How 'Black Lives Matter' is unlike the Civil Rights Movement, and for the better

I. (Note from November 2014, reflecting on the riots in Ferguson, Missouri):

What distinguishes Ferguson from the Civil Rights movements is that now it goes beyond race. It both is and is not about race. Because what happened could happen to anyone. It is far more likely to happen if you are black, but black and white are not black and white; the vulnerability to unmotivated or unjustifiable police state violence that one has if one is black is different from that of those who are not black not in kind but in degree. The fact that all of us potentially are in this position should serve as grounds for the construction of a solidarity. This possibility places the white person who wishes to stand with the black people in Ferguson in a position that is politically much stronger than mere sympathy or pity.

While in college, I once had lunch with a friend in my English literature class. As we were getting to know each other, I said, "Elizabeth, what your politics?" She replied, "I am on the left, because I care." I said I am on the left because I have had just enough experience of oppression to feel that I understand something about it and to know that I don't like it. "Revolutions," I added, "are made by the wretched of the earth, not by the aristocrats who pity them."

II. Observations in the wake of the Biden-Harris victory

Want to know what those of us on the left say about racial justice and identity politics? I wrote this in the immediate aftermath of the Ferguson incident at the beginning of Black Lives Matter, before Trump, in 2014. I still stand by this.

Oppose state violence.
There is no reason to assume our country's government acts with the authority of (or 'under') God.
There is no reason to assume that what the government of this country does is just. It can be. It must be. It often is not. That's a problem.Black Americans are more likely and often victims of forms of injustice that can happen to me too. They could happen to you.
If you live or are present in this country, anywhere, it can happen to you. It might. You ought to care. You ought to want to stop it from happening. We ought to want to stop it; because it must and we can.
We also ought to care that it happens to people who are less fortunate than us, or more likely to suffer from these injustices - by some definition of 'us', since of course, really,

"There is not a White America and a Black America, but only the United States of America." The man who said that was our previous president. I pray that our current one's successor will uphold the same values. But he and those working with him, including Ms. Harris, cannot stop it by themselves. We can. They need us more than we need them: that's the secret of politics. And that is why I voted Democratic, even though I think Mr. Biden is only right about many things, or right about them in contrast, and wrong about other things, or, I fear, too weakly committed to them. I don't expect Biden and Harris to change America so much as I expect it to change because many of us will it to and work to make it happen. I want Mr. Biden to listen.

And I know that liberals get almost everything about these wrong. Including Biden in suggesting that racial justice is not hurting anyone's feelings. Nonsense.
I don't worry that my neighbor will insult me, near so much as I worry that the police might kill him, or me. I prefer this not to happen. That's why and how I want to change America.

It's important to understand these things clearly and distinctly. The politics that is about changing things for the better tends to fail when confused ideas succeed in place of clearer ones that merely don't sell as easily.

Ferguson happened under a liberal Black president. It probably would have happened anyway. Trump legitimated the police violence, Biden does not. Many liberals at the same time were calling for campus speech codes, corporate diversity trainings, various forms of 'affirmative action', and above all, protecting poor innocent people from insults. I say that the people that are most concerned about these things are not the same as the people in Ferguson, New York, and other places who want to be free not to be perfectly respected, but to be alive.

Some of us want other things not unrelated to this, like keeping our homes, when people are being evicted because of the pandemic. But make no mistake: liberalism as we know it is mostly at best a compromise, at worst a lie. And there is an alternative. Part of its strength lies in the contemporary reality that the boundaries separating segregated parts of this country are porous and uncertain. Not only is being ‘white’ and not ‘black’ no excuse; it also won’t save you. This is a terrifying fact whose consequences are also very promising.