Social Justice Movements: The Black Lives Matters Movement

Many social justice movements have sprouted up in recent times as social issues affecting minority groups have come to light. Unfortunately, these movements face intense questioning and doubt from today’s society about their actions and intentions. The Black Lives Matter Movement is a big target of intense scrutiny in media because of its actions and platform as a budding movement. The Black Lives Matter Movement (shortened to BLM Movement) was created in an effort to fight against injustices African Americans feel face them, such as police brutality, low socioeconomic status, and unfair prejudices and stigmas that surround their lives. The BLM Movement doesn’t seek to oppress or terrorize people, as some seem to believe. The Black Lives Matter

The BLM Movement was created in 2012 as a result of the death of Trayvon Martin, the acquittal of George Zimmerman and the posthumous trial of Trayvon Martin for his own death. Many African Americans saw the posthumous trial as dehumanizing and expressed their views online. Thus, the hashtag BlackLivesMatter, which has become extremely controversial in recent time, was created and the movement was given its name (Cullors). The BLM Movement isn’t just people doing one or two small protests as a result of a few unfair rules, it’s a community of people who feel they haven’t been respected throughout history, politically, economically, and socially, fighting back against the constraints of society to gain true political socioeconomic equality. The disrespect against African Americans of the past can’t be denied; slavery and Jim Crow laws were taken away, but the BLM Movement wants to fight against and eventually rid themselves of the residual and implicit racism that still dwells within society. According to the official Platform

The claim that the BLM movement can somehow be racist is completely invalid. The idea of racism comes from a place of power in society and often resulted in African Americans of the past being actively discriminated against. In a PBS Newshour article, Mychal Denzel Smith explains that Millennials often think of racism as a personal matter, as one person actively discriminating against a marginalized group and believing stereotypes about it, but they don’t believe in institutionalized exploitation and discrimination, and they’ve become comfortable with the idea that “reverse racism” is legitimate. However, he says “‘reverse racism’ only makes sense through the erasure of power dynamics in racism, which has been accomplished through the teaching of racism as a strictly interpersonal issue of hatred and intolerance”(Smith). People fighting against the BLM Movement often fight the social media hashtag, BlackLivesMatter, with their own hashtag, AllLivesMatter, which doesn’t seem like such a harmless phrase on its own, but in the context that many use it in, it’s often used as a way to discredit BLM movement and make the claim that the movement