Black Lives Matter Controversy

Black Lives Matter is a movement that exponentially increased after the Michael Brown incident. This event rapidly spread across social media platforms and with that, hashtags such as #BLM became popularized into a continuous movement (see article about other common hashtags here). Using online collaboration, these hashtags contributed in the spread awareness of police brutality and unity among this particular group. This is an open group that gets support from other races as well by using social networking to organize events and protests, to share live footage of cases to strengthen case, and to simply support each other as a community where many feel victimized by external sources.

Source: sfgate

With such a potent growth and effectiveness of this group, other out-group members have begun to utilize these “___Lives Matter” phrase. These include Gay Lives Matter, Unborn Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and more. Some groups are using it for the same general goal as BLM, but others are seeing it through a different lens. With the rise of this movement, people have begun using “All Lives Matter” as a way of saying, it’s not just black lives that matter, but all others as well. For instance, a white male killed two cops this beginning of November and people on Twitter seemed to have noticed the lack of activity that would’ve otherwise skyrocketed had that been black life involved.

Source: thedrumnewspaper

With this said, it is apparent that the focus on #BLM has given a rise to this sense of skepticism. By focusing so much on particular out-group members, people have forgotten that it’s all lives that matter. In a way, using this phrase to create an argument against discrimination has created discrimination itself. Based on the vast amount of cases that have occurred where racism is evident towards black lives, I believe that Black Lives Matter is a great movement and has definitely been effective in raising awareness by publicizing all the physical and verbal abuse, as well as implicit bias, that exists towards them. In a sense, I feel that the movement has extended to such a far extent that other groups are starting to feel discrimination towards them. Instead of equalizing attitudes, it just shifted them from one group to another.

Source: breitbart

I don’t believe this hashtag is racist, but I do believe that the strong focus on #BLM has turned into a an implicit deterring from other groups. It is important that these Internet driven movements maintain rational and impede any disregarding of other races. The Internet and social networking are very strong tools that can be positively effective if done wisely.