How did Black Lives Matter start?
Black Lives Matter is an organized motion dedicated to non-violent civil disobedience in protest against alleged incidents of police brutality against Afro-American people. A corporation known sincerely as “Black Lives Matter” exists as a decentralized community with over 30 chapters worldwide, while a larger Black Lives Matter motion exists consisting of diverse separate like-minded businesses such as Dream Defenders and Assata’s Daughters. The broader motion and its related agencies usually advocate towards police violence toward black people, in addition to for numerous different policy modifications considered to be associated with black liberation.
In 2013, the movement began with the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media after the acquittal of George Zimmerman within the capturing loss of life of African-American youngster Trayvon Martin in February 2012. The movement became nationally identified for avenue demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two African Americans: Michael Brown—resulting in protests and unrest in Ferguson, a city close to St. Louis—and Eric Garner in New York City. Since the Ferguson protests, participants in the movement have demonstrated towards the deaths of several other African Americans by using police movements and/or while in police custody. In the summer of 2015, Black Lives Matter activists became involved in the 2016 United States presidential election. The originators of the hashtag and contact to action, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, extended their task into a national community of over 30 nearby chapters between 2014 and 2016. The standard Black Lives Matter movement, however, is a decentralized community and has no formal hierarchy.
Killing of George Floyd
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-vintage black man, was killed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, throughout an arrest for allegedly the usage of a counterfeit bill. Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine mins at the same time as Floyd became handcuffed and lying face down, begging for his life and again and again saying “I cannot breathe”. A 2nd and third officer in addition constrained Floyd whilst a fourth avoided bystanders from intervening. During the very last 3 minutes Floyd became motionless and had no pulse at the same time as Chauvin unnoticed onlookers’ pleas to do away with his knee, which he did not do until medics advised him to.
The following day, after videos made by means of witnesses and safety cameras became public, all four officers had been fired. Two autopsies found Floyd’s dying to be a homicide. Chauvin become first of all charged with third degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, to which turned into later added second-degree murder; the three other officers have been charged with helping and abetting second degree homicide
Floyd’s dying caused demonstrations and protests in over 2,000 U.S. towns and across the world in opposition to police brutality, police racism, and lack of police accountability. In early June, the Minneapolis City Council took movement to prohibit chokeholds and require law enforcement officials to intervene against the use of excessive force by way of other officers, and voted an intent to update the police department with a “new community-based system of public safety.” The Minneapolis Police Chief canceled agreement negotiations with the police union and announced plans to convey in outside professionals to take a look at how the union contract may be restructured to provide transparency and “flexibility for authentic reform.”
Police Brutality
The prevalence of police brutality in the United States isn’t always comprehensively documented, and the information on police brutality are a good deal much less available. The few facts that exist consist of a 2006 Department of Justice report, which confirmed that out of 26,556 citizen complaints made in 2002 approximately excessive use of police pressure among large U.S. organizations (representing 5% of groups and 59% of officers), about 2,000 had been observed to have merit.
Other studies have shown that most police brutality goes unreported. In 1982, the federal authorities funded a “Police Services Study,” wherein over 12,000 randomly selected citizens had been interviewed in 3 metropolitan areas. The have a look at found that 13.6 percent of these surveyed claimed to have had reason to complain approximately police service (inclusive of verbal abuse, discourtesy and physical abuse) within the previous year. Yet simplest 30 percentage of those filed formal complaints. A 1998 Human Rights Watch file stated that in all 14 precincts it examined, the technique of filing a criticism turned into “unnecessarily tough and often intimidating.”
Statistics on using physical pressure by way of regulation enforcement are available. For example, an in depth U.S. Department of Justice report on police use of pressure launched in 2001 indicated that in 1999, “about 422,000 humans 16 years old and older had been predicted to have had contact with police in which pressure or the danger of pressure changed into used.” Research shows that measures of the presence of black and Hispanic people and majority/minority income inequality are associated definitely to common annual civil rights crook proceedings.
Police brutality may be associated with racial profiling. Differences in race, religion, politics, or socioeconomic status regularly exist between police and the citizenry. Some police officers can also view the population (or a specific subset thereof) as usually deserving of punishment. Portions of the populace may additionally understand the police to be oppressors. In addition, there’s a belief that sufferers of police brutality regularly belong to extraordinarily powerless groups, which includes minorities, the disabled, and the poor. According to a 2015 and 2016 mission with the aid of The Guardian, extra white people are killed via police in uncooked numbers than black people are, however after adjusting this finding based totally on the truth that the black populace is smaller than the white populace, two times as many black human beings are killed by means of police according to capita than white humans are. A 2019 take a look at showed that people of coloration face a better probability of being killed through police than white males and females do, that chance peaks in young adulthood, and guys of coloration face a nontrivial lifetime risk of being killed with the aid of police.
