Kat Rosenfield is an UnHerd columnist and co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Her 2021 novel No One Will Miss Her has been nominated for the Edgar Award.
For every major metropolis that painted BLACK LIVES MATTER on its streets two years ago, there were huge swathes of America where the whole movement felt like a distant diversion, similar to the current war in Ukraine. You knew it was happening, of course, and who the good guys were. You woke up each morning to fresh footage of this or that inspiring protest (or sometimes, to the news that the marching had devolved overnight into something worse). You worried for the safety of those caught in the conflict and hoped for positive change. But the front, the fighting, was far away.
This was especially true in elite liberal communities on America’s highly segregated coasts, including the part of Connecticut where I’ve lived for the past ten years. These towns are geographically diverse — from Scarsdale, New York, to Hillsborough, California, to Short Hills, New Jersey — but they have a unique collection of traits: a highly educated, Democrat-voting population; an astounding concentration of wealth; a median home price upwards of $1 million; and, most crucially, almost no black people at all.
Needless to say, these places aren’t usually big on racial awareness, save for the occasional self-conscious acknowledgment of their homogeneity. But as the Black Lives Matter movement swept the nation, the mounting social pressure to demonstrate one’s support forced a confrontation with what had long been undiscussed: how does one demonstrate a commitment to black lives when virtually none of them are being lived in your zip code?
The result was, to put it mildly, remarkable: a rash of extremely fancy white people performing near-hysterical levels of hyperawareness for an issue that had absolutely no material bearing on their lives. Black Lives Matter signs popped up like weeds in the front yards of multimillion dollar homes, in neighbourhoods where they would be seen by approximately zero black people save for the odd delivery man. Pricey boutiques hung Black Lives Matter signs in their windows. In Darien, Connecticut, a town with a black population of less than 1% and a median household income of $365,528 that regularly ranks it on lists of America’s wealthiest communities, a sea of white people in designer sunglasses marched down the leafy main street screaming, “No justice, no peace!” before gathering politely in a local park to listen to the main speaker: a black woman who had traveled up from Brooklyn just for the occasion.
It’s hard to overstate the irony of a town like Darien, whose racial demographics are in part a direct result of the infamous “white flight” from nearby New York City in the Seventies, having to import people of colour from that same city in 2020 in order to demonstrate its commitment to social justice. It also speaks to the peculiar relationship that places like Darien have with more local communities of colour. The town where I live, Norwalk, is just five miles down the road from Darien and has a 15% black population — but not only did Darien not ask its black next-door neighbours to participate in its Black Lives Matter protest, they also recently rejected a plan to allow just over a dozen Norwalk kindergarteners into their top-ranked school district. And so the de facto segregation of these communities has always served to insulate them from ever truly feeling the impact of America’s racial reckonings — or from having to think about them once they’re over.
Two years after George Floyd’s murder, in some cities, ubiquitous murals, statues, and street art stand in commemoration of the moment; in others, the boarded-up remains of empty, smashed-out storefronts are a stark reminder of the revolution’s less-glorious moments. Many of the places where the movement found the most purchase are now struggling to realise its promise, with rising crime rates serving as a direct challenge to progressives’ dreams of defunding the police.
In Connecticut’s wealthy enclaves, some Black Lives Matter signs are still there — albeit faded by the sun and a bit tattered around the edges, in what seems like almost too perfect a metaphor for the legacy of BLM in elite liberal communities. But in 2020, those three words weren’t just a slogan, but a brand, as conspicuous a class signal as owning a Birkin bag and knowing which fork to use.
Long before the raised fist became an high-class accessory, writer Rob Henderson identified the rise of what he called “luxury beliefs” among privileged progressives — including the attention-seeking brand of anti-racism that became so ubiquitous that summer. “Affluent whites are the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege”, he wrote, “yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. In other words, upper-class whites gain status by talking about their high status.”
That a person can successfully preserve his power by flagellating himself for undeservedly having so much of it certainly goes a long way toward explaining the position that communities like Darien took vis-a-vis Black Lives Matter. (See also: the popularity of “defund the police” in communities that are safe and wealthy enough to be wholly unconcerned with crime.) One year after the peak of the protests, the New Yorker noted that all this shrill awareness-raising had been largely nothing but noise: people in positions of influence had “mastered the language of racial contrition, lamenting the conditions that nourish inequality, while doing the bare minimum to change them”.
