I Tried Getting the Black Lives Matter Sign Removed at My Apartment Building

Welcome to another episode of Benjamin Rubenstein’s Storytells, where I share true and personal stories. You can listen to this on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Deezer, iHeartRadio, JioSaavn, Podcast Addict, Podchaser, Spreaker, or your favorite podcast platform by way of the RSS feed. You can also listen to or read it below. I hope you enjoy!

This story is titled I Tried Getting the Black Lives Matter Sign Removed At My Apartment Building. It’s about how I made believe I was an investigative journalist to uncover why I feel the Black Lives Matter symbol has come to mean something other than what it used to represent.

Note: Benjamin Rubenstein’s Storytells is best when heard, not read, because of the emotion the art of oral storytelling evokes. If you can, I encourage you to listen to the audio. 

[Music: Revealed by Ketsa]

I tried getting the Black Lives Matter sign removed at my apartment building. You know the sign I mean. It’s the one with those three words in block letters spread across three rows with the black and white (and sometimes yellow) background. The design of those three words acts as a symbol, which is displayed on so many signs in yards and on doors and windows. One sits in my building’s courtyard.

The Black Lives Matter symbol—like any symbol—represents what its creator wants to convey and wants others to take from it. But sometimes, the person who sees the symbol perceives it differently.

Until October 10, I perceived the Black Lives Matter symbol the same as, I assumed, most people I knew and how the creators intended: it represented the needed fight against racism, discrimination, and racial inequality experienced by Blacks. 

I imagine I’d heard of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in 2013. That’s when the political and social movement started after George Zimmerman was found not guilty of second degree murder after killing a Black teen named Trayvon Martin. The movement picked up steam over the years until it became a worldwide phenomenon in 2020 after police officer Derek Chauvin killed a Black man named George Floyd.

In case these Covid years have jumbled your brain, let me remind you of this phenomenon with an example. In June 2020, the words Black Lives Matter were painted in yellow letters on two consecutive blocks of a section of 16th Street in Washington, D.C. The letters spanned the width of the two-lane street, rendering them almost 50 feet tall. D.C.’s mayor renamed the plaza around those letters Black Lives Matter Plaza NW. I walked across those 16 letters soon after they were painted. It all felt righteous. That mural has since become a permanent installation. 

Though over half of all existing tweets that included the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag were posted from May to September 2020, the movement is still going strong.

But, that's not all BLM is. Black Lives Matter is a political and social movement and multiple organizations. I didn’t know that before October 10, and I only discovered that after Black Lives Matter hit my news feed that day. 

On October 10, my news feed showed that an entity on X calling itself Black Lives Matter Chicago posted an image reveling in what Hamas militants had done three days earlier. Many hundreds of them breached Israel’s border and subsequently raped, mutilated, burned, and murdered over 1,400 people and stole over 200. The horrors worsened as some leaders of organizations and elected officials failed in their messaging to acknowledge that evil. And yet, those craven messages weren’t even the worst. The most wicked messages were those that—as Rabbi Angela Buchdahl at Central Synagogue would say in her first sermon following the massacre—included “words like ‘resistance,’ ‘decolonizing,’ or ‘freedom fighters.’ Words that valorized—and even celebrated—Hamas terrorism, words that perversely found a way to blame Israel for these monstrous attacks. The contortions people engaged in to blame defenseless children, teenagers at a music festival, or Holocaust survivors for their own murder betrayed a moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy I could not believe was possible.”

As I read more and more of those types of messages, I wanted to buy plane tickets for their authors to go hang out with their new paragliding friends in Hamas. Shalom, Felicia.

And on October 10, my plane ticket offer went to whoever at Black Lives Matter Chicago posted the image of a paraglider, which may have become the most recent in a long line of Jew-hating symbols.

I immediately emailed the board at my apartment building. I explained what Black Lives Matter Chicago had posted and reminded the board members we were currently promoting the symbol of Black Lives Matter by way of the sign in our courtyard. “Please have the owner of the Black Lives Matter sign remove it,” I wrote simply. 

Though I live in a community where all residents typically must agree to changes, I figured Black Lives Matter Chicago’s bigotry would allow the board to swiftly decide to have the sign removed. I was wrong.

The board president wrote back after denying my request, “We are a community of many deeply felt beliefs and opinions and we live together with mutual respect and understanding.”

Huh? I was confused. I couldn’t imagine any neighbor believing it was cool to align with that bigotry. Even if someone felt that way, wasn’t our community also about creating a welcoming environment for all? Surely the board misunderstood the vileness of what Black Lives Matter Chicago had posted. 

