From a 2020 interview:
Jennifer Grossman [19:15]: Black Lives Matter. What’s your perspective?
Stephen Hicks: The movement, the phrase?
Jennifer Grossman: Well, I guess you could do both? The movement, I don’t think it’s a corporation, is just the insistence that there is structural and institutional racism, particularly with regards to police brutality, what are what are your thoughts are the phrase?
Stephen Hicks: We’ll start with the movement. I don’t have expertise here, let me say, but I have poked around at the Black Lives Matters website, so forth, and looked at some of the people who are proponents of it.
It strikes me as a similar phenomenon to the Tea Party from about 15 to 20 years ago—that it’s a populist, initially grassroots movement that has a significant number of legitimate grievances. But then fairly quickly, you have some disparate other people who join the movement and bring other agendas. And when you scale up, you run into some standard issue. So the Tea Party 15 or 20 years ago—I’m fuzzy on the on the dates—was initially worried about government overreach, government bloat, and government intrusion into various people’s lives. Fairly quickly, it seemed obvious that the Tea Party internally was fighting for its own identity: Who are we really? And there were some very disparate elements from strongly religious conservatives to other conservatives who were just small-government conservatives, to others who were more libertarian, and even a few anarchists hanging out. And the movement fell apart eventually because it didn’t have a common theme.
Now, my sense is that Black Lives Matter is in a similar situation. There is one group—and I think this is the healthiest part of the Black Lives movement—that says: There is a problem with racism, and that black people are on the receiving end of more racism than other people are. And they do not get a fair deal from various sorts of institutions, some of them in the private sector, but particularly in the government sector, and that there are injustices that are real injustices that need to be faced up to. And so the rhetorical force of a phrase like “Black Lives Matter” is a kind of inclusiveness that I think is legitimate, which is to say, the point of government is to protect all people equally, and to provide justice and peace for all people equally. And that’s not happening. And so that is to say, Black lives also matter or black lives matter too. And so we need to reform various kinds of government institutions, particularly, in a more inclusive direction.
Now, there also is, though, as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, a contradictory to that segment. I don’t know how many such sub-segments there are who are bringing to the Black Lives movement an explicitly exclusionary approach—which is to say that this is a movement for black people, and the philosophy we are bringing is one that is adversarial to other racial groups—that we don’t think that we can get along with those other racial groups, that we think that they are the cause of our problems. And what this subsection of Black Lives Matter seems more interested in is stoking adversarialism, is more interested in blaming other racial groups, and is perhaps trying to get special privileges for their particular group.
Now, that’s my initial sense. And to the extent that Black Lives Matter includes both of those groups, those are in tension with each other: one is explicitly inclusive, the other is explicitly exclusive. The one is saying: There is such a thing as justice, there is such a thing as proper function of government, and we want government to live up to these American standards. And they have every right, I think, to insist the government live up to those standards. The other is explicitly adversarial, and is cynical and jaded and seems more interested in undercutting what should be a legitimate governmental function.
The full interview is here:
Related: Derrick Bell’s “Racial Realism,” in the Philosophers Explained series.