Obama counsels Black Lives Matter activists: ‘You can’t just keep on yelling’

It seems like a ploy to demoralize and, therefore, disintegrate the activist verve.

Quote from that article:

"Once you’ve highlighted an issue and brought it to people’s attention and shined a spotlight, and elected officials or people who are in a position to start bringing about change are ready to sit down with you, then you can’t just keep on yelling at them. And you can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position. The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then to start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved."

-President Obama.

We need to understand a few things about #BlacklivesMatter. It's not an organization, it's a movement. You cannot actively criticize it because it as a movement has no rigorous standards an organization would. It lacks central leadership and is comprised of individual communities with similar interests.

It bothers me that we are not looking at BlacklivesMatters this way. The problems of not seeing it this way are because:

1: Anyone can become part of the movement.

And if anyone can become part of the movement then we have:

People interested about the movement or people against the movement a part of the movement. And both of those cause a problem.

The prime example is when BLM activists overtook Bernie Sanders on stage.

Maybe Obama's way isn't what everyone wants. But it's also given us the Iran Deal and a better relations with Cuba. He is trying to prepare the movement (Which encompasses anybody and everybody) the diplomacy aspect of it. And not everyone will be a part of the that.

/r/asianamerican Thread Parent Link - ashingtonpost.com