The Slogan Black Lives Matter Is Right and Exact

Hotep!!! (An Afrikan word for peace)!!!

Take notes!!!!!!!

"But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.” -Ta-Nehisi Coates

Black Lives Matter!!! Black Lives Matter!!! Black Lives Matter!!! A slogan chanted and used by Black people, activists, and by the human family to force White people and the world to respect Black humanity in the millennium. The chant, Black Lives Matter, is now a world-wide phenomenon. It is as popular, and some say more popular, as slogans such as Black Power, All Power to the People, Stop the Violence, No Justice No Peace, Stop Police Brutality in the Black Community, and Peace in the Streets. However, some people in America, and around the world, are confused about Black Lives Matter. Many of us misconstrue the slogan Black Lives Matter with the Black Lives Matter organization. No diss to the members of the Black Lives Matter organization, but we need to be clear on the differences between the Black Lives Matter organization and the slogan Black Lives Matter. The slogan Black Lives Matter has taken a life of his own. It has been taken out of the hands of the Black Lives Matter organization and into the hands of the people. The chant Black Lives Matter is separate from the Black Lives Matter organization.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation organization started out as a hashtag on the social media website called Facebook by a Black woman named Alicia Garza on July 13, 2013. She wrote a letter to Black people to help us understand that our lives matter like everyone else in America. In the Guardian newspaper, titled, “#BlackLivesMatter: the Birth of a New Civil Rights Movement”, dated on Sunday, July 19, 2015. Garza told the digital newspaper, “I logged onto Facebook. I 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. She was then joined by two other Black women named Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi” (https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/19/blacklivesmatter-birth-civil-rights-movement).

They were all outrage over the not guilty verdict of Trayvon Martin’s murderer George Zimmerman. Trayvon Martin was a unarmed Black teenager killed on February 26, 2012 in a gated residential community called, Retreat at Twin Lakes, while visiting family by George Zimmerman-a racist neighborhood watch coordinator in Sanford, Florida. They all saw the Trayvon Martin case as long history of racial violence plaguing Black people since our sojourn in America from enslavement to the present. To get the word out for the hashtag Black Lives Matter, her close friend Patrisse Cullors went to work creating the hashtag-Black Lives Matter. Garza said, “[her] close friend, Patrisse Cullors, read the post in a motel room 300 miles away from Oakland that same night. Cullors, also a community organiser working in prison reform, started sharing Garza’s words with her friends online. She used a hashtag each time she reposted: #blacklivesmatter. The following day, Garza and Cullors spoke about how they could organise a campaign around these sentiments.” She further said that the two of them wanted Black Lives Matter to become a rallying cry for Black people. But she said they also wanted to make it a mass movement for the world community. Garza said, “ [it was] a call to action.” She saw the hashtag Black Lives Matter as way to bring attention to unchecked racial violence in Black America. Garza further said. “To make sure we are creating a world where black lives actually do matter. They reached out to Opal Tometi, another activist they knew in the field of immigrant rights. The three women started by setting up Tumblr and Twitter accounts and encouraging users to share stories of why #blacklivesmatter. Garza made protest signs with block capital letters and put them in the window of a local shoe shop. Cullors led a march down Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills with a banner emblazoned with the same hashtag. The slogan started gaining traction. Then, on 9 August 2014, a little over a year after Zimmerman was allowed to walk free from court, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Officer Darren Wilson had fired 12 rounds into the body of the young man. Brown had been unarmed. Protests broke out the day after Brown’s shooting. There was some unrest and looting. Cars were vandalised, commercial properties broken into. Police officers in riot gear took to the streets. Watching the drama unfold on TV, Garza had that same sickening feeling she’d had when she heard of Trayvon Martin’s death. Along with Cullors and Tometi, she organised a freedom ride to Ferguson under the auspices of the #blacklivesmatter campaign. More than 500 people signed up from 18 different cities across America. When they reached Ferguson, Garza was astonished to see her own phrase mirrored back at her on protest banners and shouted in unison by people she had never met” (Ibid).

A new slogan, a new movement and a new organization was born out of the hashtag Black Lives Matter.

