Has anyone listed to the recent Joe Rogan podcast with Bret Weinstein? Bret has some excellent insight and thoughts on BLM, and the general state of our country. He makes a lot of connections to what is currently brewing in the USA to the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution in China. If you have never read about what happened during the Cultural Revolution, I would highly recommend it. There are eerie similarities between what is happening now in our country. Very insightful and I'd recommend giving the podcast a listen if you have time. I've always liked listening to Bret Weinstein, as he is a very progressive person but manages to stay grounded in reality regarding what the many things great about our country (freedom of speech, civil liberties, intellectualism, etc). He proposed an interesting idea of electing a center left and center right person to serve as President and Vice President (Andrew Yang and William McRaven).
He criticizes BLM (for a variety of reasons), while also acknowledging that major government efforts need to be made to help uplift Black communities to help free them from the poverty.
One point he made, that I thought was spot-on, related to the issues that stem from mass-incarceration occurring in our country. He makes this point as an evolutionary biologist, which of course I am not, but I'll try to paraphrase. Essentially, because our country has such an aggressive approach to incarcerating people, and because that incarceration naturally will have a greater impact on impoverished groups (Black Men), this leads to higher instances of single motherhood in the Black community. Not only that, he points out that when males are removed from a group of mammals, the remaining males are much less likely to settle with a permanent mate due to their high demand. Thus, this leads to extremely high single motherhood rates for Black women (75% ish). As being raised in a two-family household is one of the key indicators to avoid poverty (along with finishing high school and avoiding pregnancy before marriage), the cycle repeats itself.
In other words. We need to stop incarcerating such a high percentage of our citizens if we truly want to get people out of poverty, specifically Black Americans.