So, I wrote a second email to the board to try and make clear what transpired and how I felt about it. I tried to demonstrate that the perpetrators’ mission is to kill Jews. Most of the victims happened to be Jews, almost always the group in the U.S. most targeted in religion-related hate crimes—sometimes by a factor of six over the next most targeted. I felt that Black Lives Matter Chicago endorsed what was among the most barbaric acts against other humans I’ve seen in my lifetime. In turn, with our Black Lives Matter symbol that couldn’t be missed as residents return home from work and guests visit for the first time and everyone in between, we were endorsing the same.

The board president responded once again. She said the board would take no action, and if I wanted to have the sign removed, I’d need to convince every resident to do so. “The Chicago chapter of the Black Lives Matter organization has apologized,” the president added, as if the phrase “We’re sorry” could make anything said previously null and void.

At this point, I stepped back from my feelings. Was I overreacting? Was I making false assumptions or misinterpreting something? Was I being played by fake accounts?

Before I did anything further, I had to figure this mess out. It was time for me to make-believe I worked on Dateline.

First, I needed to see if there were other entities claiming to be Black Lives Matter and spewing Jew-hatery. It turns out Black Lives Matter Chicago wasn’t the only one. An entity calling itself Black Lives Matter Grassroots joined in by saying Hamas’ slaughter of Jews was an act of self-defense. Black Lives Matter Los Angeles concurred with Grassroots. And Black Lives Matter D.C. promoted the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!,” a phrase that some interpret to mean expelling Jews from, or murdering Jews in, the region. Maybe there were other Black Lives Matter groups chiming in, but I stopped checking.

Now that I saw an abundance of antisemitism from Black Lives Matter entities, I needed to know how all the chapters and the Grassroots related to the official Black Lives Matter organization, if there was one, and if they related at all. It turns out there is no official Black Lives Matter organization because it is first and foremost a political and social movement, and no single entity can own a movement. To go further, no single entity owns the rights to the Black Lives Matter name, image, brand, symbol, or anything of the like. That leaves the symbol open for shenanigans.

There is a de facto leading organization, though. It’s called the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which operates blacklivesmatter.com. The Global Network Foundation has also been collecting the majority of the funds. The three women who are considered the originators of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag—Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi—also founded the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.

Cullors hasn't been shy about sharing her opinion that everyone should band together to terminate the Jewish homeland in the Middle East. For example, the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School hosted Cullors and several other activists in April of 2015 for a panel titled, Globalizing Ferguson: Racialized Policing and International Resistance. During that panel discussion, Cullors said, “Palestine is our generation’s South Africa. If we don't step up boldly and courageously to end the imperialist project that's called Israel, we're doomed.”

Cullors did have things to say that were actually related to the mission of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation before she resigned in May 2021 from her formal role as executive director. In the Black Lives Matter 2020 Impact Report, she announced chapters. Aha, I thought when I saw this, now we’re getting somewhere in deciphering the organization’s structure. Cullors wrote that Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation would work “hand in hand” with the chapters. She added, “This assembly of chapters, today, makes up BLM Grassroots.”

Further in the Impact Report was a section on the organization’s finances. It stated that Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation “committed funding” to certain chapters such as Chicago’s and D.C.’s.

The Associated Press confirmed in May 2022 that the chapters and Grassroots were not officially affiliated. "In 2020, the foundation did spin off its network of chapters as a sister collective called BLM Grassroots. It has a fiscal sponsor managing money granted by the foundation."

In an odd twist, Black Lives Matter Grassroots later sued Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. The Guardian wrote that in the lawsuit, Grassroots claimed the Foundation “mismanaged the funds and had shut local chapters out of decision making.”

A year later, a judge dismissed that civil lawsuit. Even still, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation saw a future in which the two groups—the Foundation and Grassroots—would work together. In its public letter to Grassroots, the Foundation wrote, “Although it may seem impossible now, we see a future where our two organizations can continue to operate separately, without strife, and with outsized impact toward achievement of our common goals."

Ultimately, the social media accounts at the chapters and Grassroots that were spurting anti-Jewish filth were not fake but also were not officially related to the organization that was unofficially the official Black Lives Matter. In other words, despite their chumminess and “common goals,” the Global Network Foundation was not technically related to the chapters and Grassroots. 

