HOW A HASHTAG BECAME A GLOBAL MOVEMENT
WHAT IS #BLACKLIVESMATTER?
It was the day that George Zimmerman was acquitted of his chargers for the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin—an African American young man—that the hashtag #blacklivesmatter was born. Change and awareness were the things that Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi wanted to see when they first tweeted #blacklivesmatter; an awareness of the killings of black men at the hands of police and an awareness of the police brutality and systematic racism that continues to plague the Black community to this day. Take the fact that, according to Asmelash, “Police officers are almost four times as likely to use force on Black people than White people, Black people are jailed at a disproportionate rate, and Black Americans have lower access to health care and quality education” (Asmelash, 2020). #Blacklivesmatter was a plea for the nation to pay more attention to the discrimination happening in the United States. At its core, the hashtag is used not to discount the importance of the lives of other races but to emphasize the importance of lives who are being discriminated against and treated unfairly—especially at the hands of the police.
WHY DO BLACKLIVESMATTER?
In the article Black Memes Matter: #LivingWhileBlack With Becky and Karen, while not directly focusing on police brutality, along the same lines, speaks on the white policing of black people. Apryl Williams argues that white people, particularly women, unfairly police black bodies and “uphold White supremacist notions of law and order”, undoubtedly based on the cultural consensus that White people have a reason to fear black men (Williams, 2020). While Williams homes in specifically on the creation of memes and the ideas that these memes perpetuate about society and the policing of Blackness, her writing draws so many parallels to the #blacklivesmatter movement and why it was created; to call attention to police brutality and systematic racism, as ”white individuals use their privilege and power to ensure that Black citizens conform to White notions of civility” (Williams, 2020). It was because they did not conform to this “White notion of civility” that Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many other young men are no longer with us.
THE TRANSFORMATION FROM THE MARGINS TO THE CENTER
Since the conception of the 2013 hashtag meant to spread awareness of racial disparities and police brutality in the United States, it has since transformed into a mainstream organization. While the creation of #blacklivesmatter started in 2013 with Trayvon Martin, it sat under the radar for a while. Until 2014, it was only used a total of 48 times a day on Twitter, and by August, it was used about 52,000 times a day (Demby, 2016). It was with the help of bystanders who recorded these instances of racism and shared them on social media, causing them to go viral, that the #blacklivesmatter hashtag entered the mainstream.
Social media affords us the ability to share pretty much anything, including these instances of police brutality. In doing so, Sutherland explains in Making a Killing: On Race, Ritual, and (Re)Membering in Digital Culture that this “digital visuality creates cultural frictions of race and racism, positioning law enforcement officers as violent killers… by challenging dominant cultural narratives about police benevolence and black male criminality, visual depictions of Brown elicited outrage from communities of color across the nation” (Sutherland, 2017), sparking #blacklivesmatter from a hashtag to a global movement. On November 25, 2014, when it was decided that Darren Wilson not be indicted after the killing of Michael Brown, #blacklivesmatter was used over 100,000 times. Since then, it has become a global movement and even an organization, especially after more deaths at the hands of the police, like George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor.
Following the creation of its website, the Black Lives Matter organization has taken on branding and now has chapters around the country. In 2017, it became the Black Lives Matters Global Network Foundation, Inc. Now, the BLM organization has more than 20 chapters throughout the United States and a few in Canada.
CONCLUSION
Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi’s #blacklivesmatter, once a hashtag used to bring awareness to police brutality in America has become something much bigger. The idea that White people should fear Blackness—specifically male Blackness— has undoubtedly contributed to the harsh policing of Black bodies, leading to their many deaths. Starting with Trayvon Martin, this hashtag has made us, as a society, look within and uncover the many racial disparities that persist today. Without social media and the ability to share real-life footage of these moments of police brutality, who knows how big this movement would’ve gotten. The documentation of Michael Brown’s death that caused it to go viral had an everlasting effect on the “Black Lives Matter” hashtag— it became a global movement, and it hasn’t looked back since.
WORKS CITED
Williams, A. (2020). Black Memes Matter: #LivingWhileBlack With Becky and Karen. Social Media + Society, 6(4). https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.1177/2056305120981047
Asmelash, L. (2020, July 26). How Black Lives Matter went from a hashtag to a global rallying cry. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/26/us/black-lives-matter-explainer-trnd/index.html
Demby, G. (2016, March 2). Combing Through 41 Million Tweets To Show How #BlackLivesMatter Exploded. NPR.org. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/03/02/468704888/combing-through-41-million-tweets-to-show-how-blacklivesmatter-exploded
Sutherland, T. (2017). Making a Killing: On Race, Ritual, and (Re)Membering in Digital Culture. Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, 46(1), 32-40. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.1515/pdtc-2017-0025
Hi Jordan,
ReplyDeleteI love your explanation of the Black Lives Matter hashtag and how it burst into a large-scale movement. I also love your incorporation of Sutherland and the idea of (Re)Membering the dead with photographs of the horrific incidents like George Floyd's death. However, I think you can go further into how the photographs of incidents like these have allowed for the movement to grow out from the hashtag by using Teju Cole's idea of photography as well.
In his piece, Cole spent a great deal of time arguing how the camera and photography has been used to illustrate the powerful dominating the less powerful and how that stabilizes power hierarchies (Cole, 2019). However, he also provided an insight into how we can begin to condemn the power hierarchies seen in the images of incidents of police brutality by asking the question "Why have I allowed this to happen?" rather than "Why is this happening?" (Cole, 2019). With this, we have an outline for how a movement like Black Lives Matter can grow out of the hashtag. For example, it is evident that the images of police brutality represent a power hierarchy of the powerful (white police officers) dominating a marginalized and less powerful group (black men) as the white cops are exerting their powerful forces over the black men, killing them with that force in the process. So, if people started asking themselves the question "Why have I allowed this to happen," it may have allowed for the BLM movement to grow into what it is today. Many people have access to Twitter, the internet, and TV, which are all places where these images have been shown. So, by seeing these images and asking that question, one might try to find a way to get involved so more images and incidents like the ones mentioned previously do not happen again. After all, if one is under the impression that they have allowed for these incidents to happen in some way, they may feel more inclined to try and stop it from happening again since the question itself is stronger than one that does not place any blame on themselves (Cole, 2019). As such, these people may participate in marches, use the hashtag more often, and do everything they can to condemn the powerful's domination of the marginalized in these images and incidents. Assuming this was the case or at least a factor, then these individuals have allowed for the BLM movement to grow out of the hashtag and into what it is today since they have taken these images and turned them into a fight against the power hierarchies seen in them. So, even though Cole argued that photography will probably never be used this way in his piece (Cole, 2019), he did not rule out the possibility that it could be if people ask themselves the simple question of "Why have I allowed this to happen?" So, it can be said that this idea of photography also plays a key role in BLM and its growth into a movement from the simple hashtag "#blacklivesmatter."
-Dominic Woods