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Black Lives Matter's history from Trayvon Martin to George Floyd

From Trayvon Martin to George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement continues to highlight Black lives lost to police and racial injustice.

Just the FAQs, USA TODAY

Since the nationwide protestsfollowing George Floyd's murder in summer 2020, misinformation about Black Lives Matter has spread online, ranging from misleading claims about the movement's founderto false assertions about the groups politics.

Anotherclaim surfaced Feb. 15 on Facebook.

BLM burned our cities and destroyed $2B of property. They faced no consequences.Their lawlessness celebrated and excused," reads text in the post, published by a page called The Right View of the United States."So yes, Im absolutely fine with some truckers & farmers clogging roads & bridges for freedom.

The post shows a Feb. 11 tweet fromBryan Dean Wright, an opinion writer and former CIA officer. Combined, the posts accumulated more than 5,000 shares within a week.

The "truckers & farmers"mentioned in the post refer to anti-vaccine mandate protesters in Canada. The protests, colloquially known as the"Freedom Convoy," began in late January after the Canadian government started requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination for drivers crossing the U.S. border. Similar movementshave cropped up across the world, with demonstrations against COVID-19 restrictions also taking place in Belgium and the Netherlands.

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While the post contains an element of truth, it presents a misleading comparison of the Freedom Convoy and Black Lives Matter protests.

Some reports have estimatedinsurance claims for damagesrelated to the 2020 protests totaled about $2 billion. However, the post is wrong to claimprotesters saw no consequences in fact, over 10,000 protesters were arrested, most for low-level offenses.

USA TODAY reached out to Wright and The Right View of the United Statesfor comment.

Damages caused by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were estimated to cost $2 billion, a number that could "still go higher," according to a February2021 report published onthe World Economic Forum's website.

The reportwasauthored by the head ofProperty Claim Services, which hastracked protest-related insurance claims for decades. The group found that 2020 protests cost more than any other period of unrest in American history, as the average cost of demonstrations since 1950 has been about $90 million annually.

Other cost estimates support Property Claim Services' $2 billion figure.

Fact check: Posts mislead about crowd size, peacefulness at Canada Freedom Convoy protest

Axios reported inSeptember2020that the Insurance Information Institute, which collects data from Property Claim Services and related firms, estimated that damages could total as much as 2 billion and possibly more.

Contrary to the claim in the post, manyBlack Lives Matterprotesters did face consequences. Estimates vary, but news outlets reported thousands of protesterswere arrested in the months following Floyds death in May 2020.

A June 22, 2020,article from The Washington Post tallied over 14,000 arrests made since May 27.The Hill reported over 17,000 arrests had been made in the first two weeks of protests.

Despite the large number of arrests, The Hill reported most of those protesters were booked not for violent crimes, but for low-level offenses such as violating curfews.Obstructing roadways and carrying open containers were other reasons for the arrests, as well asfailure to disperse.

Some more serious charges were filed as well, however. The Associated Press reportedhundreds were charged with burglary and looting as of June 4, 2020.

In October 2020, researchers writing forThe Washington Post analyzed 7,305 protest eventsand found police made arrests at 5% of them. Only 3.7% of the events involved property damage or vandalism, according to the analysis.

PolitiFactreported in June 2020 that, while protests in several major cities started with violence, most demonstrations across the country were largely peaceful.

Based on our research, we rate PARTLY FALSE the claim that Black Lives Matter protesters caused $2 billion worth of damage and faced no consequences. It's true that, in 2020, protests over Floyd's death were estimated to have caused about $2 billion in damage. But the post is wrong to say demonstrators faced no consequences. News reports indicate more than10,000 protesters were arrested, most for low-level offenses.

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Fact check: Thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters ...

2020 was the year a once-in-a-generation global pandemic clashed with a global call for racial equality.

In her excellent new book, Through the Lens: The Pandemic and Black Lives Matter, NYU professor Lauren Walsh attempts to understand the historic year through the vantage point of the photojournalists that were on the frontlines capturing a multitude of unprecedented events. Walsh records the emotional toll that came with covering death, destruction, and endemic racism.

The historic Black Lives Matter protests were the largest demonstrations in US history and reverberated globally, Walsh says.

The devastating Covid-19 pandemic, a once-in-a-century disaster, has impacted the entire world. And both situations collided in 2020, forcing photographers into a terrain defined by new ethical, technological, and safety concerns, as well as innovative attacks on press freedom.

Through the Lens features images that range from lockdowns in Shanghai and Wuhan, to protests in Minnesota and Portland.

Her work, Walsh adds, aims to uncover the ethical dilemmas and the risks and challenges visual journalists encounter to bring us the news in pictures.

