Yeah for real. Like all the BLM protestor organisers who shot themselves in the back and set their cars on fire after they died, they stand as a stark reminder that this oppression is current and active and until a certain tipping point is reached or a critical mass of people ready to die on their feet find each other, of course people are going to keep their heads down and focus on survival and providing for their families.

Plus like, the entire legal landscape changed in response to the BPP in its most active areas and presumably where a lot of the surviving family members are still based. You can’t just march around with guns and stand off with the police anymore unless you’re a psyop org. You’d just get massacred and the majority of the population would see it as a reasonable response. Fuck that, I can’t imagine the frustration felt by the people who would join a modern BPP movement but instead have to operate quietly in their neighbourhood self defense efforts.

Like I’m white and not from America, I can’t put myself in those shoes, but I can only imagine how incredibly miserable it would be to stay actively engaged with politics while living with the legacy of the earlier movements being so brutally repressed. The experiment was tried and it unfortunately failed, at least twice now, so any new movement has to be something new and adapted to the current material conditions etc.