> Black Lives Matter raised more than $90 million in 2020
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/black-lives-matter-raised-...
It's a massive injection towards the entire ideological package associated with Black Lives Matter. It's not just about injustice in policing (which does occur but is very rare), but also about everything from environmental causes to tax policies to universal healthcare. Put another way, these donations in the name of racial policing equality are bolstering the entirety of progressive politics.
Neither the BLM movement generally not most of the organizations associates with it nor their supporters nor their donors pretend that it's about simply “racial policing equality”.
But it's cute that conservatives scaremonger about bourgeois identity politics (though they don't tend to call it out as bourgeois) for being needlessly divisive and counterproductive to their overt goals by not incorporating and prioritizing crosscutting issues that fundamentally underlie the specific problems of the groups notionally served, but also criticize progressive identity politics as counterproductive to their overt goals for incorporating and prioritizing crosscutting issues that fundamentally underlie the specific problems of groups they serve.
It's almost as if the problem wasn't about the approach to the problems of the particular populations, but that any approach is taken to those problems at all.
(The link you provide outlines where the money went.)
So if the "BLM" organization views the nuclear family as something that has to be abolished, then one can assume that they wouldn't donate to local BLM chapters that don't subscribe to that idea. Maybe not always, but a greater than 0% chance for sure.
With this whole "decentralized" argument, we might as well say the Republican/Democratic parties are decentralized and that what the RNC and DNC do/say hasn't a huge bearing on the way that the individual local leaders/sub-organizations of the parties do or how their rallies behave. It's more "centralized" than BLM, sure, but like with a lot of things, it's not a black/white description. It's rather a range, and we can't just say "no it's not" when we can clearly see that the "central" portion has some bearing on the smaller parts.
So, my thinking on this also aligns with the Sorites Paradox:
That's not a terrible argument, and actually aligns quite well with my own experiences.
My local GOP isn't well aligned at all with the national party.
The NRA is an even better example. I refuse to directly donate to the NRA due to their mismanagement of member funds in the recent past and their lack of support for important court cases going back much further. My local NRA, on the other hand, uses the large majority of funds raised for local support and outreach: education, maintenance of public ranges, instructor training, etc.
I don't think it's uncommon to support a local chapter of an organization while being at odds with the organization itself.
It's worse than that; it's a classic motte-and-bailey.
Try to address some issue with the Black Lives Matter organization, and you're apt to see a retreat to the banner of lowercase "black lives matter" as a principle. This is like trying to address some issue with the "Democratic Party", and then those being criticized scurry over to an excuse like, "What, you don't believe in democracy?" Of course, no one makes that kind of mistake, because such a defense wouldn't be possible. It's well understood that the capital-D Democrats comprise a concrete organization with an actual platform, etc that is identifiable by the proper noun, which is distinct from democracy as a principle, even though they share a root. In the case of Black Lives Matter, it's more than just a shared root, and this is less clear overall, so people who can benefit from the halo effect strengthening their foothold knowingly exploit it for gain.
It doesn't, though. There are several large national organizations (BLMGNF, M4BL, and others) associated with the movement, not a single central organization.
> and that the central/important tenets of that central organization probably has some measurable influence in deciding which "decentralized" parts of the organization get funding/donations/focus/marketing.
The tenets of the various organizations do obviously play a role in how they distribute funds, and the tenets of the various large and small organizations play a big role in which of them get funding donated to them by various donors.
> So if the "BLM" organization views the nuclear family as something that has to be abolished
Which, contrary to the misrepresentations, none of the major movement-related organizations do; a number of movement-related organizations have said things about policies which are punitive to families outside of that assumed norm as part of institutional racism especially in the presence of other institutional and social factors which result in more Black children not being raised in nuclear families.
> then one can assume that they wouldn't donate to local BLM chapters that don't subscribe to that idea
One can also assume that, if that were true, it would be competitive fundraising advantage to other movement organizations (e.g., direct donations to local orgs, if this really was the single central organization) without that belief, to the extent that the belief conflicted with the grassroots. But since there is neither a single central org nor any major org with the viewpoint being criticized, it's moot.
> With this whole "decentralized" argument, we might as well say the Republican/Democratic parties are decentralized
No, you might as well say the that the “right-to-far-right political alignment” and the “center-right to moderate left political alignment” are decentralized movements.
The Democratic and Republican parties are centralized organizations, in ways that the BLM movement is not.
Just a statement that we shouldn't structure our society in a way that makes it impossible for those not fortunate enough to have been raised in a nuclear family to still succeed.
While I agree we need to communicate that the nuclear family is very important and beneficial to our society, we need to do so without making children of non-nuclear families feel inferior.
I was just using it because it was the example in the thread.
I would assume it is fair to say this organization is representative of BLM, as I'm sure they have been under more scrutiny than I can provide and I would hope any bad intentions or funny things happening to the money would have been caught by now. So if I think it's fair to say that if this organization is representative of BLM, I think it would be fair to assume they would also be sending the money to the places they are stating.
But the real question is, what does this have to do with racial justice? As someone like Sowell points out, many inequities are themselves the consequence of disrupting the two-parent household.
I think we can do that without disavowing the traditional nuclear family and I don't read anything there that implies that.
I wouldn't discredit an entire social movement about demanding equality and fair treatment because of what someone put on a non-profit's website. Further, a statement like "BLM supports disrupting the nuclear" doesn't hold up because that stance has apparently been taken down from the website in question. If it was still on the website, which admittedly I haven't checked, then I can understand taking this more seriously.
Anyone who has read Marx and Critical Theory knows that disrupting the family is a key tenet.
I guess I agree with all of that, but I don't feel like it's a strong argument.