The History of #BlackLivesMatter

I’ve had my medium blog for a long time and I’ve been searching for something that I felt passionate enough about to write about. Normally, I’m a 32-year old guy who just quit his corporate soul sucking job to teach photography as an Adjunct Professor and play music in Austin, Texas. In wake of the recent killings and unjustified beatings at the hand of police departments across the country, and a continuing shrinking of a middle class in this country these situations have begged me to ask, “Have we really come that far as a country in the last 100 years?” The answer is no. And arguably, hell no.

Lets make a few things clear…

1. All lives matter, yes this is true. It’s also the dixie-democrat argument made in response to Black Lives Matter. Countless analogies have been made to justify the movement, and for every meme, or Facebook — or some other sort of thumb scrolling activity through social media, making a pointabout the BLM movement, theres 3 posts of the like taking value out of its meaning. So lets just get it out of the way… All lives DO matter. Period. BUT Black lives also matter. Black Lives Matter is like that friend coming to you saying “Dude, you need help”, and “all lives matter” is the scapegoat of the cause. The “of course I need help, I mean everyone needs help” I’ll continue making my point about that in a few paragraphs if you’re inclined to continue reading…
2. Blue lives matter. The police DO protect and serve. No one, not one single solitary person discounts this. Police officers get on average 20–40 calls per day in a 12 hour period. Their average salary is about 50,000/year (which means you could work in sales using obfuscation as a tool in your belt and easily make more money than the people that protect and serve you.) This means that the people protecting us and enforcing our laws, and are our first lines of defense in kidnappings, domestic violence, robberies, traffic violations, just to name a few — and police officers make less money than A LOT of people that work full time. We don’t hear about all of these dispatches, or about the policemen and women that put their lives on the line daily for us. We don’t hear about it at all. Mostly we only hear about the police, when grave mistakes are made, and this is kind of unfortunate. Actually not kind of… its very unfortunate. Being a police officer today is the comparison of going to a party with someone, and right before you get to the door, the person that invited you says “Oh by the way, none of these people like you, just to let you know, and everyone here trusts you just about as much as they trust Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.” These police officers wake up every day, put on their uniforms, kiss their families, leave their homes, pinch their savings (because 50k a year in today's world is a joke), work 9–12 hour shifts to protect and serve a majority of their community that don’t trust them.
3. The media oftentimes is biased. Or simply idiotic. Cough cough, Fox News, cough cough. They also have to keep the lights on and they need the juicy stories to get the ratings, which is why news outlets are more worried about Donald Trump’s lackluster campaign fundraising efforts than starving kids in impoverished countries all over the world. That being said, the media does report the news. They do report the news. And when you have Diamond Reynolds live-streaming on Facebook when her fiance is shot 4 times in the passenger seat for reaching for his I.D., after informing the police officers Jeronimo Yanez and Joseph Kauser he had a gun on him, and he was licensed to carry. Oh and Ms. Reynold’s child was in the back seat. This was also during a routine traffic stop. When the media reports this, the media isn’t biased. The media is doing it's job. Regardless of the pundits, analysts, or the questions asked, the media in this case was doing it’s job. Put it this way — if a news crew was filming a house on fire, would it be biased for them filming? Probably not.

You MUST understand that racism is systemic

Lerone Bennett Jr., an African-American scholar and author, amongst other things stated in (The Shaping of Black America) that the Colonial population (post 1620 Mayflower) consisted of both white and black bondsmen and were treated equally by lords of the plantations and legislatures. “Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together”

Indentured servitude was the the best way of securing cheap labor as a means for both parties. Both blacks and whites were poor working for the good of those rich enough to travel to the colonies and buy enough land to start a new life and make a new living. At some point however, more growth was needed. Americans were slaughtering the Indians, committing heinous war crimes and expanding westward. The country needed people to continue to work the land as expansion continued, and thusly the slave trade began. The rich and powerful Whites, that both whites and blacks worked for, provisioned the lesser Whites with power over the African slaves imported and sold to colonial owners. This is where slavery started. This is when the implied notion of “White Pride” came about As long as the blacks could be kept in line, then whites were free to build and exploit us as much as they wanted, and our government, a government that was supposed to represent all of us relegated power to the states to choose whether slavery should exist or not, and the states chose slavery. When the bill of rights was written, people of color were not even people. The bill of rights did not apply to Blacks. In fact people of color weren’t even people. We were 3/5 of a human being.