It all seemed so opaque when you consider that Black Lives Matter stands for a movement and several organizations. According to Sean Campbell of Columbia's Journalism School, it’s a “bit of a problem that [Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation] has become associated as the name of Black Lives Matter when the two are totally separate.” 

At this point, I felt content with my investigative journalist work and still gross about the symbol displayed in our courtyard. After all the hopefully hundreds of people who felt welcomed by our building’s Black Lives Matter sign over the years, finally there was one person who felt unwelcome by it: me.

I reread what the president of my apartment building’s board had said about Black Lives Matter Chicago having apologized. Did they? I went to the source.

Black Lives Matter Chicago did write that it had sent messages “we aren’t proud of,” which is different from saying, “We’re sorry.” In fact, like some symbols, the phrase “we aren’t proud” is vague enough to warrant a spectrum of interpretations. Perhaps Black Lives Matter Chicago meant, “We’re not proud, but we did feel satisfactory about our messages.” Or, perhaps Black Lives Matter Chicago actually meant it wasn’t proud of how tame they were and wished they’d said outright that Jews deserve to die because they are Jews. “We aren’t proud” could have meant anything.

If Black Lives Matter Chicago had apologized, I bet Rabbi Buchdahl would have forgiven them. After all, as I understand the Jewish rules on forgiveness, if you do harm to another person and then apologize to the person you harmed, then the burden lies with the person harmed to forgive. If he or she doesn’t forgive, then he or she is now the sinner. 

Well, I’m not a rabbi, and I say Black Lives Matter Chicago crossed a line you can’t uncross, and therefore I’d have sinned had they apologized; I wouldn’t have forgiven them. No matter because they didn’t apologize. 

When the Washington Free Beacon asked the larger Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation about the chapters’ Jew hatery, they said, "We don't have any comments on your story…. To clarify, we are not affiliated with BLM Grassroots or BLM Chicago. We are the global/main BLM."

Chickenshit, I thought after seeing that. Sometimes, all you have to do is say, “We don’t align with foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas.” That was, apparently, too hard to say for Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. The next words that popped into my head came directly from the Global Network Foundation: common goals. The organization that was in the best position to act as the guardian over the Black Lives Matter symbol lacked the courage or desire to protect it, or worse, delighted in its misdirection because that was a common goal all along. 

This confluence of factors has led what I once felt was a virtuous symbol in the fight for freedom and justice to be hijacked. The Black Lives Matter symbol, to me, has come to mean something other than what it used to represent. The words "black lives matter" are as true now as they ever were and ever will be, but my perception of Black Lives Matter’s symbol has changed. Now, I walk by the Black Lives Matter symbol displayed in my building’s courtyard and am reminded of the global hatred towards Jews that has existed for centuries and seems destined to exist for eternity.

Perhaps the perceptions of all symbols change over time. It's unavoidable as the thing the symbol represents changes and as time and experience lead us to perceive the symbol differently. My research over the past few weeks has been about Black Lives Matter while also not being about that at all. What I have learned throughout this investigation is that you and I and everyone should periodically reevaluate all the symbols that we align with to make sure they still fit with our principles. If they no longer fit, it could be time to cut ties. I know that’s hard to do, as once you align with a symbol it can become part of your identity. Your identity could include symbols like Black Lives Matter, the donkey or elephant representing your political party, or the cross, star and crescent, or Star of David reflecting your religion. Indeed, it can be extremely hard to disengage from these pieces of your identity, and you may have to step way back to see that you must.

As for the sign in my courtyard: maybe this story will lead all my neighbors to agree to have it removed. Though, I suspect not. Nobody could convince me the symbol doesn’t signify Jewish hate to me, and therefore I couldn’t expect to convince others it means something other than what it means to them. In fact, I won’t even try. But, if they ask me how we could show support for Black equality without the Black Lives Matter symbol in our courtyard, I’d respond that there are endless ways, including a new sign that reads “We value Black lives” written in green and purple or any design that strays from the BLM symbol we all know. And if my neighbors ask me how we could possibly remove a symbol that welcomes so many, I’d propose a different question: how do you feel about promoting a symbol that makes a neighbor—even if it’s just one—feel unwelcome?

…But if a Black Lives Matter organization were to post one more picture of a paraglider or anything resembling one—even a zip liner, or shit, I could interpret a hot air balloon as being close enough—then I’ll take down the sign myself and inform my neighbors, “I’m not proud I removed the sign.” They could interpret that however they wish, though what I’d really mean would be: that felt not prideful; it felt righteous.

[Music: Revealed by Ketsa]