Commentary

APA Journal Denounces Parents Who Don’t Gush About BLM to Their Children

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • February 8, 2024

Black Lives Matter leaders have absconded with millions in donations while the organization languishes in debt. Meanwhile, the organization regularly traffics in hateful and radical ideology which includes a demand to defund the police, opposition to the nuclear family, and support for the perpetrators of Hamas’ October 7th attack against Israel.

Apparently, none of it matters to the American Psychological Association. In a recent “study” that appears in Developmental Psychology—a journal published by the APA—researchers explore differences in whether and how black parents and white parents discuss BLM with their children. The findings are not especially interesting, but the framing of their inquiry is alarming. “The BLM movement is explicitly about racial injustice,” the authors claim. Parents who engage in “delegitimatizing narratives” about BLM are “actively upholding racial injustice through harmful racial ideologies that perpetuate racism.”

Behind the comically tedious repetition of the word racism is a thinly veiled proposition: That BLM is a righteous organization, and that public support for it should be treated as a normatively desirable goal among health professionals.

There is no indication that talking about BLM would facilitate improved mental or physical health. There are however indications that BLM objectives endanger both. BLM-inspired protests in 2020 resulted in 19 deaths and billions in property damage, while the “defund the police” movement ushered in a historic spike in violent crime.

Nevertheless, the APA offers their staunch support. In 2016, the APA website offered glowing coverage of the “hundreds of students and psychologists” who marched in solidarity with BLM while at the APA annual convention. Another article published by the APA that year cribs fictional narratives about the U.S. justice system promoted by BLM to probe how “psychological research findings offer ways to foster justice.” In 2020, APA President Sandra Shullman called for “systemic change” in response to what she labeled a “racism pandemic” in the United States.

The corruption of medicine as a vehicle for woke political activism is a pandemic that should truly concern the APA. Instead, they’re fueling it.