After following the Black Lives Matter movement for some time now, and seeing that a lot of what they're doing doesn't get much coverage here, I've decided to try a new diary series: #BlackLivesMatter Digest.
I will post diaries regularly with one solitary goal: to widen exposure of the work that is being done by the #BLM movement and its associates.
Here is what I will not do:
1. Offer commentary. The purpose of these diaries is to get out of the way of the leaders and participants of the #BLM movement.
2. Include anything related to the presidential election. There will be no coverage of or advocacy for or against any of the presidential contenders.
3. Assume I'm doing this well and don't need any help! Please share links in the comments or message me if there's something I'm not covering or that I'm covering incorrectly or incompletely. I'm very well aware that my privilege will provide an unintentional filter to this coverage, so please call me out on it when necessary.
Since this is the first post, I want to start by linking to the Guardian, which wrote a fantastic profile on the founders of #BlackLivesMatter:
Alicia Garza was in a bar in Oakland, California, drinking bourbon when the verdict came in. It was July 2013 and she had been following the trial of George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, who had shot dead a 17-year-old African-American by the name of Trayvon Martin in February of the preceding year. Martin had been unarmed, on his way back from a 7/11 convenience store where he had just bought himself an iced tea and a bag of Skittles...
“Everything went quiet, everything and everyone,” Garza says now. “And then people started to leave en masse. The one thing I remember from that evening, other than crying myself to sleep that night, was the way in which as a black person, I felt incredibly vulnerable, incredibly exposed and incredibly enraged. Seeing these black people leaving the bar, and it was like we couldn’t look at each other. We were carrying this burden around with us every day: of racism and white supremacy. It was a verdict that said: black people are not safe in America.”
Garza logged on to Facebook. She wrote an impassioned online message, “essentially a love note to black people”, and posted it on her page. It ended with: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”
The article goes on to emphasize the importance of social media:
“We have a lot of leaders,” insists Garza, “just not where you might be looking for them. If you’re only looking for the straight black man who is a preacher, you’re not going to find it.”
Instead, the new civil rights movement combines localised power structures with an inclusive ethos that consciously incorporates women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer activists. DeRay Mckesson, one of the most high-profile activists with a Twitter following of 176,000, is a gay man. Garza identifies as queer (her husband is transgender).
The new movement is powerful yet diffuse, linked not by physical closeness or even necessarily by political consensus, but by the mobilising force of social media. A hashtag on Twitter can link the disparate fates of unarmed black men shot down by white police in a way that transcends geographical boundaries and time zones. A shared post on Facebook can organise a protest in a matter of minutes. Documentary photos and videos can be distributed on Tumblr pages and Periscope feeds, through Instagrams and Vines. Power lies in a single image. Previously unseen events become unignorable.
Moving on to current events, International Business Times reports on a massive demonstration in Minneapolis on Friday, July 31:
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets Friday in Minneapolis calling for justice for the death of Sandra Bland, the black woman found dead in a Texas jail following a confrontational traffic stop. Authorities determined Bland committed suicide while in custody, but her case has drawn widespread criticism from those who said she was unjustly detained, arguing her case highlighted the poor treatment of black people at the hands of the police.
At the Minneapolis demonstration, protesters could be heard chanting: "You can't stop the revolution, black power is the solution." In another video shared on Twitter, protesters chanted: "Black lives matter, black lives matter," which has become a slogan of the movement critical of police treatment of black communities.
Twitter is something of an epicenter for #BLM activism. Check out these tweets from
Unicorn Riot that captured some powerful moments from the protest:
BuzzFeed ran a piece last week on #BLM activists meeting in Cleveland and planning the next steps of their growing movement:
“We like to think of it as we are not a movement that is not leaderless, but leader-full,” said Dante Barry, the executive director of Million Hoodies for Justice.
This poses obvious challenges, none of which the movement is immune to, activists say. But Barry says that since Black Lives Matter is led by LGBT women who do not traditionally have access to power in “patriarchal spaces,” that power is usually distributed evenly.
And activists are aware of problems that have felled other large, dispersed, progressive movements. Leaders within the movement have even adopted a set of refrains to address some of those problems:
“Turn up on the state, turn down on each other.”
— leaders hope it reminds activists to quell spells of infighting or disagreement
“Find your lane and stay in it.”
— a reminder that there is plenty of work to be done in varied settings requiring a range of skill sets and experience levels
“Low ego, high impact.”
— a challenge to leaders within the movement to stay focused on “wins,” or changes that come as a direct result of organizing
“There’s so many” possible obstacles, Yates said. “We know a lot of folks with knowledge of what the freedom fighter that came before us went through, so we know what they face internally as well as externally. We can talk to them and rely on our own experience that tell us it’s not going to be easy.”
Tyrone Talbert, a New York-based minister and participant in Union Theological Seminary’s Millennial Leaders Project, says Black Lives Matter is particularly vulnerable because in its infancy, there is far more for the movement to gain than lose. “While having at international vision for freedom, the movement is probably going be tempted to lose its potency,” he said. “That’s why the lives of black women and all black lives have to be at the forefront.”
Imani Gandy, Senior Legal Analyst at
RH Reality Check, wrote
an article lambasting the misappropriation of #BLM by anti-choicers:
The Black Lives Matter movement has provided the perfect opportunity for anti-choice activists to demonstrate how truly grotesque they are and how little they care about or respect Black women.
For years, anti-choice radicals have erected billboards in Black communities or circulated Internet memes on social media that read “Abortion is Black genocide” or “The most dangerous place for a Black child is in the womb.” But more recently, anti-choice radicals have misappropriated #BlackLivesMatter, and have added #HandsUpDontCrush, #UnbornLivesMatter, and “#BlackLivesDontMatter” to the quiver of anti-choice arrows that they fire off to shame Black women for exercising their fundamental right to make their own reproductive choices...
This sort of misappropriation is not only offensive, it’s ultimately hollow: When it comes to advocating for policies that would actually support Black women and help them raise healthy children, far too many anti-choice activists are silent. But when it comes to using Black women as a cudgel to make a point about the evils of abortion and Planned Parenthood, it’s damn near impossible to shut these activists up.
Finally, Bree Newsome, the activist that gained widespread notoriety by removing the Confederate Flag from the South Carolina statehouse, has composed
"#StayStrong: A Love Song to Freedom Fighters."
Follow the link to hear it on SoundCloud!