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In social movements of the past, “black” meant male and “women” meant white, but BLM is unapologetically refusing to let the plight of black women go unnoticed. Black women are incarcerated at three times the rate of white women. Recent deaths of black women in police custody generally haven’t received the widespread news coverage that black men killed by officers have. The names of these black women are hardly known: Raynette Turner; Joyce Curnell; Ralkina Jones and Kindra Chapman. But with the backing of BLM, the case of Sandra Bland, a black woman who died in a Texas jail cell after she was aggressively arrested in a minor traffic violation, was given nationwide coverage last month.
Still, the movement has remained too narrow in its focus. I understand why, as a new movement, BLM has focused on black pain and suffering. But to win broader appeal, it must work harder to acknowledge the humanity in the lives of others. The movement loses sympathy when it shouts down those who dare to utter “all lives matter.” Activists insist that this slogan diverts attention from their cause of racial justice, saying it puts the spotlight on people whose lives have always mattered.
But we should remember the words of King: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The civil rights movement was not exclusively a black movement for black people. It valued all human lives, even those of people who worked against us. I can’t believe that the life of a murdered white police officer, or an Asian child sold into sex slavery, or a hungry family in Appalachia are lives that don’t matter. In a sense, even the slogan “Black Lives Matter” is too broad because the movement overlooks black-on-black homicides, the leading cause of death for black males between the ages of 15 and 34. That horrific fact remains off the movement’s radar, for fear that it puts black men in a negative light. So which black lives really matter?
Admittedly, baby boomers like myself can be too judgmental, expecting a certain reverence for our past journey. But it is critical that these two generations find a middle ground. To reach their common goal, baby boomers and millennials must overcome their differences and pair the experience of the old with the energy of the young to change a criminal justice system that has historically abused both.
Xavier Johnson, a 32-year-old pastor in Dayton who monitors the movement for his doctoral dissertation, argues that boomers should do more to fix the generational misunderstanding. “When you look at this group 1 / 8BLM 3 / 8 from the bottom up, you see young people who are grieving from the pain inflicted on black bodies,” he told me. “They saw Michael Brown, someone their age, uncovered in the street for four hours baking in the hot sun. There was unarmed Eric Garner in New York, and Tamar Rice, a little kid police killed who was playing with a toy gun. They see churches on mostly every corner, but not where they are. They see a black president who they feel ignores them. They are showing righteous indignation for a system that does not value their humanity.”
Johnson encouraged me, and others in my cohort, to spend more time trying to understand BLM activists, instead of judging them. To help me gain insight, he referred me to a popular song. “Every movement has its own soundtrack,” he told me. “One of ours is by rapper Kendrick Lamar, who sings ‘We Gon’ Be Alright.’”
So I listened to the song, expecting it would be as uplifting as “We Shall Overcome. “ I was terribly disappointed. The beat was too harsh; the lyrics were nasty and misogynistic.
“Let me tell you about my life / Painkillers only put me in the twilight / Where pretty p---- and Benjamin is the highlight.”
Instead of imparting understanding, the song was a staunch reminder of the generation gap that afflicts civil rights activism, and the struggle it is going to take to overcome it.
babelipsss;8324464 said:I will never understand why forgiveness is so important.
ChillaDaKilla;8324458 said:MLK
Malcolm X and the nation
The NAACP
The Black Panthers
There were a lot of different groups why does revisionist history single out only MLK
