Black Lives Matter has changed its messaging, scrubbing their rhetoric in favour of disrupting the nuclear family from their site.
With little fanfare, Black Lives Matter removed a section of text that had been under a section called “What We Believe” that sought to engender the destruction, or perhaps reimagining, of the nuclear family structure.
The section read: “We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.
“We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts. We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work ‘double shifts’ so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
Couched in language about liberation, this section intended to foster the idea that a person’s immediate, nuclear family, mother, father, sisters, brothers, is less important than the movement.
Many people who first became aware of BLM over the summer caught wind of this language, and found themselves put off by an organization that espouses Marxist principles of communal children and the demise of the family structure over American ideals of individualism and family unity. Jack Brewer pointed it out at the RNC.
After the public read the belief statement from BLM, and lambasted them, pushback against that began. Fact checking group PolitiFact said that BLM didn’t say they wanted to disrupt the nuclear family, even though BLM wrote down that they did and published it on their website.
In fact checking the claims that BLM wants to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” which BLM said on their site, PolitiFact said that they basically didn’t say that, writing: “We found that while Black Lives Matter seeks change in how ‘family’ is defined, especially with respect to public policy, it’s a leap to conclude that it wants to eliminate traditional family structures.”
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