Race changed into suspected to play a role inside the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. Brown become an unarmed 18-year-old African American who became shot by using Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The predominately black metropolis erupted after the taking pictures. Riots following the taking pictures generated much debate approximately the remedy of African-Americans by using law enforcement.
A 2006 Human Rights Watch document discovered that 5 state jail systems allow the usage of aggressive, unmuzzled puppies on prisoners as part of cellular removal procedures.
Slavery of Black people in America
Slavery within the United States turned into the criminal group of human chattel enslavement, mostly of native Africans and African Americans, that existed inside the United States of America from the beginning of the nation till passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Slavery were practiced in British America from early colonial days and changed into legal in all thirteen colonies on the time those colonies fashioned the USA. Under the law, a black enslaved character was treated as property and might be offered, offered, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. States until 1865. As an economic system, slavery changed into largely replaced by sharecropping and convict leasing.
By the time of the American Revolution (1775–1783), the repute of enslaved human beings was institutionalized as a racial caste associated with African ancestry. The position of slavery under the U.S. Constitution (1789) turned into the maximum contentious trouble all through its drafting. Although the creators of the Constitution never used the word “slavery”, the final document, through the three-fifths clause, gave slave-proprietors disproportionate political electricity. During and straight away following the War, abolitionist laws had been passed in most Northern states and a motion developed to abolish slavery. All Northern states had abolished slavery in some manner by means of 1805; sometimes, abolition turned into a gradual process, and loads of people have been still enslaved in the Northern states as overdue because the 1840 Census. Some slaveowners—commonly within the Upper South—freed the humans they had enslaved, and philanthropists and charitable corporations bought and freed different enslaved humans. The Atlantic slave change turned into outlawed by using person states beginning in the course of the American Revolution. The import-trade changed into banned via Congress in 1808, even though smuggling was commonplace thereafter.
The rapid growth of the cotton industry in the Deep South after the invention of the cotton gin substantially increased call for the hard work of enslaved humans, and the Southern states endured as slave societies. The United States have become ever greater polarized over the difficulty of slavery, split into slave and unfastened states. Driven by using labor demands from new cotton plantations inside the Deep South, the Upper South sold over one million enslaved folks who were taken to the Deep South in a forced migration. The total population of enslaved human beings in the South eventually reached 4 million. As the USA expanded, the Southern states attempted to extend slavery into the new western territories to permit pro-slavery forces to hold their power within the nation. The new territories obtained through the Louisiana buy and the Mexican cession were the difficulty of major political crises and compromises. By 1850, the newly-rich, cotton-growing South was threatening to secede from the Union, and tensions persisted to rise. Slavery changed into defended inside the South as a “high-quality good”, and massive Protestant denominations cut up over the slavery trouble into regional organizations of the North and South.
When Abraham Lincoln received the 1860 election on a platform of halting the enlargement of slavery, seven states broke away to shape the Confederacy. Shortly afterward, the Civil War commenced whilst Confederate forces attacked the US Army’s Fort Sumter. Four extra slave states then seceded after Lincoln asked hands from them to make a retaliatory strike. Due to Union measures which includes the Confiscation Acts and the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the warfare successfully ended slavery, even before the group changed into banned by using constitutional amendment. Following the Union victory in the Civil War, slavery became made illegal in the United States upon the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.
Don’t other lives matter too?
The slogan “Black Lives Matter”, created as a riposte to the institutional racism that lingers on within the American justice system, has met with its very own controversy. Objectors have taken it to mean “black lives matter more”. The All Lives Matter marketing campaign, for instance, is one of several groups that have sprung as much as argue that each human life, no longer just those of black people, have to be given equal consideration.
In the wake of the mass taking pictures of five cops in Dallas in July, a new marketing campaign has taken root. Blue Lives Matter, a national corporation made up of cops and their supporters, places the blame for what they see as a “war on cops” squarely at the feet of the BLM motion and the Obama administration.
But even as the data tells a greater tremendous story – that the average number of cops deliberately killed each 12 months has in truth fallen to its lowest level during Barack Obama’s presidency – hate crime continues to be a daily reality inside the US, and many sense that state-wide policies to curb it must be extended beyond the black network to include the police themselves. “Police officers are a minority group, too,” former police officer Randy Sutton, a spokesperson for the Blue Lives Matter marketing campaign has been quoted as saying. Back in Dallas, Chief of Police David Brown has been praised for his efforts to boom transparency and network-friendly policing. He has been credited with a reduction in police-related shootings and fewer lawsuits about using force by police officers.
So far, the media has focused on the marketing campaign’s occasions and protests at the street, however Black Lives Matter has additionally been concerned in campaigning to exchange legislation.
