in World News Black Lives Matter Foundation Aims to ‘Disrupt’ Family Structure, Excludes Fathers from Vision of Community
by Dr. Susan Berry
As citizens around the U.S. protest police brutality and racial inequalities, their rallying cry has been the slogan “Black Lives Matter” — a declaration of God-given value for Americans who feel marginalized. Yet that slogan was born of a political organization — now rolling in donations from massive corporations hoping to establish their social justice bona fides — whose larger agenda has gone largely unexamined.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) Global Network Foundation is a largely decentralized international organization — listing regional chapters instead of particular leaders. It was founded by three women, one of whom identifies as “queer”: Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza. On its “What We Believe” page, BLM describes itself as a movement “to fight for freedom, liberation, and justice,” but its definition of those terms includes radical changes to basic societal norms.
For instance, the org’s “What We Believe” page asserts that these goals can only be achieved through the disruption of the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement,” the site declares, “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.” The word “fathers” is deliberately excluded, replaced by the gender-neutral “parents” despite already naming “mothers” as pillars of the family.
The statement goes on to denigrate male influence on the family as oppressive. “We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered,” the group says, calling single mothers’ “double shifts” of working and parenting a “patriarchal practice.”
On a page describing the group’s “herstory,” BLM writes that part of the reason for its emphasis on intersectional sexual politics is that black liberation movements have historically overemphasized the voice and role of straight men:
Black liberation movements in this country have created room, space, and leadership mostly for Black heterosexual, cisgender men — leaving women, queer and transgender people, and others either out of the movement or in the background to move the work forward with little or no recognition. As a network, we have always recognized the need to center the leadership of women and queer and trans people.