The people who spent an afternoon parading around and shouting in their pretty town square before returning to business as usual in their comfortable, lily-white neighbourhoods may not have been consciously engaging in a cynical performance, but they nevertheless seemed to grasp the game intuitively: you can be the living, breathing embodiment of privilege, but nobody will ask you to give it up if you just make enough embarrassed noises about it — and, perhaps, if you make a generous enough donation to the cause, to the tune of the $90 million raised by BLM in 2020 alone.
Here, the mind boggles: not just at the sheer volume of both attention and money generated by this movement among people who have no skin in the game, but at their utter incuriosity about just where their money went. When stories surfaced earlier this year about the shady misappropriation of Black Lives Matter funds to, among other things, purchase a $6 million party house in Los Angeles, the response from donors was revealing in that there was hardly a response at all.
But of course, there was no outrage. Those donations were indulgences: a tax-deductible expense after which you, the giver, were free to keep living your privileged life. Whether the money did anything to help was immaterial. The point was to give, and to be able to say you gave.
But then, the intersection of wealthy white Left-leaning lives with the black ones which they profess to value has always been thus. As genuinely progressive and avowedly anti-racist as these good white liberals may be, the only black people they encounter day to day are invariably paid to be there. The gardener. The maid. The personal trainer. An endlessly rotating series of cashiers and delivery people. In lieu of actual connection, transaction. In lieu of relationships, reparations.
And in lieu of using their influence to push for actual change, the most powerful people in America — the CEOs, the philanthropists, the hedge fund managers, the people who sit on boards — raise an empty fist. At home, they plant a Black Lives Matter lawn sign and write a check for the cause; at work, they sign a bigger check alongside a polished solidarity statement crafted by the in-house PR team for maximum engagement. It is all signal and no substance, designed to mask a deep and abiding investment in the status quo — as demonstrated by what happens when you ask the folks with the lawn signs how they’d feel about a low-income housing unit being built in their neighbourhood.
Which brings us to the question of what will happen now, when Black Lives Matter is no longer the hot new trend, the must-have status symbol. Already, the black-and-white BLM banner has been largely replaced in the progressive Twittersphere by the Ukrainian flag. And in a world dominated by performative activism, where causes are less about principles than they are about keeping current, this is all but inevitable. How long will it be before the conflict in Ukraine is eclipsed, too, by some shiny new tragedy?
And sometime soon, if it hasn’t happened already, the glue holding together the last Black Lives Matter sign in the front yard of someone’s multimillion dollar mansion will give way. The hedge fund manager who lives there will come home from work to find it face-down, covered in dirt, curling with damp at the corners. And maybe he’ll pause a moment before tossing it in the trash; maybe he’ll make a mental note to order a new one from wherever that was. But by the time the men who collect the garbage come to take the bin away, its contents will have been long since forgotten — as if it was never there at all.
It’s got to the stage at which, during my initial dealings with any business, governmental or quasi-governmental agency, school, university, charity, or any other organisation, I always preface discussions between us with the declaration that I have zero tolerance for wokeness, that Black Lives Matter is a racist hate group, that a man is the producer and emitter of small motile gametes whereas a woman is the producer and carrier of large immotile gametes and that men can’t become women, and that I do not tolerate having my language policed, and that any attempt to introduce woke agenda into our discussion will result in its immediate termination and the immediate termination of any business between us.
Glad to hear I am not alone. I have lost count of the websites I have left the minute they hit me woke the woke nonsense. I’ve even canceled paid subscriptions because of it.
I’m cancelling The Times as soon as I’m allowed to by the £1 3 month subscription. I can’t stand how woke it is, and the readers are even more extreme.
Yep. Ditched my RSA membership a couple of years ago for this reason. Had initially thought the interns had got hold of the comms with no oversight over the nonsense they were generating. Then I read some of their then CEO’s nonsense and realised wokeness was top down and endemic.
How do you have any clients left? Kudos to you, but I’m surprised some mid-level bureaucrat with a BS master’s hasn’t organized a major campaign against you.
Is that before or after they ask how you take your coffee?
I have it BLACK, but it’s ok to have it ({[white]}).
