Imagine running a global operation that pulls
in a hundred million dollars in funding. Right.
And it mobilizes like up to 26 million people
in the streets. That's a staggering number. But,
and here's the catch, you have no CEO? You have
no official headquarters, and you have absolutely
no control over who uses your name. Yeah, I mean,
it sounds like an organizational nightmare, honestly.
Completely. You can't fire anyone. And literally
anyone with a smartphone can claim they speak
for you. It defies basically every traditional
rule of how human beings build movements or wield
power. Welcome to today's Deep Dive. Today is
Monday, March 23, 2026. And we're looking at
the history and the immense societal footprint
of Black Lives Matter. This is a phrase that
started as a really simple social media hashtag
back in 2013, and it erupted into one of the
largest, most decentralized protest movements
in American history. The sheer scale is just
unprecedented, but it's that very structure or
really the lack thereof that makes it so fascinating
and honestly so volatile. Exactly. So our mission
today is to chart the evolution of this movement
for you. We are going to unpack the statistics
and the strategies that fueled it. And we'll
examine the intense national reactions, the counter
movements, and the really fierce internal criticisms
it has sparked over the last decade. Right. But
before we jump right into the timeline, a quick
but very important note for you, Liz. Yes, definitely.
This is a highly charged topic. The materials
we're analyzing today, they contain deeply divided
perspectives. And they touch on some of the most
sensitive cultural and political nerves in the
country. Absolutely. Our goal today isn't to
take a side. We're not here to tell you what
to think. We are simply acting as your guides
to unpack the history, the underlying mechanisms
and the intense debates exactly as they are documented
in the research. Right. We're looking at the
architecture of the movement and the data surrounding
it. We just want to understand how it all works
mechanically and socially. OK, let's unpack this.
We have to look at how a string of text on the
Internet transforms into this sprawling global
network. Yeah, because understanding the actual
mechanics of how this movement was built is really
the only way to understand why its messaging
is both omnipresent and constantly contested.
Right. So the origin point is 2013. The catalyst
was the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the
fatal shooting of an African -American teenager,
Trayvon Martin. Right. And in response to that
verdict, three activists, Alicia Garza, Patrice
Colors, and Ayotamedi, they spearheaded the hashtag,
hashtag Black Lives Matter. And it's important
to note, the initial goal wasn't to create a
traditional nonprofit. It was simply to provide
a shared set of principles. A rallying cry, really,
for activists who were feeling just immense frustration.
But the way they designed it is what really sets
it apart. You know what this structure actually
resembles? What's that? open source software.
Oh, wow. Yeah. Think about it. With open source
code, the original developers build a framework
and then they just release it into the wild.
Anyone can take that code, in this case, the
hashtag and the core slogan, and apply it to
their own local issues. What's fascinating here
is how perfectly that analogy holds up. Because
when you release open source code, you allow
for massive, rapid, just unprecedented scaling.
Exactly. People adapt it instantly. Right. But
the trade -off is severe. The original developers
can't control the bugs. They can't control how
the software is used out in the wild. Who modifies
it or who claims to be like an official developer?
Which is exactly what happened here. The founders
deliberately avoided policing who is and isn't
part of the movement. The sources note there
are about 40 recognized chapters across the U
.S. and Canada, but local chapters are entirely
autonomous. No formal hierarchy at all. None.
And that is a massive departure from historical
precedent. I mean, think about the civil rights
movement of the 1950s and 60s. Ray, the contrast
is wild. Yeah, that era was defined by a highly
visible rigid hierarchy. You had central undeniable
leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and you had
legacy organizations like the NAACP. Very top
down. Exactly. Clear top down leadership trees.
If someone claimed to speak for the NAACP but
violated their principles, the leadership could
definitively publicly expel them. But Black Lives
Matter can't really do that. If a local chapter
or honestly just a random individual holding
a cardboard sign does something controversial,
the media and politicians immediately attribute
that action to the entire national network. Because
the human brain naturally looks for a leader
to hold accountable. When there isn't one, the
actions of a few are easily painted onto the
whole. But despite that structural vulnerability,
the financial mobilization they achieved is just
staggering. I mean, how do you even manage funding
without a central treasury? It's a huge challenge.
Look at the numbers in 2020 alone. The Black
Lives Matter Global Network Foundation raised
90 million dollars. Ninety million. And this
wasn't just corporate billionaires writing checks.
The average donation was just thirty dollars
and seventy six cents. Wow. That is millions
of everyday people opening their wallets. And
it scales up even further when you look at the
broader movement for Black Lives Coalition. Right,
the umbrella group. Yeah, it's an umbrella network
of over 50 associated groups. That coalition
received over 100 million dollars in funding
commitments from massive institutional entities.