As these days as August this 12 months, the movement launched extra than forty policy recommendations, inclusive of the demilitarization of regulation enforcement, reparation laws, the unionization of unregulated industries and the decriminalization of drugs.
Its efforts previous to that have had a few success. One example is the advent of a “civilian oversight board” in St Louis City, which evaluations and investigates citizens’ complaints and allegations of misconduct against the police.
Building on the legacy of the civil rights and LGBT movements, Black Lives Matter has created a brand new mechanism for confronting racial inequality. The motion additionally draws on feminist theories of intersectionality, which name for a unified reaction to problems of race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality.
The continuing struggle to respect black lives
Today, inspired by the Trump regime, white racists strut their assault rifles, their Confederate and swastika flags. Rollbacks mount. During this past summer alone, Trump inflamed the most retrograde elements among the police, urging them not to be “too nice” to suspects, and reversed an Obama executive order to again open the spigots through which surplus military equipment pours into the hands of police. Police departments can now acquire Army surplus bayonets as well as tanks free of charge. Black lives continue not to matter. And so it is not surprising that black activists and their allies are perplexed about how to proceed, and that some black writers go full-acerbity, exercising their bitterness talents to answer the question “How to Respond to White Folks Who Ask How They Can ‘Help.’” Meanwhile, right-wingers blame Black Lives Matter for “fostering the white identity movement.” In their jaundiced view, “white identity” is not backlash against the Obama presidency, it is imitative nationalism. At The Daily Caller, David Benkof considers whether “white identity is the result not of rejecting the worldview of Black Lives Matter, but of embracing it—and extending it to its logical conclusion?”
The fact remains that the black proportion of the American population changed relatively little between 1950 (10 percent) and 2010 (12.6 percent). A Black Lives Matter movement in a majority-black nation, like South Africa, would have different problems.
The states and cities are the main places where American institutions decide whether black lives matter. There are 17 American cities with populations of at least 200,000 where the black population numbers more than half, and an additional six where the black population runs between 40 percent and 50 percent. Of the ten largest, five (as of 2010) had black populations of at least 25 percent. In none of the ten largest is the black population a majority, nor—at current turnout rates—is the electorate. But these are also the cities to which immigrants and anti-racist millennials have flocked, making it possible to assemble progressive, multiracial coalitions. In such cities, black nationalism is not only unnecessary for reform, it would be counterproductive. Also, as Heather McGhee points out, BLM lacks infrastructure in the black church. The only way to win electoral majorities is with coalition politics. The same goes for implementing laws and regulations against the vast, opaque, irresponsible fortresses of power that run the criminal justice system with impunity.
There is no guarantee, no straightforward map for making black lives matter in practice—for changing institutions, practices, laws, regulations. Police are adroit with stalls and workarounds. They practice the dark arts of circumventing democratic controls. When the demonstrations stop and the headlines swerve away, crowd-pleasing reform gestures and formalities of public regulation cave in the face of police departments’ inertia. If any sections of government deserve the title “deep state” in America, they are the police.
Yet for all the grotesquerie that rises up under the banner “Make America Great Again,” we may someday surprise ourselves to discover that we have been launched into a revived Reconstruction. Perhaps we will discover that the new Jim Crow is a prologue not to a font of notional healing but to new civil rights advances; that the recrudescence of murderous racism is a passing—even a perversely necessary—phase in the movement toward Langston Hughes’s America, “the land that never has been yet—and yet must be.“ Perhaps, when we try to grasp where we stand in the long arc of the moral universe, we will find we stand at the beginning of the middle; that the civil rights era of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., CORE, and SNCC was not a high-water mark; that the road they traveled, the road of supple, nonviolent, cross-racial coalitions, is not easy but it is the only road in town.
My opinion
Black lives matter is not to say that other lives do not. Indeed, it is quite the reverse, it is to recognize that all lives do matter, and to acknowledge that African Americans are often targeted unfairly (witness the number of African Americans accosted daily for no reason other than walking through a White neighborhood including some, like young Trayvon Martin, who lost their lives) and that our society is not yet so advanced as to have become truly color blind. This means that many people of goodwill face the hard task of recognizing that these societal ills continue to exist, and that White privilege continues to exist, even though we wish it didn’t and would not have asked for it. I certainly agree that no loving God would judge anyone by skin color.
We recognize that Black lives are sacred, and they too, play an important role in restoring the natural world. We undoubtedly stand with and alongside of our Black relatives, because #BlackLivesMatter! When we come together as one, we can collectively transform the world into a more just, equitable, and balanced place for us all!
Source
https://www.pinterest.ph/pin/405394403928659867/
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes.html
https://theintercept.com/2020/06/27/black-lives-matter-police-brutality-history/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/opinion/black-lives-matter-protests.html