This piece addressed an audience of organizations who have adopted the term Black Lives Matter and transformed it into something different. Garza is frustrated at the people who have taken a movement for a specific race and made it about other races, with no respect to the creation of the movement. Audience is all races across the country but Garza only talks about the importance of the Black race in this context of the recent events of Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, and Michael Brown. This piece was published in a feminist news site. Garza also mentions the how Black queer women are especially underrepresented and basically invisible. This also points the audience toward the female gender. Garza does not intend for this article to be just for women, but the actual audience is probably more females.
The main idea for this article is to discuss the movement of Black Lives Matter. Garza argues that in this context of racism and oppression of the black race, only Black lives matter. She gets frustrated at the spinoffs of #BlackLivesMatter that brings to light other races. Although all races are important, Black lives have been oppressed, assaulted, manipulated, and abused. This project is to bring those to light and to change that. All women, male, children, queer, trans whoa are Blacks have been abused and we need to do something about it. Once Black people gain complete freedom, liberation for all we ensue.
The goal for this article was to stop the evolution of #BlackLivesMatter into something other than the original project to stop the white supremacy over Black lives that plagues the nation. Garza wanted her audience to understand that the movement that she started is a call to action for the Black race because of the oppression and misrepresentation of Black lives. Even in this project, Garza saw the hetero-patriarchal effect on events and organizations who wanted to take on the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This article is supposed to stir up the audience in advocating for the injustices to stop and to reach freedom for the Black race.
I did not especially agree with this article because of the complete dismissal of other races. Bascially, Garza says that only Black lives matter at the moment. Which at an extent, it is true. With the recent events that point toward the mistreatment of Black people, there is a need for a movement. However, her frustration of organizations and other movements that followed her example of the #BlackLivesMatter is frustrating to me. #BlackLivesMatter trended for many days and became a large part of social media, so why not use this trend to bring equality to other issues. Garza is very one sided and in a way “selfish” saying that Black equality has to come first then other freedom can follow. Maybe what we need in this country is to start small and gain equality in a smaller movement and then move into a large goal of eliminating anti-Black racism. Although, I appreciated Garza’s argument of finding freedom for all gender, nationality, sexuality and disability. Typically, the argument brought up is just about the how Black males are viewed as violent and inferior. However, Garza pulled in sexuality, gender and disability into the equation of mistreatment and inferiority in the Black community. I don’t have much experience with this movement, but I do remember a hashtag that was brought up that caused controversy. The #AllLivesMatter started up after #BlackLivesMatter started to trend. I see how the new hashtag belittles the importance and effect that the Black Lives Matter movement. However, we can’t forget about other races that are facing similar oppression and abuse. Why does the equality of Black lives come before all other races, nationalities under oppression?
I’d like to suggest a slightly different way of looking at this – whether you agree, disagree, or just reflect for a moment, it might help you understand where Garza is coming from.
We’ve talked in class a lot about racism as an “operating system” or as like the sea we’re swimming in – something that shapes the way we see the world, in many ways that we’re not aware of. Garza created #blacklivesmatter as a way of challenging the fact that, under the operating system of white supremacy, black lives do NOT matter. Operating in the system of white supremacy, police can look at a young unarmed man and see not a kid but a deadly threat; a grand jury can look at the killing of an unarmed kid by an armed policeman and see something that was perfectly justified. If we think that Michael Brown would have been viewed differently in this situation if he had been white (and there is a lot of evidence, anecdotal and scholarly, to suggest that he would have been) then we are acknowledging that this was a case where a black life did not matter. And we know that it wasn’t an isolated incident. Saying #blacklivesmatter in response to this means challenging that specific, deadly set of assumptions and expectations that leads to the loss of black life.
In other words, Garza isn’t talking about how to address oppression in general, and her concern is partly that her hashtag is being taken for that when it isn’t just a statement about the value of human life, and certainly not as assertion that black lives matter more than lives of other races – it’s a protest against real and unnecessary deaths of black people, and a commitment to try and stop more people from dying.
I hope this makes sense and fits with the context of the article!