HIS 270 -- Black Protest in 20th Century US Culture

I am adding to the blog because I feel as though this video is a crucial part of what is going on in our country and also ties in things that we have studied from the beginning of the course, up until now. Beto O’Rourke discusses the peaceful protest regarding NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. This is a controversial subject and some may feel that it is going against our country and the soldiers fighting for us, but Beto argues that it distinguishes what is a peaceful protest and argues that it is the most American thing that he could think of. He starts off the video by telling his audience that this is a tough issue, but if it is not discussed, nothing will get done about it. That is one of the first things that we discussed in Dr. Kieran’s class, that some of the topics discussed, will be hard and challenging, but we must talk about them if we want to learn more and tackle these controversial subjects. He then goes on to discuss non-violent protests and what that does...

Something I thought to be interesting in both our discussion and from the book, Making All Black Lives Matter by Barbara Ransby is the question of, what it means to be unapologetically black. This term, to be unapologetically black was coined by Fresco Steez and is a term that has been used in BLM activism and something that has inspired many. To be unapologetically black means to be your true self and embrace your blackness and could have multiple meanings depending on the individual. To embrace where you came from, and who you are now. In Making All Black Lives Matter , it discusses this term in its coordinance with success and says, “In fact, success sometimes depends on their proving themselves “different” and apart from the mass of ordinary Black people. That distancing can be both physical and psychological.” (97) Discussed here, the idea that in society,  the success of Black people is sometimes how they prove themselves in society. How they could be like the ordinary, an...

I had never heard of Barbara Ransby or her book, “Making All Black Lives MAtter,” until taking this class. And now having fully read it, I can say that I feel it is a book that everyone should read. I rarely get to read books that dive into intersectional issues while still offering relevant information regarding the topics at large. I found it particularly interesting when Ransby was discussing what it means to be represented versus what it means to be casted out. Ransby draws connections between racial aggression, and over- policing to name a few. In terms of representation, I enjoyed the discussion the class had when discussing what sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. I had sided with the carceral state option originally. It is a known fact that there are disproportionate numbers showing how widely targeted black men are when it comes to being convicted. However, upon further class discussion the question of how much representation and visibility did Barack Obama really give t...

Ransby's "Making All Black Lives Matter" is a book I believe everyone should read. She in a way tells the story of how the era of social media turned a hashtag into a movement. Ransby made it her point to break down the BLM movement for people to understand its history and importance. I love how she discusses the ways in which the movement stands for so much more than police violence towards black people. Though that is an important aspect, the roots lie so much deeper. Yes black men and women are losing their lives, but there are also families unable to gain economic support, adequate health care, and so many other systems at work against the black communities effecting their lives. Another important topic she discussed was about being unapologetically black, but that term can only be defined by how you define blackness. The many different definitions of blackness is what works to separate us. That is how you get people who are deemed not being black enough. This ca...

The Black Lives Matter movement is a movement that is in the best interest of the black community. Yet, the black community is not unified, as stated on page 86, “the class divides within the black community in Baltimore were on full display during the protest”. Race, gender, class, and sexual orientation intersect to make some people’s voices heard during the movement, and others not. Women were strong leaders during the Black Lives Matter movement, yet the movement focuses around the violence of young, black men. Violence against black women or black trans women are left out. Social media becomes a big factor of the movement, especially for people who have lost their voice. Hashtags such as #blackwomenmatter and #sayhername went viral and opened up many people’s eyes at other issues outside of police brutality of black men. There is a critical question on whether this movement is a feminist movement. I think that this movement has feminist ideas that can make this movement a feminist...

In chapter 5 of Making All Black Lives Matter Ransby describes The challenges and dilemmas the Black lives matter movement faced during the time of high police brutality. One of the new themes that came with the modern movement was the use of social media. Social posed as information for political topics and it really helped birth the Black Lives Matter movement. After the death of Trayvon Martin one of the co founders made a Facebook post containing the first ever Black Lives Matter hashtag. When African Americans were wrongly killed by officers there were social media posts to inform the public. Ransby confirms the importance of social media by stating “Most people first learned of Michael Brown’s death through Twitter or Facebook. The fatal police shooting of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in a park near downtown Cleveland, videotaped on a police dash camera, went viral on the internet and triggered protests. Eric Garner’s violent strangulation death by police after he tried to break up...

