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1. In the episode, “Don’t Shoot the Messenger”, citizen journalism is described as “the oxygen of Democracy”, Do you agree or disagree with this statement?

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1. In the episode, “Don’t Shoot the Messenger”, citizen journalism is described as “the oxygen of Democracy”, Do you agree or disagree with this statement?

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I agree with this statement. I believe citizen journalism can be considered "the oxygen of Democracy" because, the public having a guaranteed source of visual evidence that they can share to a social media platform and could potentially go viral, can bring awareness to their situation they have posted about.  Citizen journalism and the role of the media unites people into feeling like they are actually doing something and actually making a change, even if it's a simple retweet, like, share, or comment. As long as people see it, its bring awareness.

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2. Do you think the film was effective in raising awareness about citizen journalism and copwatching?

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2. Do you think the film was effective in raising awareness about citizen journalism and copwatching?

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I think the film was effective in raising awareness about citizen journalism and copwatching.

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This article explain the "backlash" the Black Lives Matter movement has faced and why the #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter are contradicting the movement.

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This article is the last in the Black Lives Matter Everywhere series, a collaboration between The Conversation, the Sydney Democracy Network and the Sydney Peace Foundation. To mark the presentation of the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize to the Black Lives Matter Global Network, the authors reflect on the roots of and responses to a movement that has re-ignited a global conversation about racism. The prize will be presented on November 2 (tickets here).
In White-dominated societies, nearly any demand for equality by people of colour is met by a backlash couched in terms of White victimhood. This has been as true for Black Lives Matter as it was for the civil rights movement.

Just as Black Lives Matter went global, so did the backlash.

One popular (and self-serving) theory holds that White identity politics is merely a response to movements like Black Lives Matter. But this gets the story backwards. Black Lives Matter is a response to White supremacy. The anger harnessed by figures like Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani is the anger of White privilege forced to defend itself.

" All Lives Matter" and " Blue Lives Matter " are two of the most prominent rhetorical manifestations of the backlash. Both played major roles in the media coverage of and political response to Black Lives Matter.

All Lives Matter

The hashtag and slogan "All Lives Matter" is a declaration of "colourblindness", which Ian Haney-Lopez describes as "the dominant etiquette around race" today. As is so often the case when it comes to race, liberal rhetoric serves conservative ends.

"All Lives Matter" erases a long past and present of systemic inequality in the US. It represents a refusal to acknowledge that the state does not value all lives in the same way. It reduces the problem of racism to individual prejudice and casts African-Americans as aggressors against a colourblind post-civil rights order in which White people no longer "see race".

This kind of rhetoric is hardly new, as we learn from Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's book Racism Without Racists. It is the most up-to-date articulation of how most White people view racism (as a rare, archaic and unfortunate psychological disposition) as opposed to how most people of colour see it (as institutionalised and systemic).

Under the White understanding, talking about systemic racism is itself racist, because it conjures into existence "racial divides" that are invisible to Whites who believe themselves to be free of prejudice.

There is no better example of this than Giuliani, the former New York mayor who is a famous proponent of "stop and frisk" policing and a longtime master of backlash politics. He told CNN Black Lives Matter is "inherently racist" because "it divides us ... All lives matter: White lives, Black lives, all lives."

Giuliani went on to say:

Black Lives Matter never protests when every 14 hours someone is killed in Chicago, probably 70-80% of the time by a Black person. Where are they then? Where are they when a young Black child is killed?

This argument is a popular one in backlash politics. It holds that Black Lives Matter only cares about Black life when White people are responsible for taking it, thus ignoring and displacing Black responsibility for violence in Black communities.

In November 2015, Donald Trump tweeted an infographic purporting to show that Blacks were responsible for 97% of murders of Blacks and 82% of murders of Whites. Both "statistics" are wrong, the latter monstrously so: African-Americans accounted for about 15% of murders of Whites, according to FBI data.

This twisted tribal accounting deliberately obscures Black Lives Matter's critique of violence, inequality and failings at all levels of the criminal justice system. Like the slogan "All Lives Matter", it is a way of changing the subject.