Then the Civil War happens, the North States win, and slavey is now unlawful which means black men and other people of color are free. But not really. Black people were still poor and had to continue working the land in order to have a life. But they were able to leave should they want. They went from being slaves to being sharecroppers. My grandparents were last generation of sharecroppers. But they didn’t have rights. In fact at every turn those in power continued their white pride propaganda, lobbying in congress to make sure blacks never came to power, and a very sophisticated way to do this was by implementing mass incarceration of people of color that didn’t follow segregationist rules of their state. During the Reconstruction Era, it was illegal for Blacks to not have jobs. However you did have some black politicians come to power and during Reconstruction black businesses opened, and for the first time we started getting our footing. This was perhaps the first rendition Black Lives Matter movement. That is until Jim Crow.

Jim Crow & What Happens Next

During Jim Crow, people of color were segregated from whites, and measures were put in place to ensure again that blacks never came to power, one of the biggest influences coming from the KKK. In fact if any white people were found helping blacks or people of color, those people would suffer the same fate of the blacks they were trying to help — Including having their property burned, being lynched, or being exploited in their community for helping blacks.

Jim Crow continued until Lyndon B. Johnson was assumed the role of president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. The Civil Rights act of 1964 was passed the following year, banning discrimination against all people of color, thusly ending segregation. The following year in 1965, people of color were given the right to vote. This is perhaps the second pinnacle movement for people of color and the implied #BlackLivesMatter movement.

100 years after people of color were free, we were finally given the right to vote. Take some time and think about that. That’s an entire century. That means that my grandparents weren’t able to vote until they were probably in their 40s. That means there was an entire generation of people that couldn’t vote, meaning that if I was born in or around the reconstruction era, I couldn’t really do anything at all. And the whites that had power, kept it and enforced it at every turn for 100 years.

Fast forward to the 1980s and the Regan Administration. The War on Drugs did more to incarcerate our people than at any other point in history. Prisons became privatized, and run like corporations — being built at an alarming rate. The idea was simple, if you were using drugs, crack-cocaine or whatever, you were locked up. This began the Mass incarceration of people, and disproportionally people of color.

Take a look at some of these statistics from the N.A.A.C.P

From 1980 to 2008 the number of people incarcerated quadrupled from 500,000 to 2.3 million.

The U.S is 5% of the world’s population and incarcerates 25% of the world’s prisoners.

African Americans and Hispanics comprised 58% of all prisoners in 2008. About 14 million Whites and 2.6 million African Americans reported using illicit drugs.

Whites use 5 times as many drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses 10 times at the rates of Whites.

African Americans serve virtually the same amount of time for drug use as Whites serve for violent crimes.

It’s arguable but true what used to be just good old racism evolved from men of color being “free” as a means to protect the interests of white politicians in power, and the War on Drugs was very effective at taking people of color off the streets and incarcerating them. Also once your an ex-con, it’s very difficult for you to find any reputable work and make a decent wage. In fact only 12.5 percent of employers in U.S. country will hire someone with a criminal background.

So why the history lesson? Because many of my friends, both white and black scapegoat the argument that what we’re facing is arguably the New Jim Crow. Because some of my White friends find it hard to understand that these problems of authoritarian brutality namely done by the police continue to happen. This isn’t an argument that all lives matter, of course all lives matter. But all lives matter is like saying that everyone needs to breathe. Black lives matter is like saying “I can’t breathe, and it’s important that I breathe and to continue living.”

According to the Washington Post, As of Friday July 8, 2016 there have been a total of 509 fatal shootings by the cops. 238 of them were white, and 123 of them were black. Eighteen unarmed white people were killed by the police and 12 unarmed black people were killed by the police. African Americans however, make up 12% of the U.S. population. 46.7% of whites are killed by the police vs 26% of African Americans. 63.7% of the U.S population is White, 12.3% of the population is black. Again — 509 people have died by the police. 49% are white, and 26% are black. 7.5% of Whites we’re unarmed and killed, 9.7% of Blacks were unarmed and killed. But African Americans only make up for 12.3% of the U.S. Population. As I write this blog, its Monday July 11th. Two days ago, July 9th, there was another African American man was killed 3 blocks from where I grew up in Houston, Texas. He was also unarmed. The numbers don’t lie. The numbers don’t embellish. These are the cold hard facts, and Blacks are killed disproportionately to other people of color and Whites as well at the hands of police. In fact according to these statistics, you’re more likely to die at the hands of the police if you’re unarmed than if you’re armed.

So what does Black Lives Matter mean?

Well, In 1620, we wanted to just be equal indentured servants like the whites working right next to us. After slavery started when the constitution was formed, we wanted our freedom. After we won our freedom, we wanted equality. After equality, we wanted the right to vote. Today, we just want police to stop killing us.