Herbert Ruffin, a Syracuse University historian, told the Business Insider magazine that Black Lives Matter created a new millennium approach to fighting an old social justice battle against American racial and police violence. The article is titled, “Black Lives Matter is a case study in a new kind of leadership — here’s how the movement grew to international prominence in just 7 years,” dated June 6, 2020. Ruffin said, “that Black Lives Matter approached mobilizing the masses differently from other activist groups. Black Lives Matter was the first group to emphasize social media as a force driving change. While other groups focused on organizing courthouse demonstrations and Change.org petitions, Black Lives Matter took it one step further and created communities on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, according to Ruffin” (https://www.businessinsider.com/black-lives-matter-history-social-media-movement-growth-2020-6).

The two tragic events of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida and Mike Brown of Ferguson, Missouri kicked off Black Lives Matter as a new national movement established on the internet, but spilled into the streets. (On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old unarmed Black man, was fatally shot by 28-year-old white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the city of Ferguson, Missouri.)

However, for many frustrated Black youth community activists protesting racist police violence in the Black community out of Ferguson, they began to parlay the Black Lives Matter rally chant into a massive organization during this time. Many people started to join the Black Lives Matter organization. Then Garza, Cullors, and Tometi worked to organize chapters around the country. A website and a list of demands were established.

But many people struggled to find the necessary leadership to direct this new movement. The founders of the Black Lives Matter organization argued that their movement would be leaderless. They said because of the targeted killings of Black leaders in the past by White hegemony, their organization world be founded on a leaderless collective. Therefore, the Black Lives Matter organization had loosely connected leaders and members.

But some veteran activists Black leaders believed that this is a youthful mistake.

Seasoned Black community activist leaders believe that the founders and members were making an error of ignoring the totality of the history of Black freedom struggles. Well organized Black freedom organizations in past were able to challenge and change many racist laws and attitudes in the Afrikan American community. Without a careful understanding of this history, many organizations that came after the Black freedom organizations of the past, failed miserably trying to enact progressive change in America such as the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In history, a leaderless organization agenda can fall victim to disorganization, opportunism and eventually self implode without well studied good and accountable leadership. And it did. Because of these situations, the Black Lives Matter organization began to experience major internal problems and possible co-optation by America under President Barack Obama’s administration. (Black Lives Matter developed under the country’s first elected Black President.)

After five years of its existence as a powerful force of social justice and Black liberation activism, the Black Lives Matter organization cease to be a major vehicle for Black people looking to challenge white supremacy in White America and in policing departments in the Black community.

Kecanga-Yamahtta Taylor of the Black Agenda Report wrote an extensive analysis on the failures of leaderless like the Black Lives Matter collective organization, titled, “Five Years Later: Do Black Lives Matter,” dated on October 6, 2019. She writes, “the bigger problem was the movement’s inability to create the space to debate and work out the tension between reform and revolution, or more crudely between body cameras and prison abolition. All movements are confronted with existential debates concerning their viability and longevity. There are always crucial decisions to be made concerning their direction and the best route to get there. But without the opportunity to collectively assess, discuss, or ponder what the movement is or should be, those political disagreements can sometimes devolve into bitter personal attacks.

Among movement activists, acrimonious personal disputes were expressed throughout the social media landscape, creating an archival trove of material for state agents. It also fueled animosity and discord between people who had every interest in collaboration and solidarity. Callout culture summoned attention to every transgression, armed with the belief that the act was committed with the worst of intentions. The goodwill that many imagined and wanted to rest at the heart of the movement could only be built upon trust and genuine relationships. These were difficult to build without formal structures, clear responsibilities, and mechanisms for leadership and accountability.

