For A “Good Cause”
The Campaign Black Lives Matter (BLM) is an organization with its core impact tied exclusively to urban communities, where policing, segregation, economic inequality, and racialized violence are most visible also known as areas who are weak. I’ll analyze its influence on culture, values, and power, including who benefits, who is marginalized, and all of its unintended consequential circumstance.
Why did BLM become the campaign for the Urban Communities
Although BLM the movement started back in 2013, social media activism had surged after notable deaths of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others; these events had continued to taken place in urban areas. BLM operates on two levels.
Online Activism: they use the internet spaces for (#BlackLivesMatter posts, livestresms, social awareness, Instagram infographics, and even protest organization set ups via “X” formally known as Twitter)
Offline Protests: The protests are concentrated in Urban centers such as a (Minneanapolis, NYC, Chicago, LA, Atlanta, and Philadelphia) areas where blacks reside and are the predominant located inside of the areas.
BLM through the lens of Appadurai
Who Participated?
A lot of the participants who rallied in the BLM marches and protests were primarily young, diverse, and of the urban populations. Across all cities many of the protesters were of the same demographic. Many of the protestors were Black urban residents demanding changes to how they were being policed in the neighborhoods and that the racism that was embedded within the system comes to an end. After 2020 things started to change big time, multiracial coalitions were being formed in over 200 U.S. cities. The movement among the black culture was so big that it spread amongst the populations in different nations globally including (UK, Brazil, and France) to name a few, they all shared experiences of racialized profiling.
Who Was Marginalized?
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Small inner city communities who are without internet access struggled to be heard. And those of the African migrants sometime had felt underrepresented in the narrative centered on African American experiences.
Impact:
BLM connected geographically scattered urban communities into a shared political identity around anti-racism and state violence.
How media shaped the impact
There was an uptick in viral videos of police brutality and most of it all was being filmed on cell phones, this narrative had shaped the public opinion way more than traditional news ever could have. When livestreams from urban protestors created the “boots on the ground narratives” it made it hard for mainstream media to run their own narratives of what was happening in those areas. Instagram infographics which came from many of the young urban creators had became a form of “visual activism”, summarizing history and making demands. The benefits came because the media was forced to report on the very things they had ignored and empathy was built through these first-person stories. There were also things that happened unintentionally for example; the trauma that was exposed to the black viewers by constantly viewing videos over and over again. Watching those violent videos constantly affected many unknowingly. Corporations had also started to adopt the BLM language for marketing purposes and not for systemic commitments. The impact had shown racism on a global scale and it shaped narratives along the way.
Funding
BLM has had controversies surrounding its funding and exact spaces of where the money has been spent or received. There have been many donations made over the years but for most the exact whereabouts of the funds remains to have suspicion around it.
Core Ideas
Police Brutality is systemic and not individual based. They feel racism is also structural which is tied to housing, employment, education, and criminal justice. Black lives deserve protection and the same visibility as their counterparts. The impacts of BLM had brought forth other ideologies such as opposition groups and misinterpretations of defunding the police. These both had brought controversies that began to overshadow the actual cause.
In Conclusion, BLM demonstrated how an urban centered social media campaign can mobilize people across continents, reshape public understanding of justice, expose the systemic inequalities for blacks, and most of all what it is like to face backlash from their beliefs and even with uneven representation, how to stand through it all. Through Appadurai, BLM reveals how digital activism is both powerful and uneven, both global and deeply local.