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How COVID and Black Lives Matter Converged - VICE

The number of employers implementing new diversity and inclusion drives has almost trebled since the end of the Black Lives Matter protests, new research shows.

A total of 27% of minority-ethnic workers said their employers had introduced new initiatives during the last 12 months in response to the global movement, according to an Opinium survey of 2,000 adults. This was an increase from 10% in 2020, the year in which protests began after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in the US state of Minnesota.

The latest Multicultural Britain survey, undertaken by the pollsters in partnership with the advocacy organisation Reboot, said that almost half (47%) of minority-ethnic workers had seen their employer take some sort of action to tackle racism and diversity problems up from 40% in 2020.

We were interested in questioning whether promises made by employers after George Floyd were just an example of performative activism or if we were still seeing the action happening today, which is why we specifically asked whether employers have taken action, said Priya Minhas, the lead researcher of the Multicultural Britain series.

In 2020, 73% of minority-ethnic people said they had experienced discrimination, but this year, for the first time since the Multicultural Britain series began in 2016, that figure dropped to 64%. Minhas said that it was difficult to tell whether this was positive change as a result of the global protests or because of people largely working from home and restrictions in socialising due to the pandemic.

While there have been improvements in increased satisfaction in what employers are doing, and more people feeling that businesses and organisations are making an authentic effort to tackle racism, there is still work to be done and clearly there are still issues in the workplaces that need to be addressed, she said.

The survey results show that there have been some positive changes in the workplace somewhat allaying concerns that businesses and companies were committing to anti-racism only in the height of the summer of 2020.

Sereena Abbassi, an inclusion practitioner who has worked with organisations including Sony Music, the NHS and English National Ballet, said there were encouraging signs the protests were a watershed moment.

She said: In some instances, there are businesses and employers who were very performative in their work and the catalyst seemed to be George Floyds murder for them to accelerate their work around diversity, inclusion and equity, but there are also others who have decided to take it very slow and are instead doing the work quietly, rather than showing up just for the optics.

Abbassi added that she had seen a continued appetite from companies and organisations to want to work with her and that the protests had inspired people to change.

From the clients Abbassi has worked with, she feels training sessions and conversations have been successful in contributing to a more diverse and inclusive workspace.

She said: More businesses are thinking about positive action and organisations have developed initiatives like mentoring schemes to ensure junior staff have contact with senior staff. After the protests we saw a lot of rage from people of colour, but also white allies within organisations.

Asked about the survey results that showed people were having fewer conversations about race this year than in the summer of 2020, Abbassi said a possible reason for this was that there was a real sense of fatigue when discussing race, especially for ethnic minorities who carry the burden of educating white people in their workplaces. She added that people may be concerned that having conversations about race would lead to them saying the wrong things and that it could cost them their job.

Lawrence Heming, the assistant director of EYs UK diversity and equity team, said the survey results showed it was important for people to understand how recent events such as the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests had affected things, either positively or negatively, for ethnic minorities.

Heming says although the results showed that some issues surrounding race were still prevalent and that we are nowhere where I would say we need to be, there were findings that suggested things were slowly shifting.

He added: More firms in the corporate sector are introducing initiatives and policies to tackle racism and more people are being more mindful on certain issues this has had a positive impact, but it is important for places to still be held accountable, today, for the commitments they made in 2020.

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Workplace inclusion drives have almost trebled since BLM protests, survey shows - The Guardian

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A tenured Canadian professor who was fired after criticizing Black Lives Matter (BLM) has a proposed arbitration date set during which she intends to lay out her grievances against her former university.

"All of my grievances are going forward together at this time," Frances Widdowson said during a recent interview with The College Fix. She confirmed to Fox News Digital that the proposed dates are Jan. 16-27, 2023, but they have not been confirmed.

A protester waves a Black Lives Matter flag during the demonstration. (Stanton Sharpe/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Widdowson, who taught economics, justice and policy studies, was fired from Mount Royal University (MRU) in Calgary, Alberta, last December after stoking controversy for comments criticizing BLM, which she said "destroyed MRU" to such an extent that she "doesnt recognize the institution anymore."

Widdowson, who studied Indigenization initiatives for 20 years, also took flak for claiming that Canada's controversial residential school program offered Indigenous children the opportunity "to get an education that normally they wouldnt have received." Her comments came amid a national backlash over the discovery of unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visits the makeshift memorial erected in honor of the 215 indigenous children remains found at a boarding school in British Columbia, on Parliament Hill, June 1, 2021 in Ottawa. (DAVE CHAN/AFP via Getty Images)

A petition later circulated calling her a "racist professor" and demanding her termination, which prompted a response from the university.

Widdowson told The College Fix that she wanted an open arbitration so that journalists can attend as she appeals for her rehiring and presents documentation she has been keeping since 2019 regarding issues she has with Mount Royal University.