It also exposes the myths of colourblind rhetoric. Many White people are more than happy to "see colour" when assigning blame for Black deaths, and to treat that as the end of the issue.

"All Lives Matter" has not always served as the powerful rebuke of Black Lives Matter that the backlash intends. One strategy by online activists has been to refuse to acknowledge the disingenuous binary of "Black" and "all".

Nikita Carney notes in a study of the #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter hashtags that some Black Twitter users simply used both when calling for protests against police violence, effectively disarming the dishonest critique implied by All Lives Matter.

Alicia Garza, one of the creators of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, explained in 2014 how Black lives mattering is a precondition for all lives mattering:

Black Lives Matter doesn't mean your life isn't important - it means that Black lives, which are seen as without value within White supremacy, are important to your liberation. Given the disproportionate impact state violence has on Black lives, we understand that when Black people in this country get free, the benefits will be wide-reaching and transformative for society as a whole.

When we are able to end the hyper-criminalisation and sexualisation of Black people and end the poverty, control and surveillance of Black people, every single person in this world has a better shot at getting and staying free. When Black people get free, everybody gets free.

Blue Lives Matter

While campaigning for the presidency in late 2015, Trump said that if elected he would use an executive order to make the death penalty mandatory for anyone who killed a police officer. The US president has no such authority, but Trump was attuned to the politics of the backlash.

The idea of a Black Lives Matter-inspired " war on cops" plays a powerful role in the backlash imagination. In 2014 and 2016, there were three ambush murders of multiple officers in New York, Baton Rouge and Dallas. Each was committed by a different lone gunman who sought revenge against police for their violence against Black communities.

These atrocities received blanket media coverage and became a major theme of the 2016 Republican National Convention. Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke opened his speech by declaring that "blue lives matter", blaming Black Lives Matter for "the collapse of social order".

Giuliani, speaking shortly afterwards, claimed that most Americans do not feel safe and "they fear for our police officers who are being targeted".

In Australia, The Daily Telegraph's Miranda Devine blamed Black Lives Matter for the killing of an unarmed Australian woman in Minnesota by a police officer in July this year.

Devine claimed police were "more prone to make tragic mistakes" because they felt under siege following a "wave of ambushes and assassinations" incited by Black Lives Matter. She also asserted, baselessly, that "their entire movement is built on a lie" and that "Black Americans are more likely to kill cops than be killed by cops".

In fact, it is estimated police killed more than four times as many Black Americans last year as the other way round. There is no evidence of a resurgent "war on police".

In 2016, 64 officers were shot dead, a much-remarked jump from 41 in 2015. But this remains within the average range of police deaths for the last ten years, which itself represents a steep drop from previous decades. An average of 115 were murdered each year in the 1970s, when the population was two-thirds what it is now. So far in 2017, 36 officers have been shot dead.

It is far harder to say whether killings by police are rising or falling, because no reliable data have been kept until recently. Thousands of law enforcement agencies participate in the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report, but according to Politifact "just a small fraction of them willingly provide data on deadly force and justifiable homicides within their departments".

This has led to recent data collection efforts by NGOs and media outlets, but without trustworthy numbers from previous years to allow for historical comparison. "The Counted", a project by The Guardian, found police killed 1,093 people in 2016, 266 of them African-American.

Nonetheless, the Blue Lives Matter backlash has borne fruit. According to a Huffington Post report, 33 "Blue Lives Matter" bills have been introduced in 14 states in 2017, following 15 such bills in 2016. The purpose of these bills is to extend hate crime protections to members of law enforcement, thus increasing penalties for crimes committed against them.

Most of these bills have failed, but they have become law in Louisiana and Kentucky. A similar bill went into the committee stage in South Carolina, which doesn't have a hate crimes statute and which automatically puts the death penalty on the table for the murder of police officers.

Such laws are profoundly unnecessary, which is why most don't become laws. Penalties in all 50 states are already more severe for crimes committed against law enforcement officers.

However, Blue Lives Matter bills serve a political purpose. They suggest that members of racial minorities are somehow more "protected" than police officers, who are the real victims.

