9.4 Social Movements, Social Media, and Social Justice
9.4 Social Movements, Social Media, and Social Justice
Nora Karena
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbicAmaXYtM&t=1s
We don’t deserve to be killed with impunity. We need to love ourselves and fight for a world where Black lives matter. Black people, I love you. I love us. We matter. Our lives matter.
– Alicia Garza, Facebook Post July 13, 2013.
Declaration: black bodies will no longer be sacrificed for the rest of the world’s enlightenment. I am done. I am so done. Trayvon you are loved infinitely. #blacklivesmatter.
– Patrisse Cullors, Facebook comment, posted July 13th, 2013.
When mass protests erupted in the wake of the acquittal of the person who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, the two impassioned Facebook posts that launched #BlackLivesMatter were called “love letters that launched a movement” (Jennings 2020). BLM is an example of the power of social media to create and shape social movements. Here we will look at how social media was engaged at each of the four stages described in the previous section, emergence, coalescence, institutionalization, and decline.
Emergence
Hashtag activism is the act of building up public support via social media for a cause, using a hashtag (#) (Pratim 2018:252). When Patrisse Cullors answered Alicia Garza’s declaration with #BlackLivesMatter the message resonated deeply as part of an overwhelming outpouring of collective grief and anger on social media. Between July and December of 2013, the hashtag was used 5,106 times. By 2016 Twitter reported that #BlackLivesMatter was the third most popular hashtag in the platform’s 10-year history, with nearly 1,200,000 tweets (Sichynsky 2016).
Patrisse Cullors and Aliza Garza were already seasoned and well-networked organizers with experience using social media, as was Ayo Tometi, who responded to the posts with plans to purchase the domain blacklivesmatter.com. Together, they deftly used social media to amplify the voices of over-policed, under-resourced communities of Black people, as they declared to one another, “We matter.” and to Americans, “Stop killing us.” Ayo Tometi, an organizer with a background in communications, responded by purchasing www.blacklivesmatter.com, where they linked to organizing resources and articulated the following principles:
- We are expansive. We are a collective of liberators who believe in an inclusive and spacious movement. We also believe that in order to win and bring as many people with us along the way, we must move beyond the narrow nationalism that is all too prevalent in Black communities. We must ensure we are building a movement that brings all of us to the front.
- We affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. Our network centers on those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.
- We are working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically targeted for demise.
- We affirm