The Black Lives Matter website (different from the new Black Liberation Movement) mostly presents an image of an organisation of the clenched fist and permanent protest. Its work with the police is an important exception, but otherwise that rhetoric seems unlikely to create sympathy and understanding among white communities, especially when black successes — e.g. anti-racist protocols across all institutions — remain unacknowledged. The Roman statesman Cicero understood where such disharmony could lead.
In 63 bc, Cicero was made consul to deal with his rival Catiline, who (Cicero claimed) was planning an armed insurrection and the economic reordering of the state. Under the banner of a ‘concord of the classes’ (concordia ordinum), Cicero appealed to the two top ordines — the senate and the equites (the state’s economic power bloc) — to stand together to resist it.
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