Black Lives Matter on social media

BY ELLE PROPP

Staff Reporter

The Black Lives Matter movement has surged to the frontline of American news. For me, its been at the forefront my whole life.

Racially motivated police brutality has been an issue since the idea of policing began in America. After the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis white police officer on May 25th, 2020, worldwide protests broke out against police brutality. Coming with the revival of the Black Lives Matter movement, who advocate against such instances, comes the rise of social media activism. With the nationwide attention and shrouded behind activism posts however, lie a devastating impact on the Black community.

I think undoubtedly, being Black in the peninsula isn’t that easy. If it isn’t driving an hour and a half to find someone who can actually do my hair, it’s the fact that I can’t even find cajun hot sauce in any of the grocery stores around here. It’s the fact that I had my first Black teacher in Junior year. Sequoia, which is located in almost the exact midpoint of the peninsula, isn’t subject to any change in. Though we may boast our racial differences, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, Black students make up about 1% of the student body. In fact, we’ve got the lowest percentage out of the entire district. So for the 99% that are reading this, welcome. I want to talk to you for a bit about where digital activism goes awry.

Let me bring it all the way back for a second. Disney’s Princess and the Frog premiered in the United States on December 11th, 2009, three days before my seventh birthday. A few months prior, one way or another, I found myself with the knowledge that this film had Disney’s first Black princess. We had a mermaid, before we had a Black princess. I didn’t know the deeper implications of this, as I was a kid who could not yet divide, or multiply. But this fact stuck with me.

I say this, to inform you that this is not a normal burden for a first grader. A normal burden is forgetting to capitalize the beginning of a sentence, or quarreling over tetherball rules. Why did my burden have to be race? Why did I know that that was wrong? When I told my older cousins this fact, trying to seem all adult like I thought they were, they shrugged. They didn’t see a problem. “Really?” I thought to myself. “We had a fish princess before this?”

I was eleven when the Fergueson unrest broke out, over the fatal shooting of Michael Photo credit: Pexel.com

Brown, by a white police officer. The unrest when I knew my classmates had publicly used began in the end of the summer, when I was racial slurs against Black people without and just starting middle school. My classrooms repercussions, when my hair was pulled and were bubbly and upbeat, a direct contrast prodded after being deemed an afro, when to my home life. Fergueson was a common I was told that I wasn’t Black enough to even discussion voiced with concern, and disgust enter Oakland, as I was told “Black lives don’t between my Black relatives. Yet no one spoke matter.” I tried to laugh along, I tried fighting about it in school. I learned the social precedent back, I tried to take it seriously, but nothing that summer in the white-dominated parts of worked to stop the feeling of being less-than. I the Bay Area; Black culture, Black news, and accepted the losing battle. Black ideas are not celebrated. They are not I’ve been pretty good at staying out of discussed. This was further confirmed by the social justice since then. This hasn’t been able perplexed stares I would get as we read To to be the case since May 26th, 2020. The world Kill A Mockingbird, discussed the civil rights has become flipped, replacing cold glances movement, or even spoke about rap music as with empathetic ones. It is now taboo to not a whole. It was almost as if I were a museum speak about the gross instances of racism in display, like I could spit out bullet pointed our country, executed by our police. From information that prove that Black people do being shrouded in the shadows, the Black exist here. community has become the new spotlight. If that alienating Social media has experience at the beginning of middle school taught me anything more, it was to follow suit in the don’t-askdon’t-tell policy. I Black Students make up about 1% of the student body National Center for Education “ quite literally erupted with videos, graphics, information posts, calls to actions, action plans, to the point that any internet-based platform has become grit my teeth and Statistics the vessel for selfbore it as I was told education, especially I’d be the one who’d by non-Black peers. sit at the back of the bus, as comments about It’s almost comedic, in a so-sad-it’s-funny my father were scrawled into my yearbook. way, how I get to witness others learn about I gritted my teeth to what felt like the core things I already had to experience at a young in high school, when my hair was compared age. At this point, I feel like we should all to that of a sheep, when classmates loudly commemorate this by changing the Instagram perpetuated racist tropes, including but not logo into a brightly colored infographic about limited to watermelon and Kentucky Fried how to treat others of different skin tones Chicken in the middle of history lessons, with respect, because it’s so uncommon that it when I had to sit and interact innocently requires a how-to pamphlet.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am so I cannot help but to think about any Black happy that some little girl out there won’t go child who decided to set up social media through feeling this isolating culture growing recently, and will have to grow into this up. I am ecstatic that a boy like me will enter becoming the norm. How do you think they school without having to shed tears when he will feel, knowing that it is socially acceptable gets home. And I am not here to bash, in any to know and to post about systemic racism in way, anyone trying to learn ways to actively the United States, but not to actually go through better themselves for others, how to learn with posting plans to fix them? I cannot help when some things are harmful, and recognize but think of the people who rallied after the plague that is systemic racism. But I am Rodney King’s brutalizaiton, (another Black concerned that the victim of a police Black community are going to have to face a new kind of obstacle to this wave of support. Police Police brutality has become incredibly normalized. It “ officer’s abusive hand) seeing that we have regressed to the point where Black murder is now the internet’s brutality has shouldn’t be. entertainment. That become incredibly it is a currency that normalized. It we use to share in shouldn’t be. order to feel morally

