The Republican Party and its
acolytes in the news media are trying to demonize the protest movement that has
sprung up in response to the all-too-common police killings of unarmed
African-Americans across the country. The intent of the campaign — evident in
comments by politicians like Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky — is to cast the phrase
“Black Lives Matter” as an inflammatory or even hateful anti-white expression
that has no legitimate place in a civil rights campaign.
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas crystallized this view when
he said the other week that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
were he alive today, would be “appalled” by the movement’s focus on the skin
color of the unarmed people who are disproportionately killed in encounters
with the police. This argument betrays a disturbing indifference to or at best
a profound ignorance of history in general and of the civil rights movement in
particular. From the very beginning, the movement focused unapologetically on
bringing an end to state-sanctioned violence against African-Americans and to
acts of racial terror very much like the one that took nine lives at Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in June.
