Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via AP
Lawn signs supporting Black Lives Matter sprouted in neighborhoods across the country.
LOS ANGELES – A couple of months ago, during a daily walk in a largely white, comfortably middle-class neighborhood close to the beach (in other words, not where I live), I was taking note of all the lawn signs that had started to sprout during election season. As in much of L.A., they were mostly Biden/Harris advertisements, with occasional anti-Trump slogans mixed in (“ByeDon,” “Any Mature Adult 2020”). One sight, though, stopped me in my tracks. Next to the Biden/Harris sign was another one for Black Lives Matter.
I had been seeing that sign since spring, in neighborhoods like these. But to see the still-radical notion of Black lives mattering literally aligned with a presidential ticket of moderate Democrats in the most racially fraught and consequential election in modern American history was beyond encouraging. It said to me that finally, the powerful moral idea behind Black Lives Matter has officially become a mainstream political force at precisely the moment that the Democrats—all of us, really—needed one. And it’s a force that’s here to stay.
That’s certainly true in California, where BLM was born in 2013 as an impassioned response by three Black women to the not-guilty verdict in the trial of a neighborhood vigilante charged with murdering Black teenager Trayvon Martin. That response quickly morphed into a national movement as more murders and questionable killings of Black people by police piled up in states from coast to coast. But BLM’s influence in California is distinct. It is here where the move from outside agitator to political player has evolved clearly, and 2020 marked the apex of that evolution so far.
In the run-up to November 3, BLM pushed voter education and endorsed social-justice ballot initiatives at both the state and local levels. Here in Los Angeles, it prevailed on Measure J, a county charter amendment that will ensure funding for the kinds of community services—mental health, housing, employment—that are the core of the argument for defunding police. In that sense, it’s the first truly successful attempt at comprehensive police-funding reform in the nation. It is institutional change. And it came in the nation’s largest county, which is home to more residents (roughly ten million) than all but ten of the states.
Then there’s Black Lives Matter’s role in ousting Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey. The resounding defeat of Lacey by challenger George Gascón was arguably BLM’s greatest electoral achievement, not least because of the complicated racial dynamics. When Lacey was elected in 2012 as L.A. County’s top prosecutor, she was hailed as the first African American woman to hold the position. Then came Black Lives Matter and the protest movement against police killings of Black people, spearheaded by BLM. The target of the protests was not only police, but also prosecutors who repeatedly failed to hold the police criminally accountable for murder.
Identified early on as one of those prosecutors, Lacey—the history-making Black woman—was ultimately no match for the Black women who founded BLM and who comprise much of its membership. For much of her tenure, activists in Los Angeles disrupted police commission meetings and frequently showed up at Lacey’s home after she repeatedly refused to meet with them and discuss their demands. By the time the George Floyd moment exploded, Lacey had long been on the wrong side of police reform, and the sustained BLM campaign against her became a campaign for her opponent, Gascón, San Francisco’s former district attorney and police chief, as well as a former assistant L.A. police chief. Gascón, who is Cuban and white, had built a reputation for reform, and ran against Lacey on a reform platform.
Within the Black community, Lacey’s status as a Black DA was not a political cover but a sharp point of criticism: As an African American, she had more responsibility than most to address the crisis of cop accountability. The tradition of representational politics—Black people supporting Black candidates as a matter of maintaining political equity, especially in L.A.—crumbled under the urgency of a moment that only got bigger. It will almost certainly crumble again.
At the same time, BLM did much to shore up the time-honored tradition of turning out the Black vote. Patrisse Cullors, one of the three co-founders of BLM who now heads the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, did online how-to presentations for mail-in balloting, while BLM-LA issued a voter guide. Despite its involvement in the election, BLM was careful not to equate it with endorsing the system or embracing the status quo. Cullors cited the indomitable Stacey Abrams as the best example of why grassroots movements and electoral politics have to go together, why political engagement must be part of the systemic change BLM is seeking. Melina Abdullah of Black Lives Matter LA said that while young Black protesters are disillusioned with electoral politics, they became convinced that it’s important for them to raise their voices via the ballot box for specific causes, like voting against Lacey. Abdullah also said that Gascón understands that BLM will hold his feet to the fire in the same uncompromising way it did with Lacey. If necessary, they will show up at his house too.
The powerful moral idea behind Black Lives Matter has officially become a mainstream political force at precisely the moment that the Democrats—all of us, really—needed one.
BLM’s other big success, Measure J, calls for L.A. County to set aside 10 percent of its unrestricted budget annually for social services, services that cannot include jail or law enforcement. As a charter amendment, it will be codified as law and not subject to the whims of annual budgets or the political preferences of county supervisors. The winning strategy enacted by BLM and other supporters, as noted by Vox, was simple but brilliant: framing Measure J not as a way to decrease police but to increase services desperately needed by Black, brown, and poorer neighborhoods. It turned out that voters found that adding services, rather than subtracting law enforcement, was an anti-racist cause they could more easily get behind.
One of the reasons BLM matters politically is that since the summer protests highlighted the need for police reform and anti-racism, it suddenly had money to burn. In October, BLM formed a PAC to bolster its messages and fund racial justice–minded candidates, chiefly mayors, sheriffs, and DAs. That came on the heels of the Movement for Black Lives, a policy-oriented coalition of more than 50 organizing groups nationwide that functions as a larger Black liberation movement, launching The Frontline, an initiative to turn out the vote among young people of color. Black Lives Matter itself, partnering with Rock the Vote, led four national voter education projects, including a multimillion-dollar outreach campaign and an anti-disinformation initiative.
Despite the progress—or alongside progress—California, the blue bastion, remains in some ways rigidly conservative. Voters defeated the proposed repeal of affirmative action at public universities, and refused to modify Prop 13, the so-called “third rail” of California politics that has limited local property tax revenue and hamstrung communities of color for 40 years. And the “blue wave” of 2018 that famously overtook Orange County receded a bit as Republicans regained two congressional seats there. Still, two statewide initiatives that BLM supported or opposed, respectively—Prop 17, which restores voting rights to parolees, and Prop 20, which sought to overturn some criminal justice reforms approved by voters two years ago—went BLM’s way. The takeaway of 2020 is that anti-racism is emerging as a new rail of California politics, a fact reflected in a survey earlier this year by the Public Policy Institute of California that found two-thirds of the state’s voters expressing support for Black Lives Matter. More than a growing political movement, it’s at heart a moral idea that, against many odds and in many ways, is aligning with all our lives.
