Three women running a movement that is uniting activists to participate in online and offline protests, addressing inequality, and pushing for social and political change is powerful. The Black Lives Matter movement is teaching us how a social movement can initiate social change, combine digital activism with traditional protests and shake up global power structures. And by doing so highlighting the power of the Internet, shining light on structural and institutional racism and questioning whose voice really counts.
Rattling global power structures
The Black Lives Matter (referred to as BLM from here forth) movement grew immensely during the first half of 2020 after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd became high profile cases and international news. In solidarity with the movement, and to protest against police brutality, institutional and structural racism, an estimated 15 to 26 million people participated in demonstrations in the United States during the first three weeks of June, possibly making the movement the biggest in its country’s history (Buchanan, Bui and Patel, 2020). Protests spread, engaging activists all over the world.
BLM is a ’decentralized grassroots movement’, without a clear leader and led by local activists organizing their own programs and protests (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020). Many contemporary social movements that take place partially in the digital sphere don’t have a clear leader (Poell and van Dijck, 2018), a phenomena that Tufekci (2020. pp.205-206) explains is due to digital media ensuring movements no longer need institutional presence in terms of formal organisations or official leaders to be heard. The online movement, and the hashtag #blacklivesmatter was founded by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. The hashtag was first used in a Facebook post by Alicia Garza after the acquittal of Zimmerman, where she expressed her grief over the inequality black people experience.
In short, BLM seeks to draw attention to the inequalities that black people experience and the ways that institutions, laws and policies continue that injustice, or as Opal Tometi (TED, 2016) puts it: ”What we need now more than ever is a human rights movement that challenges systematic racism in every single context”.
Black men in the US are 12.7 times more likely to be imprisoned than white men of the same age and are disproportionately represented in statistics over fatal police shootings (Gal et al., 2020). Investigations led by The Washington Post have proven that the FBI undercount the amount of fatal shootings and have therefore created their own database and their statistics have shown that black Americans are killed at twice the rate as white Americans (The Washington Post, 2020). Yet, racism is structural and systemic affecting every aspect of life from unemployment rates, political influence, income, educational opportunities to access to health care.
However, racism is a global issue. There are many reports of racism within the aid industry and the BLM movement brought some well-needed light to the situation. Racism was used throughout colonialism and shapes the development of today (Lartey, 2020). Many INGOs condemned racism and showed support for the movement this year, but not without criticism: Bruce-Raeburn (2020): “This support has created a conundrum that amplifies the paradox facing the sector: white saviors ostensibly “doing good” in far-flung places in the world; expats, not immigrants away from home, in countries still nursing the wounds of systemic racism and colonialism.”. Yet, Bruce-Raeburn’s (2020) critique doesn’t stop there as she questions “the dominance of white males in leadership roles to the unpaid but necessary internships that effectively exclude poor people, and certainly black people”.
Similarly to Bruce-Raeburn, Lartey (2020) calls for a reform in development where funding should be overlooked and changed according to research, racial discrimination questioned, leadership shifted from older white men and the workforce diversified. She says “the sector needs to unpack the complex ideas that underpin racism, and to understand how racism impacts our organisations and our mandates” and that there is little hope in pushing anti-racism if these issues can’t be addressed within INGOs (Lartey, 2020).
Engaging activist – online and offline
The Fridays for Future movement (with Greta Thunberg in the lead), the Arabic Spring and the ‘Occupy’ movement have led the way in showing how digital media can engage and mobilize activists for protests, raise awareness and create social and political change, showing how to use a hybrid model of online and offline activism. As social media is so commonly used today, Poell and van Dijck (2018) argue that you can’t distinguish between online and offline movements. This means that the question isn’t whether or not social media is more important than physical protests but how it affects the movement (Poell and van Dijck, 2018). As BLM and other contemporary social movements have shown, digital media has enabled the general public to engage in humanitarian work and this type of digital humanitarianism is popularized on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook (Shringarpure, 2020, pp.180-182).
Initially used to mobilize activists to participate in protests, the movement also uses social media to share educational videos, texts and even cartoons and memes on structural racism and inequality. Using digital media has been beneficial in the movement’s quest to gain international media attention and contribute towards opinion building and political change, forcing political statements and discussion.
Yet, the most common use of social media has been sharing a black square, often with the use of #blackouttuesday or #blacklivesmatter. In order to understand why so many choose to share content about the BLM movement this year we need to dig deeper into the effects and motives of digital activism. Social media activism creates an emotional dimension that creates collectivity (Poell and van Dijck, 2018, pp.5-6). However, sharing on social media isn’t always about the good of the community. On the contrary, sharing content as a form of advocacy is often a form of self-expression and self-validation (Poell and van Dijck, 2018, pp.2-3). Shringarpure (2020, pp. 183-185) introduces the concept of ‘The Digital Savior Complex’ based on Teju Cole’s ‘White Savior Industrial Complex’, a title for people working in development with the “intention of fulfilling their sentimentalist narcissism.” that has taken its commitment to a digital setting. And while many of the activists shared with good intent, those who did nothing else but share a square could similarly to INGOs be seen as ‘digital saviors’, wanting to show the world how good they are with the least effort, time and money spent.