When Louisiana's law was signed, a Blue Lives Matter national spokesman said it was "important symbolically because it advises there is a value to the lives of police officers".

Bestowing the status of a victim class on police is a grotesque distortion of reality and a symptom of structural violence. Police do a dangerous job, but there has never been any question that their lives matter. Criminal justice is never pursued more vigorously than when a police officer is killed.

Slain police officers deserve to be mourned. But those slain by police officers deserve at least to be counted. Black Lives Matter draws attention not just to police violence, but to the many deep imbalances in how the state values human life.
You can read other articles in the series here.

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The backlash against Black Lives Matter is just more evidence of injustice

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This article is the last in the Black Lives Matter Everywhere series, a collaboration between The Conversation, the Sydney Democracy Network and the Sydney Peace Foundation. To mark the presentation of the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize to the Black Lives Matter Global Network, the authors reflect on the roots of and responses to a movement that has re-ignited a global conversation about racism.

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3. If you could join a citizen journalism project would you?

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3. If you could join a citizen journalism project would you?

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Yes

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This article explains how Black Lives Matter started from the Trayvon Martin. It explains concisely how a movement formed from a hashtag.

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Updated June 2, 2020

Black Lives Matter: An Activist Movement

Black Lives Matter is an activist movement which began as a hashtag (#BlackLivesMatter) after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American teenager killed in Florida in July 2013. The movement became more widely known and popularized after two high-profile deaths in 2014 of unarmed African-American men (Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY and Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO). Neither of the police officers involved in their deaths were indicted (i.e., formally charged with a crime).

Violence against African Americans

There is a larger context and history of African American men and boys who were killed at the hands of the police, many of whom, like George Floyd (2020), were unarmed. Since 2014, other high-profile deaths include Tamir Rice (2014), Laquan McDonald (2014), John Crawford (2014) Freddie Gray (2015), Walter Scott (2015), Alton Sterling (2016), Philando Castile (2016), Terence Crutcher (2016), Antwon Rose (2018) and others. Black women and girls are also targets of police violence, a reality that sparked the "Say Her Name" movement to highlight how this violence often goes unnoticed. Women who have died as a result of police interactions include Sandra Bland (2015), Deborah Danner (2016), Atatiana Jefferson (2019) and Breonna Taylor (2020).

From Protests to Policy Solutions

Ongoing local and national protests and other actions-often sparked by the deaths of other unarmed African Americans-have brought the Black Lives Matter movement to the public consciousness and conversation. Black Lives activists released "Campaign Zero," which includes ten policy solutions developed in conjunction with activists, protestors and researchers across the country, integrating community demands, input from research organizations and the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

On March 4, 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the findings in two separate investigations related to Ferguson. One report found a pattern of civil rights violations on the part of the Ferguson Police Department. A second report determined that "the evidence examined in its independent, federal investigation into the fatal shooting of Michael Brown does not support federal civil rights charges against Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson." Two weeks later, on March 17, the Department and the city of Ferguson formally announced an agreement "aiming to remedy the unconstitutional law enforcement conduct that the Justice Department found during its civil pattern-or-practice investigation." The announcement resolved a pending federal lawsuit against Ferguson, and addressed a range of issues including bias-free police and court practices, protecting all individuals' First Amendment rights, and reorienting Ferguson's use of force policies.

Black Lives Matter continues to pursue policy solutions beyond the events of Ferguson.

About the Lesson Plan

This high school lesson provides an opportunity for students to learn more about Black Lives Matter and the activists involved, explore the controversy about using the term "All lives matter," and posit their point of view in writing to a person of their choice.
Learning Objectives:

Students will learn about the history of the Black Lives Matter movement and how it evolved.

Students will analyze the controversy around politicians and other people using the term "All lives matter" instead of or in addition to "Black lives matter."

Students will reflect on their perspective of Black Lives Matter and write a letter to a person of their choice which reflects their new knowledge and point of view.

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Black Lives Matter: From Hashtag to Movement

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Updated June 2, 2020 Black Lives Matter is an activist movement which began as a hashtag (#BlackLivesMatter) after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American teenager killed in Florida in July 2013.

