Introduction
Alicia Garza founded Black Lives Matter on July 13 in 2013 (Anderson 1). The social movement focused on the system of racism and gun violence that affects the lives of black citizens. The BLM Social Movement has had significant effects on the lives of African Americans and has contributed to various changes for the injustice of black lives.
The Emergence of Black Lives Matter Social Movement
The Black Lives Matter social movement started in the US and has gained the force of the electric power system. Americans used to have different attitudes towards the issues of racial inequality such that they incorporated the use of most hashtags to promote a message of equality. The police have been known to use force when handling black men and women, resulting in several high profile cases, especially in mid-2014 (Anderson 1).
The BLM movement began in Ferguson as what was meant to be a local movement erupted into a national force. When the grand jury failed to indict the policeman behind the death of Mike Brown Jr, which took place in Ferguson as well as its failure to indict a New York officer in spite of the evidence of the cop choking Eric Garner to death, the people felt their hopes of a better country shattered (Edrington, LaShara, and Lee 289).
Tens of thousands of individuals across America took part in non-violent civil disobedient acts in late 2014 and early 2015 with the declarations of BLM like the cry for freedom during the movement for civil rights (Darr 82).The “Black Lives Matter” phrase has been used countless times on social media. It was first since the first time the phrase was used in a comment on Facebook by a black communal coordinator after the George Zimmerman acquittal in July 2013 for killing Trayvon Martin, a black teenage boy (Glawe 1).
It took a lot of time to become prominent but is now widespread and has changed the broader lives of black Americans. According to research, the phrase appeared over 58 thousand intervals a day in about three weeks after Michael Brown’s death (Anderson 1). He was a black citizen who was also shot dead in August 2014 by a policeman in Missouri. The use of the phrase increased a few months later when a grand jury in the region failed to prosecute the person behind the abrupt death.
The phrase was then used over 1.7 million times after November 25 and continued to gain popularity on Twitter, especially around specific events. On December 2014, the Black Lives Matter phrase was used 189,210 times in a single day after the Grand Jury in New York did to prosecute the people involved in Eric Garner’s death (Lopez 1). In October 2015, the phrase appeared over 127,000 times on twitter after Senator Bernie Sander's defense of the movement during the presidential campaign debate and criticized institutional racism (Anderson 1).
Moreover, the BLM phrase was also used frequently to support the broader social movement or as a form of criticism towards the general racial issues. It experienced two external challenges, as well as the other internal struggles that every social change faces. Externally, it had to go through social threats brought about by the white-supremacist right. From the time the movement begun in 2013, social media users has used it in support of the broader movements or while making positive references to them (Edrington, LaShara, and Lee 289). Black Lives Matter hashtag made positive references to social change and were generally supportive of it. More than half of the representing tweets with the hashtag.
According to research, most positive tweets that used the phrase were in opposition to police brutality and broadly supported racial equality. Some of the best examples of this are the Mag-net’s February 2014 post and Byron Sigcho’s post in January 2015 (Eligon and Pérez-Peña 1). Mag-net is a network of social organizations that is calling people to action to respond to the dehumanization of African Americans.
Byron Sigcho was a Chicago-based activist who used the phrase in the effort of organizing protests. However, in some cases, people included the hashtag to criticize the movement. As the movement grew, the use of the phrase on social media increased as various tweets begun to object to it. Some critics expressed their disappointments on the campaign as they felt that it was favoring one race over the others.
Others thought that it was not making fair judgments towards all the police officers as only a few of them had displayed racist actions (Darr 82). It is evident in David Higgins' post on September 11, 2015, whereby he felt that the movement was not fair to the police as the officers save a lot of black lies every other day (Darr 82). Yet, people only concentrate on the few mistakes committed by the men in uniform.
Changes Brought About by the Black Lives Matter Movement
Black Lives Matter is mostly a human rights association than it is a civil rights undertaking. The campaign focuses more on the fight for the reorder of the society into one that allows African Americans to live free from regular dehumanization than it does about changing specific laws. But still, it has had some measurable impacts on the legal and political landscapes.
The movement has collectively since 2013 brought about local and national changes that include the expelling of crooked prosecutors. In Chicago, Anita Alvarez lost her bid for the re-election for Cook County prosecutor since she unaccountably did not charge the individuals that shot dead 68 people (Glawe 1). In Florida, Angela Corey also was forced to end her time as a state attorney after she did not convict George Zimmerman, who caused Trayvon Martin's death. She instead indicted Marissa Alexander, who fired a warning shot to stop her ex-husband from being abusive towards her.
