The least disputable measure of a bad week is any seven-day period that requires a body count at the end of it. Seven Americans in three different cities died in high-profile incidents this week, all of them captured, at least partially, on video and disseminated by social media. Taken in sum, the deaths of Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Philando Castile, near St. Paul, Minnesota; and Officers Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael J. Smith, Brent Thompson, and Patrick Zamarripa, in Dallas, Texas; seem like installments in a macabre serial: “The Purge” recast as a reality show. There are common threads here: the surfeit of guns in American society, the chasm between law enforcement and many African-Americans, the ways in which social media have transformed the public into a nation of eyewitnesses.
No single organization has been as consistently identified with these questions in the past two years as Black Lives Matter. There’s confusion about what B.L.M. is because it exists both as a discrete national network of activists and as a much more amorphous movement focussing largely on police accountability. In the wake of Sterling and Castile’s deaths—which occurred within forty-eight hours of each other—it was possible to imagine that public opinion might become more sympathetic toward B.L.M.’s cause. (A recent Pew study yielded that only four out of ten people surveyed supported Black Lives Matter.)
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