Indeed, the “organic democratic accountability” that Packnett insisted on was absent. The lack of clear entry points into movement organizing, and the absence of any democratically accountable organization or structure within the movement, left very few spaces to evaluate the state of the movement, delaying its ability to pivot and postponing the generalization of strategic lessons and tactics from one locality to the next or from one action to the next. Instead, the emphasis on autonomy, even at the cost of disconnection from the broader movement, left each locality to its own devices to learn and conjure its own strategy. The BLM movement claimed to have no leaders, embracing the “horizontalism” of its Occupy predecessor. But all movements have leaders; someone or some group of individuals are deciding that this or that thing will or will not happen; someone decides how this or that resource is used or not used; someone decides whether this or that meeting will or will not happen. The issue is not whether there are leaders, it is whether those leaders are accountable to those they represent. It also matters the way in which those leaders are determined as leaders. In the case of the meeting with Obama, it appears that the attendees were selected by the Obama administration as individuals or organizations they determined were the leadership of the movement. Perhaps this was unavoidable, but the lack of accountability to the ordinary people who made up the mass of the movement could cause confusion or hard feelings. But the insistence that there was no leadership even as people are brandished as leaders by the political establishment obscured how decisions were being made and who was to account for them. These problems deepened when it began to feel as if the movement was going in the wrong direction or was stagnant, as it became difficult to determine who to look to for guidance”(https://blackagendareport.com/five-years-later-do-black-lives-matter).

(Brittany Packnett, who was active in St Louis and Ferguson in 2014, was a Black Lives Matter leader that believed that the organization should have met with the President Obama to challenge his administration to change the racist culture within institutions in America. While other Black Lives Matter organizers believed that meeting with the President was supporting White hegemony.)

Unfortunately, many people in the world are confused by the social justice and Black liberation protests under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Some of these people are even posting on social media that we as Black people should stay away from Black Live Matter. They argue that Black Lives Matter sold out by compromising to White hegemony. I have not done enough research to completely determine that argument. But I do know this about the organization of Black Lives Matter. It is not directing, leading, nor organizing the racial and police violence mass protests since the May 25, 2020 murder of a unarmed Black man named George Floyd by the Minneapolis, Minnesota police department. However, I would hope that the mass outpouring of protests under the banner of Black Lives Matter will be organized into a political movement that fights for progressive policies in government, fights for Afrikan studies as a requirement to graduate from high schools and universities, fights for progressive candidates running for offices in government, fights for reparations, fights for the freeing of Black political political prisoners and New Afrikan prisoners of war in the US, fights for police reforms, and fights for civilian complaint review boards with subpoena power. But most importantly, I hope that Black Lives Matter activists transform our righteous commitments to social justice and Black liberation in the Afrikan American community into a fight for Black power, Black freedom and for Black self - determination from White domination.

The Black Live Matter organization is separate from the chant Black Lives Matter. Within their sphere of the Black Lives Matter organization, they may be still working to end racial and police violence in the Black community. I don’t know. And many of us in the Black community don’t know.

This is why some people in the Black community have raised concerns about the direction and the leadership of the Black Lives Matter organization. And rightly so. Some Black people have expressed that their national leadership is missing in action, especially under alt-right wing White nationalist President Donald C. Trump. But I think that discussion should happen behind closed doors in the Black community. Therefore, I am not going to dig deeper into that conversation. I think it is unproductive and reactionary to discuss tactics and strategy for Black freedom and Black empowerment on line or in the press.

However, despite our issues with the Black Lives Matter organization itself, the slogan that Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created is right and exact!!!!!!!! We must keep pushing the phrase BLACK LIVES MATTER to the world!!! Why? Because White hegemony is using White supremacy to make the world fictitiously believe that Black people’s humanity, our history, our culture, our languages, our spirituality do not matter!!!!!!!! White hegemony continuously says to the world that Blackness is inferior; and Whiteness is superior in every institution created in the western world, particularly the institutions of education and policing agencies. The disease of White supremacy has been systematically institutionalized in the form of racism to justify the racial oppression and mistreatment of Black people for centuries to the present. This is why George Floyd, and many Black people, are being murdered either at the hands of a racist police system or in the minds of a racist educational system. We must force the world to respect Black humanity by chanting, rallying, demonstrating, politizing, and organizing under the slogan of Black Lives Matter.

Hotep!!!

-Bashir Muhammad Akinyele is a History and Afrikana Studies teacher at Weequahic High School in Newark, NJ. He is also the co-coordinator for ASCAC's (the Association for Study of Classical African Civilizations) Study Group Chapter in Newark, NJ. (https://ascac.org/).

Note: Spelling Afrika with a k is not a typo. Using the k in Afrika is the Kiswahili way of writing Africa. Kiswahili is a Pan -Afrikan language. It is spoken in many countries in Afrika. Kiswahili is the language used in Kwanzaa. The holiday of Kwanzaa is celebrated from December 26 to January 1.