Former BLM Leader Calls Out ‘Ugly Truth’ of Group’s Position on Family, Education
The founder of the St. Paul, Minn., chapter of Black Lives Matter recently called out the “ugly truth” of the movement’s positions on family and education.
In a video posted to Youtube last week, Rashad Turner said that as the founder of Black Lives Matter in St. Paul in 2015, he “believed the organization stood for exactly what the name implies — black lives do matter.”
“However, after a year on the inside, I learned they had little concern for rebuilding Black families,” added Turner, who now leads the pro-school-choice group Minnesota Parent Union.
He noted that the group’s website previously said that it wanted to “disrupt the nuclear family structure.” He said they “cared even less” about “improving the quality of education for students in Minneapolis.”
“That was made clear when they publicly denounced charter schools alongside the teachers’ union,” he said.
He added: “I was an insider in Black Lives Matter and I learned the ugly truth – the moratorium on charter schools does not support rebuilding the black family. But it does create barriers to a better education for black children.”
In September, media outlets first reported that the official Black Lives Matter website no longer included language encouraging the “disruption” of the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”
The language had been featured on the site’s “What We Believe” page, in which the group had laid out its support for various extreme policies and ideals that went beyond police reform and brutality.
The page had described the group as a “global Black family” that engages “comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts,” according to an archive.
“We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work ‘double shifts’ so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work,” the organization wrote. “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
The organization has received criticism for its extremist views, including co-founder Patrisse Cullors’s 2015 admission that she and her fellow co-founders are “trained Marxists.”
“I actually do think we have an ideological frame. We are trained Marxists,” Cullors said.
Cullors also recently faced backlash after the revelation that she bought four homes for more than $3 million in recent years. She was also seen in a recently resurfaced video favorably comparing a book to the “red book” propagated under Mao Zedong.
Cullors is resigning from her post as executive director of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, a role she has held for more than five years, amid questions about her finances, according to Fox News.
However, she told the Associated Press last week that she is leaving her post to focus on other projects, including the release of her second book and a television deal with Warner Bros.
She said that her departure was planned for more than a year and was unrelated to any controversies over her personal finances.
“Those were right-wing attacks that tried to discredit my character, and I don’t operate off of what the right thinks of me,” Cullors said.
