What does it mean? What tangible outcomes? Look it up. Kind of early to be making judgements on their success or failure, I think. Certainly too early to write them off wholesale as "just a waste of time and energy" as YOU put it.
Can you point to a single piece of legislation that was directly lobbied for by BLM that has seen a tangible reduction in unjustified police violence against black citizens? I've looked it up and haven't found it. Perhaps you can help me?
Rather PRESUMPTUOUS of you to say WTF I "spend time" doing, don't you think?
The fact that you carry on about "starting conversations" as if BLM was the first group of people to figure out racism is still institutionalized strongly suggests your views on this matter are shaped more by media hype than direct experience in this particular matter. As we've seen, the introduction of anti-racist laws are only as good as the state's willingness to enforce them. And the state's willingness to enforce them is almost entirely dependent these days on the will of the various business lobbies. BLM's association with activities that are indiscriminately costly and disruptive to white and black businesses has seriously compromised their ability to gain financial support of the allies they need the most - black business owners.
You know, a lot of that sounds strikingly similar to some of that (not so well known) enmity that sometimes existed between various factions of the Civil Rights Movement of the '60's and '70's. And frankly, it comes off as rather guarded. I happen to think (as I did then) that each component/entity can have a role to play in working towards the overall goals.
Because of your personal involvement, you seem to be rather envious of the attention BLM gets, rather than being able to view them objectively. Which perhaps explains why you find them so objectionable.
Are you envious of the attention that Trump gets? BLM has essentially been using the same media-grab tactics - militant, loud, angry rhetoric, reliance on whipping crowds into an emotional frenzy. Divisive and non-constructive. And very short on depth. Many of the reasons why you find Trump objectionable, I see in BLM. It has nothing to do with jealousy, but rather the fact that they offer no evolution at all in how Americans approach uncomfortable aspects of shared racial history, how groups in opposition find common ground, how black people organize politically for the sake of driving wealth into black communities. Instead, they rely on slacktivism, social media "burns", and shit stirring to get attention...that they have no real way of translating into a coherent framework for actual empowerment. Again, just like Trump. Only instead of an angry white audience, they're preaching to angry black people.
That is quite likely to happen regardless, as a natural course of progression... the "changing of the guard" if you will. And NOT necessarily because one or the other (BLM or a "more mature organization) is the more VALID.
I don't subscribe to the idea of a natural course of progression, in part because I don't believe in an absolute right or wrong. I take more of a quantum mechanics view of political outcomes rather than a deterministic one. Hindsight allows us to create a narrative to support the inevitability of the outcome that came to be, but there are thousands of historical inflection points where people make decisions with imperfect information that may or may not align with their actual goals, and we discount just how much accidents and dumb luck play a role.