Every week or so I see this viral instagram okay that we’ve let police brutality carry on this video, and in the first few seconds, George far. Floyd’s death flashes, as you see the light Perhaps it is the nature of social media, to drain out from his eyes. There is no warning. produce small snippets of the real world. But There is no caption that implies that we will the real world is not always small snippets. We see someone’s last breath being taken. There cannot weigh someone’s life, and equate it to is indication that we will watch someone’s the weight of an Instagram story post or two. child, someone’s father, live for the last time, We cannot equate a life taken, with minimal crushed under the weight of a cop’s knee. The to no consequence, to a mere link in our bio. I only masking we have is a blurry eye with a am not here to deny that social media has been slash over it, indicating that the content may instrumental in spreading the word around. be sensitive to the reader. For inciting conversation, allowing us to

I for one, believe that that video is a bit address our implicit bias, and keep up with the more than subjectively sensitive. world. But there is a line between information,

I cannot log onto my own social media and trauma porn, which very little people anymore, without being reminded daily of the know when they cross. rampant amounts of racially motivated police And I get it. It’s a confusing line. I’ve brutality going on in our country. I cannot tripped them up before too. But I haven’t been see anything past reposts of tone-deaf quotes able to pick up my phone, and use social media from politicians that only serve to remind to relax with friends, without being reminded us of the sub-human standards Black people of the reality that police brutality for Africanare subjected to. I saw a compilation footage Americans have had very little change since I of police plummeting people to the ground, was eleven. I know it’s a hard time, when you either by a car, or by something that resembled are faced with an information overload, and a mob surge. It had fifty four million views at you realize that the world around you is not the time of writing this. No one’s death should what you think it is anymore. I know, maybe become a viral tweet. No one’s brutalization more than anyone you might now, that you deserves to be demoted to a quick clip. Trauma can feel helpless, and useless. With a half a year has become so monotizational, that I see it weekly.

And to what do these posts truly accomplish? How does this help aid in the fight against racially motivated violence against Black people? You use the hashtag; you must be desiring to fight for the motive of the movement, right? I ask you this, because I want your candid answer. What does posting about our President encouraging a white nationalist group do to serve you, besides notifying others that you are “woke?” What does captioning a video of a Black man with a knee on his neck and pleading for his life, with the words “damn” do to help others? coming up on the anniversary of the beginnings of these posts, I just ask that you begin to take the time to consider what you are placing out into the world. Not only the ways in which it may benefit you, but benefit others.

The purpose of these posts are to help marginalized communities. It is to reduce the stigma around speaking about it. It is to limit the stares, the uncorrected comments, the alienation culture that has festered in the world for so long. Perhaps, due to the nationwide effort, we can eliminate the culture entirely. If you have in fact taken your energy to post information guides, protest details, I appreciate you. To everyone who has tried to help, I appreciate you. But I don’t think I’m ready to say thank you yet. To say thank you is to imply that the deed is done. Six months of feverish posting, of which can be quite literally defined as a “trend,” does not erase a lifetime of silence. We’re not ready to just pretend that a fear-mongering quote and a video of a literal death is enough to eradicate racism in America. Trayvon Martin, who was murdered at the age of seventeen, in 2012, was the same age I am. The same age of the majority of the senior class right now. He did not get to plan for his future, the same way we are right now. In order to honor a life he was robbed of, I’m beginning to take my time to help prevent children like him to meet the same fate, and work to try to dismantle the system that caused his death. When I do take the time to post, I try and ask myself how the post serves the greater community. If I cannot answer that, I don’t post it. It’s a pretty good practice.

To quote a protestor’s sign in from a 1992 rally against the acquittal of the LAPD officers who brutalized Rodney King, “Stop beating my people.” Now I come to you in 2020, with an even older message: Stop beating the dead horse. After six months of intense proof, we are all caught up to recognize that systemic racism exists. We can now stop needing to share the proof that it still exists. We cannot begin to try to remove the horse, and the damage it has caused over hundreds of years, until we stop prodding at its corpse, to prove that it is dead. And if we ever want to even consider the possibility of getting a new horse, we have to start there.