Like the Ford Foundation, for example. That's
incredible. The financial infrastructure had
to evolve incredibly quickly just to catch up
with the digital viral nature of the hashtag.
So if this decentralized open source structure
is the vehicle, we need to talk about the fuel.
Right. How did we get to 90 million dollars in
donations? We have to move from how it's organized
to the specific catalysts, the flashpoints and
the intense statistical battleground over police
use of force. Right, the data points to 2014
as the moment the hashtag truly manifested in
the physical streets. This started in Ferguson,
Missouri following the death of Michael Brown.
Which was a huge turning point for national visibility.
It was. And shortly after, you had the death
of Eric Garner in New York City, which directly
gave rise to the I Can't Breathe chant. And then,
of course, the global explosion in the summer
of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd
by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
Yeah. That specific video was the catalyst for
protests that erupted across three different
continents. But beneath these highly visible,
tragic individual events, there is a very dense
academic and statistical debate happening. right.
The movement's core grievance is rooted in statistics
regarding structural racism. For example, the
Washington Post began compiling a massive database
of police use of force. Right, because there
wasn't a really unified federal one. Exactly.
And their data showed that in 2019, police officers
shot and killed 1 ,001 people in the United States.
And when you break down the demographics of those
1 ,001 people, the disparity becomes the focal
point. The rate of deaths for black Americans
was 31 fatal shootings per million. For white
Americans, it was 13 per million. Black Americans
were being killed at more than twice the rate.
But the interpretation of why that disparity
exists is where the academic world completely
fractured. How so? Well you had a prominent 2015
study by Cody Ross at UC Davis and that study
found a significant measurable bias in the shooting
of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed
white Americans. Okay. But then you have a 2019
study by researcher Joseph Cesario and others
that concluded something entirely different.
They found no systematic evidence of anti -black
disparities in fatal shootings once you mathematically
adjusted for local crime rates. Wait, I need
to push back on this for a second because the
data gets incredibly muddy here. I was reading
through the source stack and it mentions another
major 2019 study published in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS that
went even further. It claimed that black people
were actually less likely to be killed by police.
If you're listening to this and you've seen those
exact headlines used to dismiss the movement
entirely, how does the research reconcile that
mathematical claim? This is one of the most important
technical concepts to grasp in this entire debate.
The sources explain that this specific conclusion
that black people were less likely to be killed
was found to be heavily flawed. due to a mathematical
illusion called Simpson's paradox. Simpson's
paradox. Walk us through how that actually tricks
the data in this context. Right. So Simpson's
paradox happens when a trend appears in isolated
groups of data, but completely reverses when
you combine the groups and look at the big picture.
OK. In this specific study, the researchers only
looked at the probability of death during an
active police encounter. They didn't look at
the whole population. So just focusing on the
encounter itself? Yes. And it is true, mathematically,
that a white person might be slightly more likely
to be killed during an encounter. Wait, why?
Because white people, on a population level,
interact with the police much less frequently.
When they do have an encounter that escalates,
it is statistically more often for a highly serious
violent crime, like an active shooter situation,
for example, where lethal force is highly probable
from the start. So the context of the encounter
is heavily stewed from the jump. Exactly. The
source material highlights that Black Americans
face systemic structural issues like proactive
policing in minority neighborhoods that lead
to vastly more total encounters with police,
often for petty crimes, traffic stops, or honestly,
no crime at all. So the denominator, the sheer
number of stops is just massive compared to white
Americans. Yes. So while the percentage risk
of dying in one single isolated traffic stop
might mathematically look lower, their overall
population risk of being killed by police is
vastly higher. Just by the sheer volume of stops.
Simply because they're subjected to an exponentially
higher number of interactions. Wow, that completely
flips the headline. It does. And it's crucial
to note that the authors of that 2019 PNAS study
actually retracted their paper. Really? Yes.
They explicitly stated that their work was being
misused by politicians and media to support the
idea that there are no racial biases in policing.
