“My goal is to save lives by any means necessary, even if that means putting mine on the line.” — Jasmine Richards, interview on “Uprising with Sonali,” July 22, 2015
"I think we need to believe in a leader like Bernie Sanders. People are dying. This is real. We need a president that will talk about it. Bernie is a protester. He's not scared to go up against the criminal justice system. He is not scared." - Erica Garner
Context is crucial to the politics of a narrative, always. In the context of the #BlackLivesMatter protests, and the increasing public focus on police brutality toward particularly African American communities in the U.S., it is important to ask how the fantasy of Luke Cage – a black man who is “unbreakable” – fits into the current socio-political landscape.
The Counted has made up for the Obama administration’s failings, but the lack of oversight remains. So we will restart our count of people killed by police until the government does its job
Whenever there’s a black girl on a school campus wielding a dangerous weapon like a cell phone, white macho can always be counted on to come to civilization’s rescue with the full force of fascist violence. These days, unarmed black children rank higher than mass murderers with semi-automatic weapons as public enemy number one on American school campuses.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren calls for broad policing reform - including de-escalation training and body cameras for all police officers - and likens the Black Lives Matter movement to the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
From Ferguson, Mo., where the "Black Lives Matters" movement took off, to the South Side of Chicago, where Fearless Leading by the Youth launched the trauma center campaign, young people are leading the call for justice. And increasingly across the country, they are strategically amplifying their message to get results.
"Bernie Sanders and other progressive politicians need to hit issues of police murder and police terror... But it's very important never to downplay the critique of Wall Street domination or downplay the critique of capitalism as a whole. In that sense, indeed, Bernie Sanders is a prophetic politician."
Sue Bradford Edwards, local Missouri journalist, and Dr. Duchess Harris, Professor of American Studies at Macalester College, new book, Black Lives Matter, is a comprehensive guidebook introducing without emotionally overwhelming 6-12th graders who are learning about the movement, and its inheritance, for the first time to antiblackness violence in U.S. law and society. Surprisingly, the text also resonates with lower-division university students.
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