This person—a Black imam—sounds like he is MAD that folks are protesting for Black lives. Don’t let nobody’s sunken place theology lead you in a ditch. #BlackLivesMattter IS A MORAL DECLARATION, even for those who are coming into new awareness of that fact. @manrilla 
Look this ain’t hard. Are there opportunists in movement spaces who adopt movement rhetoric when it seems expedient to do so? ALL THE TIME. But if you are in it to win it, you engage that in ways that benefits the movement needs anyway. Hold folks feet to the fire long term.
If your employer/elected official/spiritual leader expresses a commitment in this moment to institutional change, make them PUBLICLY ACCOUNTABLE for follow up and lasting shifts when the cameras are gone. I don’t need people to love me, I need them to do right by me.
But I find it disingenuous for a man who has been bleating to all and sundry for YEARS now that Muslim “activists,” a group of folks who are LARGELY BLACK WOMEN—are morally misguided and don’t really understand Islam to be making public attempts to check bonafides for struggle.
These alt-akh Muslim brothers have been parroting a Republican talking points HARD for the last few years dismissing #BlackLivesMattter, #MeToo, etc. as “liberal,” “postmodern” ideologies to destroy the “moral fiber” of Islam & now they wanna gatekeep for the movement? FOH
And if we wanna get “Islamic” here—did the Prophet ﷺ castigate the folks who came into Islam on the occasion of Fath Mecca? Y’all don’t even follow your own alleged principles.
Moral of the story—being Black does NOT make a person an authority on Black struggle. It does not make them invested in the life chances of Black people other than themselves. All skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.
And if anyone is wondering why I took a public approach—these cats have all been pulled aside in private, repeatedly, FOR YEARS. They chose to stay on that bullshit, articulating and repeatedly doubling down on it IN PUBLIC. So here we are.