They admitted their data set, which only looked
at people who had already been stopped by police,
was completely inadequate to make that broader
claim. So what does this all mean? You have these
intense, deeply complex statistical debates playing
out in academic journals. Right. But when that
frustration spills out of academia and into the
streets through direct action, it loses all that
nuance and inevitably triggers massive cultural
and political counter movements. Yeah, because
direct action is designed to be disruptive, not
nuanced. The tactics used by BLM were meant to
force society to pay attention. Right. They were
impossible to ignore. Exactly. You had massive
hashtag activism. We're talking nearly 48 million
tweets utilizing the hashtag by mid -2020. 48
million. Yeah. You had protesters staging die
-ins, physically shutting down major highways
and shopping malls, and of course, the widespread
use of the slogan, defund the police. And the
public reaction to those tactics has been a total
roller coaster. If you look at the polling data,
public support peaked during a George Floyd protests
in the summer of 2020, with 67 percent of American
adults expressing support for BLM, which is a
huge majority. It is. But by 2024, that broader
national support had steadily declined to 45
percent. Crucially, though, it remained incredibly
high among African -Americans sitting at 81 percent
in 2023. Right. And that decline in broader national
support didn't happen in a vacuum. It was partly
fueled by the rise of highly organized counter
movements. the most prominent early one being
All Lives Matter. Which BLM supporters heavily
criticized. They argued that saying All Lives
Matter intentionally dismisses and erases the
specific structural dangers faced by black people.
Co -founder Alicia Garza specifically addressed
this. She said the BLM slogan doesn't mean other
lives aren't important. It means black lives
are currently treated as less valuable by the
justice system, and that specific disparity needs
to be addressed. And following that, you had
the Blue Lives Matter movement. This emerged
as direct pro -law enforcement counter movement.
It started gaining traction after two NYPD officers
were killed in 2014, but it really exploded into
a massive cultural force after five police officers
were killed in a targeted ambush in Dallas in
2016. But the sources note that Blue Lives Matter
faced intense accusations of hypocrisy just a
few years later. Oh, absolutely. Specifically
during the January 6th Capitol attack in 2021,
you had pro -Trump rioters actively physically
attacking Capitol police officers while simultaneously
carrying and wearing Blue Lives Matter flags.
Yeah, that was a very visible contradiction.
Critics argued this proved the movement was often
more about opposing minority protests than actually
protecting law enforcement. If we connect this
to the bigger picture, we really have to look
at the media's role in fueling this polarization.
The sources reference a vital media theory called
the protest paradigm. Define that for us because
I think it explains so much of what the listener
might have seen on the evening news. The protest
paradigm is the tendency for news organizations
to focus heavily on the drama, the deviance,
and the violence of a protest rather than the
actual grievances or policies the protesters
are fighting for. The camera lens naturally points
at the broken window, not the thousands of peaceful
marchers. Because the broken window gets ratings.
Exactly. Studies cited in the material, including
exhaustive research from the Washington Post
and the University of Connecticut, found that
93 to 96 percent of the 2020 BLM protests were
entirely peaceful. Wow. Over 90 percent. There
is no violence or property damage at all. Yet
opponents and certain media outlets actively
capitalize on that remaining four to seven percent.
And to be fair to the data, that four to seven
percent was historically destructive. The riots,
arson and looting that did occur caused an estimated
one to two billion dollars in insured damages.
That is the highest amount of riot related damage
in U .S. history. It is a massive number. But
the protest paradigm explains how opponents weaponized
those specific isolated images of burning buildings
to portray the entire decentralized 96 percent
peaceful movement as a violent hate group. and
into that polarized media vacuum steps foreign
interference. The information war was global.
Because the movement has no central PR department
to correct the record, it was incredibly vulnerable.
The sources detail how Russian operatives tied
to the Internet Research Agency actively played
both sides of the debate on social media. And
their goal wasn't to help BLM or to help the
police, for that matter. No. Their explicit goal.
according to the intelligence reports, was to
stoke a race war in the United States. They would
literally promote BLM events while simultaneously
creating fake conservative accounts to encourage
armed antagonism against those very same events.
You even had trolls on the anonymous message
board 4chan creating a fake violent fascist manifesto
from 1919 and rebranding it online as the official
Black Lives Matter manifesto just to discredit
the activists. It became a pure digital battleground
where the actual on the ground goals of the movement
were constantly being drowned out by deliberate
disinformation. Which brings us to a really crucial
phase of this history. It wasn't just external
opponents and Russian trolls pushing back. As
the movement aged and as it accumulated that
massive 90 million dollar treasury, it began
facing severe internal critiques and unprecedented
political collisions. And this brings us right
up to the present day. This raises an important
question. What happens when a raw grassroots
street protest matures into a wealthy institution?
You inevitably face a crisis of authenticity.
And the first major crack was a class disconnect.
The sources highlight serious critiques coming
from working class black community leaders. You
have the mayor of Newark publicly calling the
defund the police slogan a bourgeois liberal
solution. That's a very specific phrase. He's
essentially arguing that it's an idea born in
wealthy academic circles that doesn't actually
reflect reality on the ground. Right. City council
members in places like New York pointed out that
their constituents working class homeowners and
tenants in minority neighborhoods actually want
safe, effective, and present policing. They want
better policing, not zero policing. Exactly.
