Back in the summer of 2020, amid a pandemic and widespread closures, tens of millions of Americans protested police violence and racism in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. The demonstrations for racial justice that year under the banner of Black Lives Matter became arguably the largest social protest movement in U.S. history.
Three years later though, little has changed, at least according to Fredrik deBoer, better known as Freddie deBoer, the leftist lightning rod, once-academic, always-writer who has re-made a name for himself on Substack with over 46,000 subscribers. As deBoer sees it in his new book How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, elites of all races mishandled that historic moment as the protesters’ demands either became immaterial (like representation in the arts) or unpopular with the working class (like defunding the police). Not only was defunding either never achieved or quickly reversed — perhaps because working-class Black people did not want it to happen — no material change to Black people’s misfortunes was achieved.
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