   Making All Black Lives Matter by Barbara Ransbys talks about many cases of unauthorized killings of young black people. Within these murders, are the murders of Fred Hampton and his friend Mark Clark. They were killed during a police raid on the morning of December 4, 1969. The killing of Hampton was a little different than the others because he was a known leader in two Civil Rights activist groups. He was a youth leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and he also became the chair of the Illinois Black Panther Party. The FBI's counter intelligence program, "...which sought to subvert and destroy black liberation organizations that the government deemed threatening," was the source of the killing. The quote shows that institutional, structural racism is the main cause and problem of all the cases. The system is structured in a way that colored people are oppressed.    The end of the book dives deeper into the things th...

Throughout our class discussions, we have touched on the place of Black feminism in the larger scope of the Freedom Struggle. Book after book, I feel that the common narrative is centered around the male, until we have reached How We Get Free  and Making All Black Lives Matter . These two books incorporate the females place in the movement, showing the interlocking oppression women face due to their many layers of oppression through class, race, gender, and identity. Taking a look back at the big pushes from BLMM into media, the cases have been predominantly male victims. Ransby comments on this, acknowledging that the BLMM campaigns "have wrestled with an obvious dilemma: the most highly publicized victims of police violence during this time, and in terms of dominant narrative, have been male. That is not because Black women have somehow been sheltered or exempted form such violence"(Ransby 108). Women's struggles being left out of the main picture is not something new,...

Throughout this whole class we've been talking about pretty much how sucky America is to people who don't fit the mold of whiteness, and how that the only way to change the system is to rebuild the system. I was wandering the internet one day and found this pitch video for this grassroots movement called RepresentUs where they laid out what the problem with today's government system corruption. on the represent us webpage it gives statistics that public opinion has a near-zero impact on U.S. law and that the bottom 90% of income earners in America opinions have a statistically non-significant impact government policy. When I look at those statistics and then at the problems we talk about in class its hard to imagine how to improve the quality of life of black Americans if most Americans cant influence law, except for the richest AKA the whitest. This same group gives ideas to fix this, they propose an anti-corruption act to stop political bribery, end secret money, and fix ...

The second half of Making All Black Lives Matter begins with the murder of Freddie Gray. The aftermath was an explosion from the Black community. Brittney Cooper, an African American college professor, had this to say: “No, I don’t support looting. But I question a society that always sees the product of the provocation and never the provocation itself. I question a society that values property over black life. But I know that our particular system of law was conceived on the founding premise that black lives are white property.” What she said about provocation struck a chord with me because, every time there is a disaster concerning an African American, society sees the repercussions but refuses to get to the source of the problem. The latter half of the book discusses the challenges surrounding the BMM movement, a shift away from the individual tragedies. What I thought was interesting was what was discussed regarding state violence against transgender/non-gender conforming African A...

The second half of Making All Black Lives Matter is as hard-hitting and relevant as the first. The case of Freddie Gray and the reaction it evoked from the black community further highlighted that individual acts of white racism are not the defining culprit of black oppression; the largest problem is that of “structural racism, which include[s] profiling and harassment of a certain type of poor or working-class Black youth, an aggressive policing style in poor Black communities.” The fourth chapter notes that half of the officers responsible for Freddie Gray’s death were black, but that the “notorious blue code of silence among cops...often trumps any kind of racial solidarity that Black officers might otherwise feel toward the Black community.” This observation is reminiscent of the one made in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me ; Prince Jones was killed by a black cop whose prioritization of an inherently racist policing structure led him to racially profile an innocent man a...

In Emily Jacko’s blog post she gives a description of the starting point of the Black Lives Matter movement. She describes in depth the murder of Trayvon martin and the trail of George Zimmerman. While I agree that Trayvon Martin’s death was a major factor in I don’t believe it was the only cause for the Black Lives Matter movement. Earlier in the book Ransby describes the impact of hurricane Katrina in the African American community. Ransby states” Those suffering and dying in Katrina’s wake were disproportionately Black and poor. Americans watched as the US government’s blatant disregard for Black pain and death was on full display.”(13) This quote shows that the disregard for black lives had went far back as Hurricane Katrina. While Trayvon’s death was the most recent occurrence there were also other factors that went into creating the movement.