As much as sharing a square on social media is an easy way to become an activist, is it doing more harm than good? As Shringarpure and Poell and van Dijck say, it can be a way of fulfilling personal validation rather than helping. Seay (2012, p.110) introduces the term ‘badvocacy’ meaning well-intended advocacy that “does more harm than good” and often presents a faulty and simplistic view of the situation or solutions that won’t work. Instead, she says: “What is needed in these communities is not saviors coming in to fix everything, but supportive global communities that provide funds, expertise, and assistance for local initiatives that are already underway.” (Seay, 2012, p.115). Acknowledging complexity, empowering communities rather than ‘overpowering’ and understanding that advocacy is difficult and time-consuming are key elements in creating successful activism (Seay, 2012, p.117). As much as sharing content may be well intended and may have forced a raised awareness of structural racism and police brutality it does raise some other concerns. For starters, sharing a square without any further information and using the hashtags limits the possibility to use the hashtag as a way of spreading knowledge about systemic and institutional racism (Willingham, 2020). Instead, some activists encourage people to give voice to people from the black community (Willingham, 2020), along with using social media for good, donating money, and calling out racist policies, power dynamics and comments (Stamp, 2020).
Technology – a mirror of society
Creating social change isn’t as ‘easy’ as sharing content to a large crowd. The digital world and new technologies are generally designed by “professionals employed by powerful companies” (O’Donnell and Sweetman, 2018), effecting the design of all digital media. Or as Birhane (2019) puts it: “Technology in general is never either neutral or objective; it is a mirror that reflects societal bias, unfairness, and injustice“. The same structural and institutional racism that exists in the rest of society can therefore be assumed to exist in digital media. Social media are made up of algorithms deciding what content will be given visibility. Social movements can therefore be given a “strong tailwind or a substantial obstacle” (Tufekci, 2020. pp. 154-155). Black Lives Matter met major algorithmic resistance on Facebook in its early stages ((Tufekci, 2020. pp. 154-155), but organically managed to push through and adapt their content to work better in order to receive greater visibility.
Creating social and political change
On a more positive note, the combination of media attention, digital activism and physical protests created a discussion, established an attitude change and has evidently led to social and political change. Thanks to BLM more attention is paid to police brutality today even though the rate of killings hasn’t gone up drastically (Tufekci, 2020. pp. 205-206). Recent polls show that a majority of Americans supported the Black Lives Matter movement in October 2020 and have since early 2018 (Civiqs, 2020), but that isn’t the only attitude change. 76 percent of Americans consider racism a ’big problem’ today compared to 50 percent in 2015 and 78 percent of voters in a poll thought ’the anger behind the demonstrations’ was fully or somewhat justified (Cohn and Quealy, 2020). The change in numbers might seem small but creating social change isn’t an easy job. Douglas McAdam (cited in Buchanan, Bui and Patel, 2020), emeritus professor at Stanford University who studies social movements says: “It looks, for all the world, like these protests are achieving what very few do: setting in motion a period of significant, sustained, and widespread social, political change,”.
And the protesters have also been able to push through political change in the US. Some schools around the country have discontinued agreements with the police patrolling schools, in parts of the country police are now not the first to respond to certain situations, funding has been shifted from police to other community and social services (Vera, 2020). Several police officers that have been filmed using force against protestors are being investigated, the CEOs of some companies have stepped down after staff complaining about a ‘racist company culture’ and some cities and universities have removed monuments of slave owners or known racists (Andrew and Asmelash, 2020).
As the movement has been successful in establishing social change and changing political policy it is a great case study in terms of understanding social movements and their usage of digital media. Even though the change has been created in the U.S, I believe some of the learnings of the movement to be useful for movements and organizations in the ‘global south’. The movement has been successful in engaging local activists to organize and participate in protests, to share educational material to a large crowd on social media and by doing so has gained a lot of attention from international media. All this ‘noise’ has forced political change and created a shift in attitudes that can be seen as societal change, making Black Lives Matter an important case study for the ‘communication for development’ field.
Conclusion
BLM is important to development partly because it has ignited a much needed discussion on racism within both the development world and all of society. Not only has it shown the importance of shifting power structures and giving voice to people of color but questioned what INGOs and the general public need to do in order to sustain the fight against racism.
As much as black squares were shared to a large audience, perhaps sometimes with good intentions and not only self-validation in mind, many advocates call for other action including giving voice to black advocates, donating money and calling out racist policies, comments and power dynamics. These pieces of advice are useful for anyone wanting to get involved, while INGOs should go beyond merely condemning racism and focus on how it impacts organisations from the wounds of colonialism to diversifying workforces and leadership.
Besides the impact an anti-racist development industry could have on the world, and as much as the movement has already created some social and political change, the fact that the movement and structural racism is broadly, publicly and politically discussed can be key in further opinion building, potentially enabling increased funding and other resources needed for development. It leaves me thinking what the BLM movement will achieve next and whether challenging racism (finally) could become the new ‘normal’?
Personal reflection
Blogging for this assignment has been a great learning experience. It has been particularly interesting learning how to adapt academic topics into blog posts and trying to create relevant yet interesting content for a target audience that isn’t necessarily professionals within development. While focus on the first four blog posts was to create an interest in development and to find further resources to read about the topics presented, the focus in this assignment has been to further explore and connect the topics to relevant course literature.
As some of the writing I do professionally is for an audience with little experience in development it is always interesting finding the right balance. This type of writing is often far from academic writing where topics that require more background knowledge are presented, yet the balance is so important for spreading knowledge rather than opinions simply backed by emotions. It has been great exploring a new topic and achieving a greater understanding for social movements and digital activism.
Getting insight into my group members’ expertise and discussing issues, angles and topics with them throughout this course has been very beneficial for my own professional and academic growth.
Reference list
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Birhane, A. (2019, July 9) The Algorithmic Colonization of Africa, Real Life Mag. https://reallifemag.com/the-algorithmic-colonization-of-africa/
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