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This article provides the background information on how BLM came to be and more information on the movement.

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Freedom fighters around the globe commemorate July 13 as the day that three Black women helped give birth to a movement. In the five short years since #Black LivesMatter arrived on the scene - thanks to the creative genius of Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometti - the push for Black liberation from state-inflicted violence has evolved into one of the most influential social movements of the post-civil rights era.

Black Lives Matter has always been more of a human rights movement rather than a civil rights movement. BLM's focus has been less about changing specific laws and more about fighting for a fundamental reordering of society wherein Black lives are free from systematic dehumanization. Still, the movement's measurable impact on the political and legal landscape is undeniable.

What gets referred to as "the Black Lives Matter movement" is, in actuality, the collective labor of a wide range of Black liberation organizations, each which their own distinct histories. These organizations include groups like the Black Youth Project 100, the Dream Defenders, Assata's Daughters, the St. Louis Action council, Millennial Activists United, and the Organization for Black Struggle, to name just a few.

Collectively, since 2013, these organizers have effected significant change locally and nationally, including the ousting of high-profile corrupt prosecutors. In Chicago, the labor of groups such as BYP100 and Assata's Daughters, among others, led Anita Alvarez - who had inexplicably failed to charge police officers who shot at least 68 people to death - to lose her re-election bid for Cook County prosecutor. And in Florida, groups like The Dream Defenders and others helped end Angela Corey 's reign as a state attorney. Corey remains infamous for failing to convict Trayvon Martin's killer George Zimmerman while prosecuting Marissa Alexander, a Black woman who didn't hurt anyone when firing a warning shot at her abusive ex-husband.
Podcast: Hear Patrisse Cullors on the Evolution of Black Lives Matter
The BLM movement's work certainly doesn't stop there. Students on the ground in Missouri, as part of the #ConcernedStudent1950 movement, helped lead to the resignation of the University of Missouri president over his failure to deal with racism on campus. BLM compelled Democrats to restructure their national platform to include issues such as criminal justice reform, and the movement contributed to the election of Black leftist organizers to public office, such as activist Chokwe Lumumba to mayor of Jackson, Mississippi.

The BLM movement's unrelenting work on the issue of police corruption, helped incite the release of four unprecedented U.S. Department of Justice reports that confirm the widespread presence of police corruption in Baltimore, Chicago, Ferguson, and Cleveland. Moreover, the Movement for Black Lives' publication of a watershed multi-agenda policy platform - authored by over 50 black-centered organizations - laid bare the expansive policy goals of the movement. The fact that these accomplishments have happened so quickly is an extraordinary achievement in and of itself.

Moreover, the broader cultural impact of BLM as a movement has been immeasurably expansive. BLM will forever be remembered as the movement responsible for popularizing what has now become an indispensable tool in 21st-century organizing efforts: the phenomenon that scholars refer to as "mediated mobilization." By using the tools of social media, BLM was the first U.S. social movement in history to successfully use the internet as a mass mobilization device. The recent successes of movements, such as #MeToo, #NeverAgain, and #TimesUp, would be inconceivable had it not been for the groundwork that #BlackLivesMatter laid.

Many have suggested, erroneously, that the BLM movement has "quieted" down in the age of Trump. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything the opposite is true: BLM is stronger, larger, and more global now than ever before. The success of initiatives such as Alicia Garza's Black Census Project - the largest national survey focusing on U.S. black lives in over 150 years - and Patrisse Cullor's launch of the grassroots effort Dignity and Power Now in support of incarcerated people, both exemplify the BLM movement's continued impact, particularly in local communities.

The idea that BLM is in a "decline" stage is false. Instead, what is true is that American mainstream media has been much less willing to actually cover the concerns of the BLM in part because it has been consumed by the daily catastrophes of the Trump presidency. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to assume that BLM is "dwindling" away simply because the cameras are no longer present. The revolution is still happening - it is just not being televised. All throughout the country, BLM organizers are at work in their local communities feverishly fighting for change and relentlessly speaking truth to power. For instance, The Dream Defenders in Florida just released their visionary project "The Freedom Papers," and BYP100 just celebrated its five-year anniversary.

