In the wake of a perverse constellation of deaths of black Americans at the hands of the police and vigilantes, America’s current incarnation of a civil rights movement, organised under the rallying cry of ‘Black Lives Matter’, is more powerful than ever, says a New York Times news analysis published on Friday.
Written by the newspaper’s staff writer Jenna Wortham, the article quoted Oakland-based civil rights organizer Alicia Garza, who coined the phrase in a 2013 Facebook post after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, as saying, “Seven years ago, we were treated like we were too radical, too out of the bounds of what is possible… And now, countless lives later, it’s finally seen as relevant.”
The urgency and validity of the movement have finally been recognized, she told the writer, as the country has reached “its boiling point.”
For nearly 10 days straight, Americans have been gathering and marching to protest unchecked state violence against black people. Protests have erupted in virtually every American state, in small towns and major cities alike, and in Europe and New Zealand. Dozens of brands published social media posts vocalizing their support for the Black Lives Matter movement or against racism.
Some, including those from Ben & Jerry’s, “Sesame Street” and Nickelodeon, felt more explicit and powerful than others. Taylor Swift responded to President Trump’s “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” tweet by accusing him of threatening violence after years of “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism.” The “Star Wars” actor John Boyega gave an emotional speech at a protest in London.
This is the biggest collective demonstration of civil unrest around state violence in our generation’s memory. The unifying theme, for the first time in America’s history, is at last: Black Lives Matter.
Why now?
Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil rights organization Color of Change, speculated that it was the stark cruelty of the video of George Floyd’s death that captivated the country. The pain was palpable, the nonchalance in Derek Chauvin’s face, chilling. “The police officer is looking into the camera as he’s pushing the life out of him,” Robinson said.
In Minnesota, black people are four times as likely to be killed by law enforcement as white people. Floyd’s death shares a grim geographical lineage with other black deaths that rocked the nation: The place where he died is roughly a 15-minute drive from Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul, Minn., where Philando Castile was shot by a police officer in 2016 while his fiancée streamed the encounter live on Facebook. The year before that, Jamar Clark was shot by the police as they tried to handcuff him as he lay on the ground, in the same vicinity as where Floyd gasped for his final breaths beneath a white police officer’s knee.
“The reason this got so big is because it has been happening,” Junauda Petrus-Nasah, an author and organizer from Minneapolis, where Floyd lived and was killed, told the writer. On the third day of protests, when a police station house was lit on fire, “it felt like a glorious poetic rage,” she said.
The pandemic added its own accelerant to the mix. For roughly three months before Floyd’s death, Americans were living in a state of hypervigilance and anxiety, coping with feelings of uncertainty, fear and vulnerability — things many black Americans experience on a regular basis. Information about how to avoid the virus was distressingly sparse and confusing as local and federal officials sparred about the severity of the pandemic and how best to contain it.
Meanwhile, a clearer — and bleaker — picture of the country began to emerge. The spoils of privilege among some were in stark contrast to the lack of it among others. While some Americans fled cities to second homes, millions of others filed for unemployment and formed lines at food banks. Empathy for the plight of essential workers, a category in which black people are overrepresented, swelled tremendously. Data revealed that black and Latinx communities were being disproportionately ravaged by the pandemic.
At the same time, social distancing meant much of daily life — school, work, meetings, parties, weddings, birthday celebrations — was migrating to screens. It seems we’d just created newfound trust and intimacy with our phones and computers when the gruesome parade of deaths began a procession across them. Ahmaud Arbery was chased down and killed in Glynn County, Ga., on Feb. 23. Breonna Taylor was in bed when the police entered her apartment and sprayed her with bullets in Louisville, Ky., on March 13. Nina Pop was found stabbed to death in Sikeston, Mo., on May 3. Tony McDade was gunned down by the police in Tallahassee, Fla., on May 27.
By the time outrage and despair over Floyd’s death filled our feeds, the tinderbox was ready to explode.
If the country had been open per usual, some organizers told the writer, the distractions of pre-pandemic life might have kept people from tuning into the dialogues online. Several said this is the most diverse demonstration of support for Black Lives Matters that they can recall in the movement’s seven-year history. On May 28, Twitter told the writer, more than eight million tweets tagged with #BlackLivesMatter were posted on the platform. By comparison, on Dec. 4, 2014, nearly five months after Eric Garner died at the hands of a police officer on Staten Island, the number of tweets tagged with #BlackLivesMatter peaked at 146,000.
Finally, there’s the sheer volume of video documentation of the police atrocities at the protests themselves, which has only served to reaffirm critiques of unbridled uses of force and underscore the cognitive dissonances.
Our social feeds have become like security camera grids, each with images of a dystopia: in a park in the nation’s capital, peaceful protesters dispersed with chemical irritants and smoke canisters, clearing a path for the president, who then posed for a photograph nearby. In Philadelphia, police officers pelting demonstrators trapped on the side of a highway with canisters of tear gas. In New York, two police vehicles accelerating into a crowd. In Atlanta, police officers breaking into a car and tasering two black college students. Every day, people with cameras have offered a raw and terrifying supplement to television and newspaper coverage.
Thenjiwe McHarris, a strategist for the Movement for Black Lives, said this kind of documentation and distribution is unveiling the sadism that black Americans regularly face. “We used to do cop watch patrols, and we would go around in teams and document it and show the country what was happening to our people,” she told the writer. “Obviously, by now, we know that cameras don’t deter the police, but what they do show is extremely important for the rest of America to see.”
The movement drew an additional boost from the digital interactions of racially diverse communities. Melissa Brown, a postdoctoral fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, observed that as black Twitter users have become increasingly interested in Korean pop music, there has been more of an exchange between black and Korean communities online.
This month, after the Dallas Police Department used a tweet to encourage people to report “illegal activity” to its application, K-pop fans flooded the app with videos of their favourite singers (known as fancams). Though the department wouldn’t confirm why, the service was temporarily taken offline.
Last, while much of the nation’s attention drifted away from Black Lives Matter, organizers and activists weren’t dormant. Garza told the writer that the movement’s first generation of organizers has been working steadily to become savvier and even more strategic over the past seven years, and have been joined by motivated younger leaders.
Garza said she hopes the current momentum carries the movement forward without tempering it. “We can go one of two ways,” she said. “The ‘law and order’ route or the route where we make black lives matter because we all want them to matter. And have access to the things we deserve, and peace and justice in our communities.”
