The Votes Are In!
2023 Readers' Choice is back, bigger and better than ever!
View Winners → 
Movements Nov 18, 2020
by
share with
Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via AP Lawn signs supporting Black Lives Matter sprouted in neighborhoods across the country. LOS ANGELES – A couple of months ago, during a daily walk in a largely white, comfortably middle-class neighborhood close to the beach (in other words, not where I live), I was taking note of all the lawn signs that had started to sprout during election season.
As in much of L.A., they were mostly Biden/Harris advertisements, with occasional anti-Trump slogans mixed in (“ByeDon,” “Any Mature Adult 2020”). One sight, though, stopped me in my tracks. Next to the Biden/Harris sign was another one for Black Lives Matter. I had been seeing that sign since spring, in neighborhoods like these.
But to see the still-radical notion of Black lives mattering literally aligned with a presidential ticket of moderate Democrats in the most racially fraught and consequential election in modern American history was beyond encouraging.
It said to me that finally, the powerful moral idea behind Black Lives Matter has officially become a mainstream political force at precisely the moment that the Democrats—all of us, really—needed one. And it’s a force that’s here to stay. That’s certainly true in California, where BLM was born […]
