Patrisse Cullors co-founded Black Lives Matter on faux victimhood. In her Thursday announcement that she would be resigning from the organization, she once again demonstrated what she does best.
For those unfamiliar, Cullors has been the subject of negative headlines for the past few months. Her Marxist street cred first came under fire when reports surfaced in April that she had gone on a luxury home-buying spree totaling $3.2 million.
Further investigations into Cullors’s finances revealed stunning extravagance and corruption. In 2019, Cullors was earning close to $20,000 a month as the chairwoman of a Los Angeles jail reform group, while dropping the organization’s money on $26,000 on ‘meetings’ at a Malibu beach resort. She was self-dealing, using the BLM organization to give hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of business to the father of her only child. The allegations were so bad that leaders of local BLM chapters were calling for independent investigations into Cullors’s handling of BLM’s money.
‘Those were right-wing attacks that tried to discredit my character, and I don’t operate off of what the right thinks about me,’ Cullors said, insisting that her resignation had been in the works for a year and had nothing to do with the fact that even local BLM leaders were calling for an investigation into her handling of the group’s money.
Cullors could give expert-level classes on the victimhood mentality. She is set to release her second book and landed a multi-year television show after milking multiple nonprofits for all they’re worth. More than 80 percent of the BLM Global Network Foundation’s money was spent on payroll, consulting and travel, with very little going to local chapters. Yet Cullors is the one breaking down in tears during interviews insisting she is terrified and that her detractors are ‘racist and sexist’.
‘The fact that the right-wing media is trying to create hysteria around my spending is frankly racist and sexist,’ Cullors asserted.
Cullors’s attitude toward perfectly reasonable criticisms of her sketchy finances reveals why BLM has been so successful. Just like its founder, Black Lives Matter ignores inconvenient facts in favor of a culture of victimhood. Cullors started the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter after George Zimmerman, a Hispanic man, killed Trayvon Martin, a black teenager. An attorney for the Martin family has said that he does not believe the incident was about race. Evidence suggests Martin was beating Zimmerman before he was shot and killed. BLM still managed to turn the tragic incident into a narrative about white supremacy in America. The organization got even more popular after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It pushed the tagline ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’, even though it contradicted evidence that Michael Brown did not surrender and was actually charging at Officer Darren Wilson (who he had already assaulted) when he was shot dead.
It is it any wonder, looking at Cullors’s recent behavior and the events upon which she founded her organization, that BLM is a shameless cash-grab rather than a virtuous nonprofit? It does little for the families it purports to speak for, instead demanding donations and insisting loudly that white people have rigged the game against black people as its executives all get rich. It advocates for defunding the police and dismantling the traditional nuclear family, both positions that would further harm the black community (and thus perpetuate the conditions it needs for survival). Cullors may be finally leaving the organization after too much scandal, but she will be laughing all the way to the bank.
