Wham, Bam, Thank You Sam: Standing in Solidarity

It’s no secret that tensions have been high between black communities and law enforcement. Such has been the case for decades – even centuries – in this country and the rest of the world.

The #BlackLivesMatter movement is just another iteration of a battle that has been waged since the Civil Rights Movement. Though it is disappointing, it is not surprising that there has been pushback against its proponents.

The arguments against this movement are largely supported on fallacies – some people believe saying “black lives matter” somehow says other lives do not. Others believe that, in spite of new evidence every day, organizations like Black Lives Matter are engaged in a war that ended in the 1960s.

A group of protesters gathered in Miami Gardens July 16 to march against recent police killings around the country – while I was covering the event, I realized all the chants they used were familiar.

As an annual attendee of Miami SlutWalk at FIU, I have become familiar with chants like “hey hey, ho ho, sexual violence has got to go” and “no justice, no peace.” These choruses have been used for decades to promote different causes. Although the setting and the words were different, the scene in Miami Gardens was strikingly similar to thousands of protests past.

It is my hope that supporters of SlutWalk and Black Lives Matter would, for the most part, intersect. When the chants you lead are the same, when you’re asking the same people (police) for the same thing (respect, protection, justice) why shouldn’t these groups be working together?

Dashana Honore, 26, organized the protest over Facebook, and expected about 200 to attend. The crowd was large, but less than half the expected turnout. This could be expected from any social-media based event, but it makes me wonder why more people didn’t attend.

There are organizations in every community who want something. When that “something” so closely aligns with the desires of another group, both would benefit from the other’s solidarity. The pool of participants could theoretically be much wider if organizations banded together and reached out to one another to bolster their numbers.

Social activism is intersectional, if not by direct connection, then by empathy. Liberal activists who want to effect social change cannot be focused solely on the causes that seem to impact them directly, because a combination of causes has a greater impact on society as a whole.

Feminism intersects with Black Lives Matter because many of those black lives are women, and vice versa, many women are black. Together, since they are petitioning law enforcement and other government agencies for change, they could increase their support networks significantly. Change is not made by leaders and figures, but by the groups behind them.

Honore made a move toward a better future by bringing attention to an issue and giving visibility to a cause by attaching almost 100 supporting faces to it. Though she hopes that she would not have to organize such a rally again – as that would mean more people would have died at the hands of police, she said she would.

I would hope that, next time, other like-minded groups would stand with her. I’m almost positive that, with over 1,200 people invited to the event, some of them must have had connections to other causes. It is our duty, if we have the connections, to at least try to widen a movement’s audience, not just to a general population, but to organizations with their own resources that they might be willing to share.