If you are black and angry about police violence, you are a potential terror threat.
Or so says a newly released FBI Intelligence Assessment
that concocts a non-existent movement they dub “Black Identity
Extremists.” According to the assessment, “premeditated, retaliatory
lethal violence against law enforcement” has been spurred on by “Black
Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African
Americans.”
The problems with this report are manifold. First, and foremost, it
places the blame for violence on actual concerns with police brutality
and racial justice, thus delegitimizing dissent.
Second, as numerous former FBI officials and counterterrorism experts
have attested the moniker “Black Identity Extremist” has no history of
prior usage and it appears to have been dreamed up by the authors of
this report. In doing so, the FBI has lumped together a diverse range of
beliefs into one non-existent movement. As former FBI Agent Mike German
told Foreign Policy, “Basically, it’s black people who scare them.”
Raising the alarm about “Black Identity Extremist” is eerily similar of
when Hoover’s FBI went after civil rights groups, including Martin
Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as part of
counterintelligence operations against what they called “Black
Nationalist–Hate Groups.”
The FBI from its very inception has viewed racial justice movements as a
threat. Its invention of “Black Identity Extremist” in order to justify
treating opponents of police brutality as potential terrorists is just
more of the same.
#Resist,
Chip Gibbons
Policy & Legislative Counsel
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