Contrary to other civil rights movement, the Black Lives Matter movement was launched and organize predominantly by women. In this video, I'll explain why. Black women have always been a dissenter of black liberation movements. We can mention the names of Ida B Wells, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, or Diane Nash. But what's different with Black Lives Matter is that the leading faces of the movement are all women. In fact, it is three black women, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza who created the hashtag. Why were women so important in the creation of Black Lives Matter? First, women were also victims of police brutality, while their names are often less known than their male counterparts, the police had also killed several black women in the past 20 years. Remember Rekia Boyd, Shelly Frey, or Breonna Taylor. If it is true that the police predominantly kills men, African-American women who are married, partner, and have children with African-American men, are also impacted as a result. Yet, historically, men have been at the forefront of the civil rights movement. In recent years, remembered the names of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. But this change with the events of Ferguson. In Ferguson, Women organized a protest. They were the leaders. In fact, the media dubbed them as the women of Ferguson. Why were women at the center of the Black Lives Matter Movement, especially in Ferguson, The reasons are probably multifaceted. According to the Census Bureau, that was a huge gender imbalance in African-American communities in Ferguson, but that cannot explain it all. The main reason maybe more philosophical, it may have been there women and predominantly those who identify as queer or working class, where the central victims of the systemic inequalities. This is why what police brutality was at the center of the movement. It was also used to explain a system of social injustice. See for example, what Alicia Garza has to say in the blog, The Feminist Wire, it isn't acknowledgment the black poverty and genocide as state violence. It is an acknowledgment that one million black people are locked in cages in this country, when half of all people in prisons and jails is an act of state violence. It is an acknowledgment that black women continued to bear the burden of a relentless assault on our children and on our family. That this is also an act of state violence. Black, queer, and trans folks bearing a unique burden in the hetero patriarchal society, disposes of us like garbage, and simultaneously fetishes us and profits of us is a state violence. The fact that 500 thousand black people in the US are undocumented immigrants is state violence. The fact that black girls are used as negotiating chips during times of conflict, the state violence. Black folks living with disability and different abilities bear the burden of state-sponsored Darwinian experiments that attempt to squeeze us into boxes of normality, defined by white supremacy is state violence. What does this say? It says that oppression comes from different places, different angles, and one must fight on different fonts. It is what Kimberle Crenshaw, a leading critical race theory scholar calls an inter-sectional approach, which means that oppression is multidimensional and comes from different places. This is precisely the novelty of the Black Lives movement by placing police brutality at the center of their agenda, Black Lives Matter activists have been able to target a web of systemic inequalities. This is very different from the old civil rights movement, as we have seen in this video, the people organizing the Black Lives Matter Movement are very different from the ones quite organized previous Civil Rights Movement, does therefore means that the organizational structure of the movement is also different? This is going to be the subject of the next video.
