Government targeted BLM protesters to discourage movement: report
The new report was released Wednesday by The Movement for Black Lives
A new report has confirmed that the federal government targeted Black Lives Matter protesters in an effort to disrupt and destabilize the global movement following the police killing of George Floyd last summer.
The report, titled “Struggle For Power: The Ongoing Persecution of Black Movement By The U.S. Government,” was released Wednesday by The Movement for Black Lives. The group’s findings note that BLM protestors were slapped with “heavy-handed criminal prosecutions,” NBC News reports.
“The empirical data and findings in this report largely corroborate what Black organizers have long known intellectually, intuitively, and from lived experience about the federal government’s disparate policing and prosecution of racial justice protests and related activity,” the report states.
The report details that as civil unrest swept through the country in the summer of 2020, the police presence at demonstrations increased, as did “the deployment of federal agents and prosecution of protesters,” per NBC.
BLM leaders say the severe prosecution of protesters falls in line with the federal government’s long history of suppressing Black social movements.
The report highlights how the federal agents used Counterintelligence Program techniques to “disrupt the work of the Black Panther Party and other organizations fighting for Black liberation.”
“We want to really show how the U.S. government has continued to persecute the Black movement by surveillance, by criminalizing protests, and by using the criminal legal system to prevent people from protesting and punishing them for being engaged in protests by attempting to curtail their First Amendment rights,” said Amara Enyia, The Movement for Black Lives’ policy research coordinator.
“It is undeniable that racism plays a role,” Enyia said. “It is structurally built into the fabric of this country and its institutions, which is why it’s been so difficult to eradicate. It’s based on institutions that were designed around racism and around the devaluing of Black people and the devaluing of Black lives.”
In the report, The Movement for Black Lives (also known as M4BL) is calling for official pardons for all participants in nationwide protests. According to The Associated Press, the group is also demanding reparations and an apology from the government for targeting advocates of “Black life and Black liberation.”
The report was published in partnership with the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility clinic at City University of New York School of Law.
In related news, the Black Lives Matter movement recently called the U.S. government’s decades-long embargo on Cuba “cruel and inhumane.”
Last month, the organization addressed the growing anti-government protests in the island nation, sparked by shortages of food, electricity, medicine, and other vital resources.
“Since 1962, the United States has forced pain and suffering on the people of Cuba by cutting off food, medicine, and supplies, costing the tiny island nation an estimated $130 billion,” BLM wrote in a statement on its Instagram account.
BLM noted that the embargo was “instituted with the explicit intention of destabilizing the country and undermining Cubans’ right to choose their own government” and is “at the heart of Cuba’s current crisis.”
Thousands of Cubans have participated in protests against Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel. They are demanding more freedoms, more life-sustaining resources.
Black Lives Matter is calling on the US government to respond to the crisis by lifting the economic embargo.
The group said “the people of Cuba are being punished by the U.S. government because the country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination,” adding, “United States leaders have tried to crush this Revolution for decades.”
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