Professor Frances Widowsson (Credit: MOUNT ROYAL UNIVERSITY)

"Without upholding academic freedom, we have no ability to explore ideas and pursue the truth," Widdowson said.

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The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, which is a free speech advocacy group, supported Widdowson in a letter, and she told The College Fix that some of her former colleagues expressed support for her privately.

Mount Royal University did not immediately respond to request for comment.

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Tenured Canadian professor fired after saying BLM 'destroyed' her university - Fox News

A few weeks ago, Bellows Falls High School student, Grace Garyas, delivered a well prepared and thoughtful request to her school board that a Black Lives Matter flag fly beneath the Vermont flag on the school flagpole. Though the board tabled her proposal until it developed a policy to govern such matters, there was opposition expressed by some white members of the board and audience. These were especially striking for being framed by some as All lives matter and Were all equal, and that the nearby American flag rendered the Black Lives Matter flag unnecessary because the stars and stripes already spoke to liberty and justice for all.

I dont know if these remarks were coded racist statements, politically correct for polite society, or simply the dangerously ignorant comments of people who like so many of us white folks are blind to both our racial supremacy and skin privilege, as well as the past and present daily experiences of violence, subjugation, and discrimination suffered by POC (people of color) folks living in a white society. Whatever they were, insisting that were all equal and that all lives matter in America is as true as the claim that Trump won the 2020 election.

These are the statements of willfully oblivious people who, like myself, never had to prepare our sons on how to behave should they encounter a white cop; or had to cope with losing members of their families to murder and imprisonment as a social norm; or suffer and perhaps die from inferior medical care because a white doctor believed that Black bodies are biologically and physiologically inferior to white bodies; or were redlined from purchasing a desired home; or experienced daily insults and racial epithets, in school, work, and just walking down the street.

Like myself, this absence of personal experience is compounded by the whitewashed version of American history we were taught in school where the 246 years of horrific slavery whipping, branding, hanging, raping, separating children from parents was treated as an aberrant moment only deserving of passing mention in the chapter on the Civil War in the standard high school text. Or ignored that the U.S. Constitution was shaped to accommodate the interests of slave-owners; or that the involuntary labor of Black people is the foundation of our nations wealth that they have never been compensated for or benefited from; or when slavery ended, it was followed by the nightmare of the Jim Crow era featuring terroristic violence (white Americans lynched at least 6,500 Black citizens from the end of the Civil War to 1950), contract labor (slavery by another name), Black Codes disenfranchising otherwise eligible Black voters and otherwise thwarting the expression of equal Black citizenship;. or the race riots and mass murders in towns like the prosperous Black Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, and the only successful coup in the history of the United States, perpetrated by whites in the Black-run town of Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898.

We are color blind to the horror that continues into the present moment with the war on drugs and stop and search campaigns resulting in a Black incarceration rate five times higher than whites. Or that todays Black median income is about half that of white Americans, the same as it was in 1950. And that Black Americans are 3 times more likely than white Americans to be killed during a police encounter.

All lives Matter? Were all equal?

White supremacy and skin privilege are basic to what our nation is all about. It is the original member of our civilizations long emergency tripartite, as seemingly impervious to resolution as the climate catastrophe, and as plainly evil as fascism, its two associates.

Yes, its good that some of us march and protest, and express our outrage with the latest white cop murder of a Black citizen. But then we return home where, other than planting a Black Lives Matter sign in our lawn, we suffer white amnesia as we resume a life of white privilege that exists at the expense of the same Black folks whose oppression we otherwise episodically act out against with the best intentions.

While I believe it serves no useful purpose to try to convert those who harbor racist viewpoints, we nevertheless must always stand up against and speak truth to white supremacy, both overt and coded. Like attending and speaking up at the next meeting of the Bellows Falls School Board, Monday, April 25, 6:30 p.m. in the BFUHS Family Engagement Room, to support Graces proposed Black Lives Matter flag.

But we do this in a way that, while rejecting the expressions of white supremacy, does not renounce the person voicing them. As challenging as this may be, it is important that we never lose sight of the fact that, despite our differences, we share a common humanity with our white brothers and sisters, not to mention a mutual responsibility for what is the white race problem. While always resisting and opposing racist behavior, and serving as an ally of our POC sisters and brothers, we do so without denying the white person we are, or disowning other members of our race.

And while were at it, we might read The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, available at Brooks Memorial and Rockingham libraries, and local book stores. Its a great antidote for our racialized ignorance!

Tim Stevenson is a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions from Athens, and author of Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age (2015, Green Writers Press). The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of Vermont News & Media.

Originally posted here:
Stevenson | Living with the Long Emergency: The intractability of white supremacy - Brattleboro Reformer