Her Name Was AMERIKA
It was an idea Sprung in my head across a sea of foam She was my first Love I thought she was so BEAUTIFUL She sent me to school taught me the Golden Rule I was no fool Solid as Bronze carved out of Parisian Liberté, égalité, Fraternité Statues for US not kings sing Helen could I Kiss thy face Mariam would you let me get to second base Love is not a Disgrace This Place? God did not go to Art School All this Ugly Droll ! But what is the most beautiful ? Why a life of free rule ! Lady Liberty, that Statue. Oh what launches she did displace Achilles in the Heel Soldiers dressed in Steel Troy we Will Destroy We will Destroy And burnt the topless towers of tabulae ansatae Go give to Helen the kiss she’s due. She’s not a lady Just an Image that I would Kill For. Ah Faustus
The opening of Bk4 of my heroic couplet satire, The Wokeiad by Richard Craven:- ………. Behold the monstrous regiment of woke, Science’s nemesis and but of joke. First waddle past the squads of scowling smurfs, With cardboard signs excoriating TERFs. The sunlight bounces off each azure scalp And dandruff glitters like a Switzer alp. Above white knee socks, fat and dimpled thighs Betray the sacrifice of untold pies. Hotpants which emphasise the camel toe, As Adam’s apple does the beard’s shadow. 1210 O’er each fraying belt tremulous blubber juts, On porcine face the lipsticked gob tut-tuts. The cheesecloth working shirt with rolled-up sleeves! The animosity! The petty peeves! With pond’rous tread they stamp upon the ground. Buildings collapse, and light aircraft are downed. The birds fall silent and the dead revive, It isn’t bliss that dawn to be alive. Next marches Antifa’s Sturmabteilung, From lamp posts effigies of Jews are hung. 1220 Black shirts they wear, and black shorts underneath. Black are their souls, and equally their teeth. Pissant pathetic parliament of fools, The stinking sewage of the public schools, Tarquin and Henrietta on the slum, All trust-funded and terminally dumb. Each wears a skateboard strapped across their chest, Razors embedded, and a kevlar vest. With lowered standards dragged through guttered muck, They show the world how they don’t give a fvck: 1230 Portraits of Molotov with Ribbentrop, The Red Flag with the Swastika on top, Sayings of Mao, diktats of Xi Jin Ping, The vanguard does its genocidal thing. Behind on tumbrils prisoners are drawn, The lumpen proles, objects of Twitter scorn. The hipsters at their whiteness take the pee, Joke about rickets and Vitamin D. Now Black Lives Matter flaunt their camouflage, And fling their epithets at Nigel F’rage, 1240 And Jon Snow fainting falls upon the floor; So many white people he never saw. They pull down statues and they “take the knee”, Dismantle whiteness and the family. On surfaces four-lettered filth they spray And chase the po-po and the Jews away. A black conservative in tailored suit Disturbs the felons as they burn and loot. They beat him with their skateboards on the head And with their razors roughly shave his dreads, 1250 And call him “pet nijjer” and “coconut”. The businesses they burn! The stores they gut! Maggot on civis, roach horde under fridge, The botulism in the club sandwich. And as they march, they hold aloft their texts and Wokeness wreaks remorseless her effects. ’Tis now the turn of the Aquarians, Vegans or at least vegetarians, To shuffle past in sandals open-toed And fill the screen for a brief episode. 1260 Homeopath, post-fascist charity Wanting in intellectual clarity, Hidebound opponent of the microscope Sworn enemy of bath and bar of soap. The creepy masseur and the mesmerist, The slightly rapey male feminist. Organic farmer and anarcho-trot Who worship a Swedish child idiot. Eugenic theory, both the why and how. Worzel Gummidge reads Thoughts of Chairman Mao. 1270 A special place in Hell’s for the Vert Rouge For their cruel primitive subterfuge. A captive dragged on ropes staggers behind, Vitamin A-deficient, almost blind. They taunt him with handfuls of Golden Rice Dropped in the gutter for the rats and mice. As these march past odours suffuse the nose Of the manure in which the poison grows: The combination of patchouli oil Leavened with the sour reek of armpit royal, 1280 The cat lady redolent of old tom, The battle axe with face like Herbert Lom. In thick wool tights huge women come and go, Talking of long drop toilets and Osho.
I cancelled my NT membership due to its “Anti-Racism” virtue-signaling, but re-joined after the board reacted against it. Ditto for Tate Britain after being educated about the racism inherent in a chair portrayed in a Hogarth painting. Such humiliating and absurd displays only serve to erode respect for cultural institutions.
Not just utter incuriousity about where the money went, but downright hostility toward anyone who asks. . Where did it go? Who exactly got it? What exactly did they do with it?
The same can be said for so many other fashionable causes and collections.
‘Twas a scam, as was clear right from the outset when racism cloaked in a new garb became acceptable.
Well said Brendan and Drach.
The wokeist response? Reparations of course.
It’d save time and money if they just had the signs say “I Support the Current Thing” so they didn’t have to replace them.
A neighbor of mine recently posted a sign that simply reads, “You Matter”
What struck me most was: the good white folks of Darien 1) imported a black speaker from Brooklyn for their BLM protest rather than a black neighbour from nearby Norwalk, and 2) even more hypocritically, rejected a proposal to include 12 Norwalk kindergartens in their top-rated school district.
Limousine Liberals have always been striking hypocrites.
It speaks to profound insecurity.
Excellent piece that sums up what should have been glaringly obvious all along.
It was glaringly obvious to many of us but some people are so desperate for ‘likes’ that they’ll do or so whatever is required to be seen to be a good person.
It’s strange seeing these movements held up as a class signifier, which reached a fever during the Trump and Covid years. The BLM sign isn’t their for Black people, it’s there to tell you “we’re the good people.”
I’ve noticed there’s a similar trend in the UK press, when they’re not just appropriating our protests for social credit (protesting racist police in the UK? Seriously?), there’s this strange fascination with apologizing for past historical sins. Almost as if bringing up past evils is a way to keep themselves relevant in the “right on” conversation even if whatever it is has been irrelevant for years.
Every year I hear a story on NPR commemorating some Indian massacre from the 1920s. I never hear anyone commemorating the genocide on the subcontinent that occurred within a generation of independence from the UK.
And don’t get me started on Canadians apologizing and tearing themselves apart for -wait for it- sending impoverished children to school.
I had a similar argument two years ago when I refused to self flagellate because my British ancestors where responsible for slavery the world over. My point being, they weren’t my ancestors. Being white and British doesn’t automatically make me the descendant of Slave traders and I will not apologise for something that has nothing to do with me or my family. Most white British ancestors of white British people were working in the mills or the pits during this period. The sh!tty jobs that the aristocracy/mill/pit owners wouldn’t waste good money buying slaves to do!
Agreed. This article is excellent because it does what all great articles should do – take something I am myself unable to articulate and proffer it with dizzying clarity.
Awesome. Thank you so much for describing it all so succinctly, accurately, and vividly. It almost makes me want to re-activate my FB account to post it and pick fights with the narcissistic white “anti-racism” consultants among my past “friends” who are making bank off of this latest grift. Forwarded it to all my favorite people this morning.
“lamenting the conditions that nourish inequality.” Yes, but these conditions include inequality in intelligence, initiative, scholastic aptititude, social skills etc. The only way to eliminate inequality is to install a totalitarian government that transfers power, money, and property from those who have it to those who want it. Anyone who objects is sent to the gulag. We’ve seen this before in history and it doesn’t turn out well.
Exactly. According to cultural Marxism, everyone who is “marginalized” or “oppressed” is so, not because of the vicissitudes and complexities of human beings and the societies they create, but because of systemic hierarchies and dominant power structures. Individual responsibility is not factored into the equation.
There are very wealthy predominately black neighborhoods as well. I am certainly not rich, by any definition, but I believe strongly in law and order, being on time, mathematics, western culture and that capitalism has created more wealth for poor people than any other system the planet has ever known. If you believe the same, and happen to be black, we can be wonderful acquaintances, or even friends. If not, we probably won’t be, regardless of your skin color.
This article left out the 30+ people killed in the “mostly peaceful riots” and the $2bn plus of damage done by the demonstrations. Friends across the US told me that their down town area was on fire. Yet crickets from the media as it did not fit the narrative. BLM funds seem to have ended up in a real estate portfolio…
A well-made point about expressing luxury beliefs to signal status.
But why do we signal this kind of status? There must be more to it than simply feeling good at dinner parties and the golf club.
What are the real-world material benefits? Do older people in media and academia hang onto their jobs? Do businesspeople keep workers in their place? Do we get better quality partners?
