopped short of endorsing Black Lives Matter as an organization, almost as if to say that it is possible to care about black lives without endorsing the organization that promotes all of the issues listed above.

 

   1812 Productions, a company famous for comedy and its annual hilarious political satire, This Is The Week That Is, also used the term Black Lives Matter but in a generic sense. 1812 Productions co-founder Jennifer Childs, wrote “I believe, as everyone does at 1812, that Black Lives Matter.”

    Black lives do matter: just don’t put that truth in all caps and turn it into a Marxist polemic. 

    The Philadelphia Museum of Art, from its lofty and apolitical-leaning throne on the Parkway, issued a statement entitled “Black Lives Matter” without mentioning the organization per se but still capitalizing the words in a design of ingenious ambiguity. “We stand with all Philadelphians,” PMA’s statement read, “demanding an end to systematic racism in all areas of society.” 

  The statement continued: “We have also paused to reflect on the role of museums—and our role specifically—in historically silencing Black voices. We do know we have work to do.”  The PMA statement did not contain a link to BLM-Philadelphia, and there’s no suggested reading lists for unwoke “idiots.” 

   The Irish Heritage Theatre, the only producers of Irish and Irish American plays in the city, went full throttle in its embrace of BLM. “We resolutely stand by Black Lives Matter and its mission for racial justice and equality,” the statement read, conveniently overlooking or forgetting the other parts of BLM’s mission. I’m thinking of all those heteronormative Irish actors who plan on having nuclear families.    

    The Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University also threw its hat into the ring by declaring itself an ally of the BLM movement, as did Historic Germantown. No surprise here. Organizations connected to Academe rarely go out on a limb and think independently. And yet the Independence Seaport Museum avoided ceding to the movement when it said in its statement that “Black lives matter.”

    Black lives do matter, but not the organization with the same name. God bless the Independence Seaport Museum!

    Small neighborhood associations like the Northern Liberties Neighborhood Association and the Olde Richmond Community Association in the city’s Riverwards neighborhoods sent out statements of support, not wanting to be left behind in a Rapture that might possibly accuse them of indifference to racism somewhere down the line.

      The biggest disappointment for me in reading these statements of support was not finding any reference to the days or violence that wrecked Center City and many neighborhood businesses. For the most part the statements avoided any reference to looting, broken glass, blown up ATMs and partially burned buildings.

      The four days of looting became invisible because it was an inconvenient truth.         

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor