The single biggest problem with the Black Lives Matter organization is not its blatant hypocrisy (though that is rife).  Like all contemporary mob movements, it’s emphasis is entirely on symbolic efforts rather than any actual, helpful change.  There is, of course, a reason for this: it’s easy to get Guilty White Liberals to spend their entire day making empty gestures…these gestures cost nothing in either money or time, but make the GWL a chance to be seen “fighting for the cause.”  Whether its toppling statues, burning buildings, giving copious donations to BLM, or putting stupid black squares on one’s social media pages…all of these do exactly nothing to actually address any issue of racial inequity, but it sure makes the GWLs feel good about themselves, and it goes miles to assuage their irrational and misplaced guilt.  I have been lectured by I can’t tell you how many highly educated GWLs about “white privilege,” and yet, to a person, when asked if at any point in their own academic career, did they offer their place in their cohort and/or their tuition to a black person, the answer is no…in fact it has, on occasion, been, “Well, no…of course not.”  if pressed on the issue, the explanation is typically some rather pathetic rational involving the GWL getting a degree will improve their societal position and thus enable them to help facilitate societal change more effectively, or some similar drivel.  Which, is, of course, bullshit of the rankest vintage.  What they are saying is, “It is absurd to think that I would suddenly abandon my plans to get through post-graduate school and just give away the $250,000 i took out in student loans to someone else.”  And they are right…it would be absurd.  These people complain daily about massive student loan debt, and that’s what their paying for their own education.  It is unimaginable that they would spend the rest of their professional lives working menial jobs to pay off someone else’s quarter of a million dollar student loan, no matter what color they are.   So the pattern quickly emerges: empty gestures made very publicly that benefit no one but the guilt-ridden psyche of the person making the gesture, while doing nothing in the way of real, meaningful, significant change.
The real danger from this hypocrisy is that the empty gestures make the GWLs feel as if they have done their part, and this feeling is validated by other GWLs and the BLM organization as well.  And the entire “movement” will soon fizzle out, and the GWLs, having satisfactorily assuaged their guilt after a couple of weeks of black squares on their social media and maybe a sizable and very public donation to BLM, will go back to their little suburban lives until the next cause to which they can pay pointless lip service to comes along.  And not only will the actual black lives that rhetorically matter will, in actuality will have been made worse.  To wit:
Early on in the pandemic, it became obvious that COVID-19 was affecting the African-American community disproportionately.  Yet just weeks later, in the middle of the same pandemic, BLM was openly encouraging African-Americans to take the streets in massive protests: no social distancing, few masks, and a whole lot of shouting. So in this case, the meaningless symbol is the protests, but the actual Really Real World Reality: thousands of black lives being unnecessarily exposed to a pandemic-level virus, about which one of the few things that is known for sure is that it hits black people harder than other demographics.  For a group that hides behind the name Black Lives Matter, their blatant disregard for the well-being of actual black lives seems a tad—inconsistent.
Now there is a county in Oregon which has ordered that white people must wear masks any time in public, and non-white people don’t.  Out of “concerns about profiling.”  Yeah.  This is absurdly illegal, obviously, but never mind that: here, the meaningless gesture is declaring that black people don’t need to wear masks.  The Really Real World Reality: mandating white people take reasonable precautions during a pandemic to stay healthy and alive, but black people?  Nah…don’t worry about it.  Go out there into the pandemic and breathe deep.  Again, for people who can’t stop screaming about how much black lives matter, it’s almost like they want more cases of COVID-19 in the African-American community.  Like they’re encouraging risky behavior.  Of course, bigger numbers would be good for the message.  But here’s the exact same county order with the context of BLM taken out: “there is a pandemic that incidentally affects black people disproportionately, so to mitigate the disease, we are ordering only white people to wear masks.  It will save lives.”  Had it been stated that way, the order would be decried as the most blatantly racist governmental policy enacted in 50 years.
I live in an area with extremely high fire danger.  Because of this, there are orders that residents must maintain 50 feet of defensible space around their houses (meaning removing leaves, dead plants, anything that fuels fires).  Doing so is good for individual homeowners as it greatly increases the chances that their house won’t be burned to the ground, and its good for the community and state because it greatly reduces the risk of the massive wildfires that plague the area every summer).  Fine.  But fire, just like The Virus, affects everything is can, regardless of the color of the people involved.  If this same order only applied to houses owned by white people, I would hope the outcry and outrage at such egregious and callous racism would be deafening.  But if the order is couched in the BLM message, then apparently it’s some kind moral victory…sure your house burned down, but, you know, if you want to make an omelette, you’ve gotta break some eggs.
This Symbolism Over Substance could potentially decimate the black community, undo the progress the African-American population in the United States has worked for generations to achieve, and leave the community even more hopelessly marginalized than they were before the GWLs of BLM arrived to “help.”

N.P.: “You Haven’t Done Nothin'” – Stevie Wonder