They felt that affluent outside activists were
lecturing them about the realities of their own
neighborhoods. Alongside that ideological class
divide, there was massive financial controversy.
The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation
faced intense grassroots backlash for purchasing
a six million dollar compound in Southern California.
Yeah, a luxury compound with a swimming pool
and a soundstage. Yeah. The leadership stated
it was intended to be a black artists fellowship
space, but the optics were brutal. It sparked
outrage from local street level organizers who
felt those millions of dollars should be distributed
directly into impoverished communities, not tied
up in luxury real estate. We also see critiques
about the movement's focus and its blind spots.
The Say Her Name campaign is a prime example
of this. How so? Well, it had to be created as
a completely separate initiative, specifically
because the deaths of black women at the hands
of police were largely being sidelined by the
media and the movement, mostly in favor of narrative.
surrounding black men. Furthermore, local organizations
highlighted that BLM largely ignored the vastly
disproportionate number of unsolved civilian
murders and missing persons cases in the black
community. They chose to focus their massive
megaphone almost exclusively on instances of
police violence. It really shows the limits of
a hashtag. It can highlight a specific systemic
issue, but it struggles to address the broader
everyday systemic failures affecting the community.
Here's what gets really interesting, especially
from a political science perspective. Looking
at recent events, the decentralized power of
BLM actually turned its sights against its own
traditional political allies. Yeah, this was
huge. In July 2024, the BLM Global Network Foundation
publicly and aggressively opposed the Democratic
Party's decision to essentially anoint Kamala
Harris as the presidential nominee without a
primary vote following Biden's exit. That is
a stark pivot. We have a movement whose supporters
heavily lean Democratic attacking the DNC. But
if you look at their structural DNA, it makes
perfect sense. They called the DNC's process
hypocritical and demanded they host our virtual
primary so everyday voters could participate.
Because of how they operate. Yes. Here's a movement
built entirely on decentralized bottom -up open
source democratic participation. They are fundamentally
philosophically incompatible with a top -down
party elite appointment. They challenged the
democratic establishment on the exact grounds
of democratic principles. And the political friction
didn't stop at party rules. Moving into 2025,
we saw the physical erasure of one of the movement's
most iconic symbols. This detail really stood
out to me. Back in 2020, Washington D .C. Mayor
Muriel Bowser painted Black Lives Matter in massive
block yellow letters directly on the street leading
to the White House. Right. Everyone remembers
that imagery. She officially renamed it Black
Lives Matter Plaza. But the sources note that
in March 2025, just about a year ago for us sitting
here today, city crews quietly began removing
the mural. It's a striking reversal. How did
the local government justify scrubbing their
own monument? What blows my mind about the removal
of the mural is that it wasn't a local organic
decision. It was essentially forced by federal
threats. Oh, wow. Mayor Bowser stated it was
due to intense pressure and explicit threats
of massive federal funding cuts from the Republican
controlled Congress and President Trump. So they
used federal leverage to force the city's hand.
Exactly. A bill was introduced in Congress to
withhold crucial federal funds from the city
unless the plaza was renamed and all BLM references
were scrubbed. Unbelievable. The mayor essentially
admitted they couldn't afford to be distracted
by congressional interference or risk losing
federal jobs in the district. It shows how local
protest art literally became a national political
hostage. When you synthesize all of these internal
critiques, the financial scandals, and these
high stakes political collisions, it paints a
very clear picture. Managing a movement that
transitions from a decentralized outcry into
a multi -million dollar political entity is a
nearly impossible tightrope. It really is. Looking
back over the source material today, the journey
is just incredible. From a single hashtag typed
out in 2013, sparked by a tragic acquittal, to
a sprawling entity that generated over $100 million.
It mobilized tens of millions of people globally.
It completely reshaped the cultural dialogue
on policing. And it has weathered intense political,
statistical, and internal battles. Regardless
of how public opinion polling has fluctuated
over the years, the structural and cultural impact
it had on the landscape of American social justice
is undeniably permanent. Which brings me to a
final thought for you to mull over as we wrap
up. Historically, social movements like the civil
rights era we discussed earlier were defined
by clear leaders who sought very specific, clear
legislative victories. Right. The Voting Rights
Act, the Civil Rights Act. Exactly. There was
a finish line. But in an era where movements
are built like open source software, decentralized,
algorithm driven, and constantly open to modification
by anyone with a smartphone, can a movement ever
truly end? That's a great question. Can an open
source movement ever officially achieve its goals
and shut down? Or is it destined to permanently
exist as a digital battleground, constantly morphing
with the endless news cycle? It's a structural
paradigm shift that we are honestly still trying
to understand. Thank you so much for joining
us on this deep dive. We'll see you next time.