The movement continues to reduce the injustice of black lives by ensuring the resignation of racist leaders. Missouri students who are part of the Black Lives Matter undertaking contributed to the departure of the Missouri University president because he did not adequately handle matters of racism (Eligon and Pérez-Peña 1). Black Lives Matter also obligated Democrats to reorganize the national podium and embrace matters like the criminal justice modification (Lopez 1).
Likewise, because of the movement, black leftist organizers were elected to public office. Additionally, the BLM society relentlessly worked on the matter of police dishonesty. It contributed to the release of the unprecedented justice department reports that confirmed the presence of police exploitation in cities like Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, and Ferguson.
The BLM association has also had an immeasurable, widespread cultural impact. It was the first American social undertaking to successfully make use of the internet as the mass mobilization device. It is the movement that popularized the interceded mobilization. Using internet tools, the campaign led the way for other actions such as Me Too and Times Up to succeed.
Black Lives Matter benefited a lot from social media as it helped the program expand and fortify internally (Mundt, Ross, and Burnett 205). The campaign was intricately tied to the digital networks, with over fifty organizations having a shared platform and vision for Black liberation as well as to end police brutality. Black Lives Matter also changed the injustice of black lives by ensuring the enacting of laws that address police violence.
Forty states have enacted new legislation since 2014, and the bail reform has taken place across the country (Gitlin 1). Reformers are nowadays doing away with money bail as they believe it is discriminatory against the poor, results in wrongful convictions, and fuels mass incarceration. The introduction and extensive circulation of body cameras are also a result of the BLM movement. However, equipment is not everything since the footages are not always made public.
Moreover, with the introduction of consent decrees, the civil rights department managed to improve police practices. By the time a federal judge lifted a consent decree in 2013 in Los Angeles, LAPD had transformed from the troubled department with a severely damaged reputation into a national and international standard of policing (Darr 82). These reforms were made possible by the Black Lives Matter undertaking that ensured the merciless beating of a young black American Rodney King in 1992 was widespread, ensuring that police brutality was put out in the open.
Nonetheless, the BLM movement has not been entirely successful in the fight for equal rights and in completely changing the injustice of Black lives. African Americans still do not enjoy equal life chances. They are still discriminated against in terms of equal job prospects, equal access to health care, housing, and education. There is also no same treatment in the system of criminal justice as well as the corresponding right of treatment by public agencies.
The government policy has had a significant role in the establishment as well as reinforcing unequal housing, which results in unequal wealth. When it comes to capital punishment, it becomes evident that there is still unequal justice. Blacks make up only 13 percent of the American populace, but about 42 percent of them are presently on death row while 34 percent have been executed (Gitlin 1).
The connection between the death penalty and race exemplifies the patterns of discrimination that exist in the criminal justice structure in terms of the race of the defendant and the victim. False imprisonments are also still frequent, and they lead to the systematic humiliation of the black community. The criminal justice system has a multitude of inequities, which include the incarceration rates, rates of prosecuted and unprosecuted murders, bail requirements, and so on.
The association is now moving towards identifying the value of electoral power. Black Lives Matter supports various organizations and devotes their demands in the matters of community control, political power, clinical justice, and reparations by lifting the voices of Black people and encouraging them to demonstrate their ability (Blum 683). Contrary to what the police and most white racists like to say, Black Lives Matter is not meant to single out black lives as well as should not be viewed as identity politics. It is not used to indicate that only black lives matter but instead to show that black experiences are also meaningful in life and even matter.
The idea behind the movement was basically to defend human rights and ensure everyone enjoys equal rights in spite of their color and race. It means that one does not have to be African to recognize that black lives matter. At the same time, nobody needs to be White to have the notion that White lives also matter. Black Lives Matter is a phrase used by the movement to indicate that all lives matter without excluding black lives. It does not affirm or represent the iniquities or virtues of any specific social identity. It is the pursuit of equality.
The Black Lives Matter program matters to the American people and has changed the injustice of black lives in various ways. Not everything that was done in the name of the action serves the higher goal of increasing equality of all races. Some have used the phrase to broaden the gap between races and add to the disrespect towards black African Americans. The Black Lives Matter movement is a perpetual fight for civil rights that will never end until every American enjoys civil and human rights.
Conclusion
It is easy to reflect on the few years of the Black lives Matter movement and consider the many ways that it has influenced the contemporary moment of Americans resulting in a framework for the kind of democracy in action that people should expect. It has transformed how Americans talk about police violence as well as how they look a...
