At the onset of the #MeToo movement, men were baffled by the sheer extent of women, not just in the news, but the ones they knew personally, who came forward with horror stories of rape, domestic violence, and workplace sexual harassment. And it made sense.
Sexual violence thrives in secret thanks to a lack of social awareness and a functional criminal justice system. Bad men do bad things only when good men aren’t there to stop them. Couple that with the fact that an overwhelming majority of abusers and harassers are serial offenders, and it created a perfect storm of ignorance that was shattered by a hashtag perfectly designed to educate, not flagellate, and perhaps even more importantly, not virtue signal.
As a result, the immediate aftermath of the #MeToo movement was monumental and productive. It was emotional, sure, but far more crucially, it was productive in raising awareness, crossing partisan lines, initially, at least, and driving real change in workplaces and social circles across America.
What is happening right now is tragically the opposite of the autumn of 2017. Racial progress and police reform will suffer as a result.
Like sexual violence, racism, and specifically that perpetrated by law enforcement, has survived thanks to its relative difficulty to quantify and the penchant of racists to subvert social norms by operating inconspicuously. Even setting aside the most politically controversial Black Lives Matter cases from the mid-2010s, most understood that structural flaws in the criminal justice system allowed individual racist cops to get away with crossing lines against black people. But not everyone understood the extent. It’s not until you hear about your personal black friend getting pulled over by the cops dozens of times without speeding or another getting stopped at the mall for minding his own business that you understand, it’s not just dozens of murders a year. It’s thousands and thousands of cases of frisking and harassment and behavior that make black Americans feel less than human.
We need to hear those stories. Instead, we’re getting a bunch of white folks posting black squares on Instagram and crowding out the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag with their own performative professions of white guilt and cringeworthy virtue signaling.
And it’s not just a shame. It could be a crucial opportunity cost sabotaging the real momentum we finally have in addressing racism. Consider, nearly seven in ten Americans recognize that the killing of George Floyd was a sign of broader problems in treatment of black Americans by police, including almost half of all Republicans. The time for sweeping police reform is now. No matter how much party leaders wish to politicize this moment, the people are mostly united on the need for a reckoning. But rather than constructing a movement to elevate the lived experiences of black American, get the rest of us to listen, and get all of us on board to focus on real solutions, petrified corporations and brain dead celebrities are drowning out the potential for a movement with black squares and hackneyed statements.
Black Americans deserve their own #MeToo movement. But thanks to virtue signaling and white guilt, this isn’t it.
