Arriving too late to enter an at-capacity campaign event for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, activists with Black Lives Matter were extended an invitation to meet with the candidate afterwards. That exchange, filmed and released by the activists, reveals a candid discussion of systemic racism, the failure of previous policies and Clinton's advice for the grassroots movement: "find some common ground on agendas that can make a difference right here and now that will make a difference in people's lives."
As she recognized, "the consciousness-raising, the advocacy, the passion, the youth of your movement is so critical," but I fear that without better tactics and organization, Black Lives Matter will fail to translate its message into real reform.
We have seen this before. While living in Egypt, I personally witnessed the Egyptian Revolution rise and fall. Many forget that it too was rooted in police brutality. Photos of the broken body of Khaled Said, beaten and murdered at the hands of the Egyptian police, galvanized support for reform. A Facebook group by the name of "We Are All Khaled Said" organized mass protests on January 25, 2011 -- Egypt's National Police Day.
However, when the euphoria of President Hosni Mubarak's departure wore off, liberal activists failed to secure reforms in the resulting political landscape. Mubarak's presidency fell to a coalition of leftists, socialists and Islamists united by the chant, "The people want the downfall of the regime," but political cleavages soon divided that call into different political messages. While the Muslim Brotherhood capitalized on its organization and bargaining power to negotiate its way into power, leftist and socialist activists -- truly at the heart of the revolution -- struggled to organize coherent, organized political parties. In fact, through successive protests quickly deemed a nuisance, the leftists repeatedly called for delays in the timetable for elections. They feared holding elections earlier would benefit the better-organized Islamists. They were right. When the Islamist-dominated People's Assembly and the Muslim Brotherhood's President Mohamed Morsi were sworn in, the revolution's very instigators were sidelined.
Protests and grandstanding presidential candidates are good opportunities to disseminate one's message, but they are the function of outsiders. What else can those outside the system do but pound on the doors and demand to be listened to? They can ask to be let in. "You never change things by fighting the existing reality," author and inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller famously said. "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
Here, I would recommend that Black Lives Matter learn from the Tea Party's playbook. Yes, you read that right. Itself a grassroots movement, the Tea Party has succeeded where movements like Occupy Wall Street have failed. It did so not by raging against the system (literally out in the cold), but by working within it. In an ingenious scheme, the Tea Party has sponsored and inspired primary challenges against Republican candidates. And here's the irony: whether or not these primary challenges are successful, the Tea Party wins. It wins because the resulting pressure either awards the nomination to a Tea Party-backed candidate or forces a more establishment-backed candidate to prove their conservative bona fides -- driving the GOP further to the right.
Black Lives Matter is right to apply pressure to presidential primary candidates. But since policing in the United States is highly decentralized, groups in favor of reform must also pressure the elections of the country's mayors and sheriffs, who often shape police tactics and department guidelines and who sometimes run unopposed. Already, Black Lives Matter has forced the issue of police violence into nearly every presidential candidate's political discourse on both sides of the aisle. For example, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) admitted in an August 13 interview on Fox News that, "We do need to face this. It is a serious problem in this country...." However, Rubio also added, "I don't know if this group [Black Lives Matter] has a detailed policy agenda, but it is a legitimate issue."
Black Lives Matter cannot keep this pressure up alone. As in Tahrir Square and the Civil Rights Era, it must expand its base of support across both sides of the aisle. Certainly, the potential is there. Police violence affects all classes, genders and ethnicities -- though some more disproportionately so. If everyone is to be beneficiaries of justice and police reform, we all need to be a part of it.
Though it seems unfair to require that Black Lives Matter activists develop all policy recommendations themselves, this is the demand placed on the movement by politicians in the system. And unless the movement can increasingly move the discussion from the streets and the margins of meetings to the floor of Congress and the hearings of its committees -- not by appeasers, but by the converted -- that will continue to be the case. If the reform movement fails to do so, it may find itself like the activists at Clinton's event: late and shut out of the room.