The point is that nothing material changes, whereas a wealth tax, a tax on financials as opposed to earnings, re-industrialisation and maybe a bit of protectionism while the re-industrialism happens, and going back to the idea of a meritocracy as a desirable thing — all of these are likely to hit the wealthy in the pocketbook.
I agree. I was just thinking that, whether or not some group of in a “vape-filled back Zoom” planned it, all of the class-conscious energy that might have united a lot of Americans across race, ethnicity, and geography has all gone into virtue-signaling and obsessively policing ourselves and others to ensure conformity. Segwayed beautifully into COVID, which sort of standardized the mold.
It’s also about being fashionable. Once you have a mansion in a nice enclave with a few Teslas in your garage and your kids in Ivy League universities you can’t afford to be left out of intellectual fashions involving public rituals of politically correct signage and events.
Kat Rosenfield has nailed the current iteration of this phenomenon. It’s not a new aspect of human hypocrisy–her reference to buying “indulgences” harks back to Christian practices in the Middle Ages–only now the indulgences are for political instead of religious reasons. Thomas Wolfe described the 1920’s version of indulgence buying in “The Party at Jack’s”, in which wealthy New Yorkers at a cocktail party avow their Socialist solidarity with the “workers of the world”, yet where the only “workers” in sight are the maids serving them. And Tom Wolfe got the 1970’s version down in his book “Radical Chic”, portraying the actual party given by Leonard Bernstein for wealthy arts patrons, to which he invited members of the “Black Panthers”.
It is their brainwashed woke children who are the real problem and how they going to escape being born with ‘horrible’ white skin.
Great analysis, and yes it’s ironic that the wealthy and privileged can gain status by publicly criticizing the wealthy and privileged. But I guess that is the way it was also during the Cultural Revolution in China, when to keep your reputation and social position you had to first confess all of your social sins (including those that you invented to enhance your confession). A lot of cults work the same way. Significant also and along side this social phenomenon, it’s worth noting how comfortably corporations have adapted to the new social manners, perhaps because declaring solidarity with BLM and transgender activism has no appreciable negative effect on the bottom line of the ledger, except for the mild expense of hiring additional Human Resources officers to adminster progressive training and adjudicate perceived transgressions. A real win-win for corporate capitalism!
I think Shelby Steele really nailed this issue in his insightful book, “White Guilt.” He basically makes the case that white liberal elites perceived the need to somehow “dissociate” themselves from racism and social injustice. With the new accentuation of historical wrongs, and faced with a need to absolve themselves from collective sins and regain their moral authority, these elites jumped on any bandwagon (anti-Americanism, anti-racism, etc.) that would assuage their guilt. Steele writes, “dissociation is inherently elitist. Automatically, it creates a new kind of American [or Brit, or whatever other guilty Westerner one is] because he has conspicuously dissociated from the litany of [his nation’s] sins. I suppose the operative word here is “conspicuously,” since one cannot virtue signal successfully in a closet. As a consequence, all this harried frenzy of dissociation becomes a kind of nauseating “collective narcissism” to which this article refers.
Excellent article. Virtue signaling without much cost.
Just for the record, I watched all of the George Floyd trial and although Chauvin appeared to be a pretty unpleasant person, he did not murder George Floyd. There was some evidence to at best convict for manslaughter however with the force which built up for a conviction, fact and evidence flew out the window.
Are you sure you watched the whole thing, Paul? He was convicted for second-degree murder. What that means is death through reckless conduct/obvious lack of concern for human life… rather like manslaughter. So, the court essentially agreed with your own analysis of the evidence…
Yes. Ms Rosenfield mentions the lack of interest in where the BLM money went and also the next fashionable cause, Ukraine.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that there was only one US Senator, Rand Paul, who insisted that there be some oversight on where America’s $40 billion appropriated for Ukraine would be spent — and that he was vilified by the media faithful.
“Which brings us to the question of what will happen now, when Black Lives Matter is no longer the hot new trend, the must-have status symbol.” Wait until the Metaverse takes hold! Every day will host a new flashy red herring to spend money on.
This sounds like an intersectional problem – Narcissism blended with Munchausens by proxy.
Wouldn’t it be fun if these woke elite white districts stopping minorities getting into their education system got pinged by their own woke side?
Those virtue-signalers with political objectives are of course quick to point at those not displaying the BLM sign as “deplorables,” thus re-enforcing the barrier that keeps them out of the higher-status woke elite.
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