Ironically, many of the debates that have come to define the age of Trump, such as the immigration debate, are arguably indirectly influenced by BLM. A notable example: Recently, some congressional Democrats have called for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been violating the rights of undocumented immigrants. What has been missing in much of the mainstream coverage of the ICE debate is an acknowledgment of how the democratic left's radicalization would not have been possible without the efforts of Black radical grassroots social movements, such as BLM.

Indeed, long before congressional Democrats dared to call for the abolition of ICE, #blacklivesmatter activists pioneered the call for an end of modern policing in America. The language of "abolition" comes directly from the work of grassroots activists, such as those in the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Their work helped to revive a long black radical tradition of engaging the rhetoric of abolitionism.

We literally would not even be using the word "abolition" - let alone embracing it as a framework - had it not been for the labor of BLM activists. The fact that Democrats are gradually calling for the abolition of ICE is a testimony to the continued impact of BLM as a social movement.

As we reflect on five years of BLM, we would do well to consider the myriad ways that #blacklivesmatter has influenced our contemporary moment and given us a framework for imagining what democracy in action really looks like. Whether it be transforming how we talk about police violence or transforming how we talk about "abolitionism," the BLM movement has succeeded in transforming how Americans talk about, think about, and organize for freedom.
Frank Leon Roberts is the founder of the Black Lives Matter Syllabus and teaches at New York University.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: An earlier version of this essay inadvertently conflated two important distinctions: Black Lives Matter, the organization, vs. Black Lives Matter, the movement. Black Lives Matter, the organization, is a global decentralized network with over 30 chapters across the world. Black Lives Matter, the movement, is a broad conceptual umbrella that refers to the important work of a wide range of Black liberation organizations. Sometimes referred to as "the Movement for Black Lives," the achievements of the Black Lives Matter movement would not be possible had it not been for the collective efforts of groups such as Black Youth Project 100, the Dream Defenders, Assata's Daughters, the St. Louis Action council, Millennial Activists United, and the Organization for Black Struggle, to name just a few. This essay is an attempt to celebrate the movement without attributing the movement's "achievements" solely to Black Lives Matter, the organization.

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How Black Lives Matter Changed the Way Americans Fight for Freedom | News & Commentary | American Civil Liberties Union

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Freedom fighters around the globe commemorate July 13 as the day that three Black women helped give birth to a movement. In the five short years since #Black LivesMatter arrived on the scene - thanks to the creative genius of Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometti - the push for Black liberation from state-inflicted violence has evolved into one of the most influential social movements of the post-civil rights era.

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GBs speak on the movement

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Black Lives Matter Movement | Global Citizen

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Kennedy Cook does a TED talk on the meaning behind the hashtag.

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#BlackLivesMatter | Kennedy Cook | TEDxYouth@Dayton

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Identify an Issue you are going to ‘Watch’.

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Identify an Issue you are going to ‘Watch’.

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The Black Lives Matter Movement

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How has the Internet revolution impacted journalism, and what are its effects on the coverage of public affairs and current issues?

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How has the Internet revolution impacted journalism, and what are its effects on the coverage of public affairs and current issues?

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The internet plays a huge role in journalism. The internet helps journalism be seen by people all over. It allows people to give their opinion and views on public affairs and current issues.

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This is Shaun King. He is a civil rights activist and he also uses his social media to promote social justice causes, including the Black Lives Matter Movement.

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Where in the country would you be visiting? 

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Where in the country would you be visiting? 

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The United States. The Black Lives Matter Movement is an international movement all throughout the U.S.

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What content do you hope to catch and post? 

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What content do you hope to catch and post? 

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I'd hope to catch a Black Lives Matter Movement protest in action.

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Who should you be following on social media?

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Who should you be following on social media?

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I should be following the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. The founders are Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors.

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The Root and Essence are a few of the news outlets that would favor my topic.

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The Root | Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude

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Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude

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This is Tomi Lahren. She is a conservative political commentator.

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My padlet discusses the importance of the movement and it's meaning to me.