Recuperation and Cooptation in Undermining the BLM Movement

Neutralizing the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests

Abstract

The Black Lives Matter movement, originating in 2013 is “a Black-centered political will and movement building project” (Howard University School of Law, 2018). In the spring and summer of 2020, the BLM movement was reinvigorated by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officers, resulting in some of the biggest protests America had ever seen. In order to deal with these protests and the demands for radical systemic change while maintaining the status quo, American corporations, government bodies, and law enforcement agencies engaged in a number of tactics broadly belonging to the idea of recuperation, the idea that "capitalism [can] appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely in the form of harmless ideologies” (Vague, 2012). In this paper, I use the frame of recuperation and cooptation to analyze how the demands of the BLM movement were undermined and neutralized.