#BlackLivesMatter was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc. is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes. By combating and countering acts of violence, creating space for Black imagination and innovation, and centering Black joy, we are winning immediate improvements in our lives. . . .
We are working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically targeted for demise.
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Airing those viewpoints is a service—and there’s a lot to chew on that I won’t address here.
But it seems to me that the debate about whether to focus on police killings or “black-on-black” killings presumes that reducing the former will not help to reduce the latter.
What if the opposite is true?
Black Lives Matter calls for 10 specific changes to policing policy, including body cameras, an end to “policing for profit,” better training, and stricter limits on the use of force.
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Black Lives Matter activists are often silent about black-on-black killings. Perhaps that is a P.R. mistake. But the reforms they are urging strike me as a more realistic path to decreasing those killings than publicly haranguing would-be murderers to be peaceful.
Black Lives Matter participants are civic activists, not respected high-school teachers or social workers or reformed gang members who can influence their former brethren.
Since police departments are ultimately responsive to political institutions, fighting for police reforms with civic activism is a relatively straightforward project. . . .
... Let’s stop losing focus and changing the subject when it comes to police and or vigilante violence against blacks. That is what the Black Lives Matter movement originally brought focus to. A person randomly killing someone is a totally and completely separate issue. For those so concerned about these murders, you need to offer some solutions to stop them. . . .
Think of the chaos currently in Minnepolis of #BlackLivesMatter protesters. A lot of damage has been done and I imagine tons injured. If no-one was to contend these blacks, they would slaughter everyone. I say use real guns, kill all violent protestors. — Barabmob
In many social science departments of many western universities, they now teach that the west is fundamentally patriarchal, and fundamentally white supremacist. Racism is "power + privilege". They accept it as a brute fact that whites have all the power and all the privilege in the west, making all white people racist. It's hard to believe that this comes out of actual university curriculum, but it's becoming more and more evident. We're being told that as white men we're unaware of the naturally ingrained systems of oppression, which can be complex and subtle, that benefit us at the expense of women, of people color, even more so at the expense of women of color (and so on with a litany of possible identities which might entail facing any sort of obstacle in life which white men might not face). "Intersectionality" they call it, which is in itself worthy of it's own discussion. — VagabondSpectre
In some ways, any would be leader of the BLM movement is going to somehow have to put the "black" in "#BlackLivesMatter". It is very difficult to do this without amplifying a racial lens, but my own approach would be to address the issue of police use of force without focusing on racism or race as a fundamental causative factor behind the problem, and to also address the larger issue facing the black community, which leads to many of the events which spark BLM protests, which is crime in and of itself in black communities. The discussion must necessarily involve economics, politics and culture, and while it runs the risk of being obfuscated by likewise presuming that the economic, political, and cultural realities facing many black communities are symptoms of that larger white supremacist system contemporary schools of thought point to, it could still bare fruit. In summation, the BLM rhetoric at large is not outwardly "us against them", it is rather an idea lurks just under it's surface, and because of lost complexity and some inherently evocative underpinnings, it's now beginning to rear it's ugly head. — VagabondSpectre
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