Week 9

Gabriela Garcia-Mejia

Section A03

Week 9

Santiago Ramos’ piece “Building a Culture of Solidarity: Racial Discourse, Black Lives Matter, and Indigenous Social Justice” discussed how we need to stand in solidarity with movements like the Black Lives Matter but not let it be isolated acts of solidarity. We need to understand our similarities but also our differences and know that even though we might not have experienced the same struggles we can still stand as one in support of them. He brings up the topic of other communities like the Chicanx, Native, and Asian community using the #BlackLivesMatter and making their own #LatinoLivesMatter or #NativeLivesMatter and by doing this, it undermines the origin of the movement which was to bring awareness to police brutality against African Americans. Similarly hashtags like #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter emerged to support police officers and create equality in all the lives that have been lost to discriminations, but it does not give credit to origin of the movement. When we focus on a movement like Black Lives Matter we aren’t taking away from the struggles of other minorities, we are just focusing on the violence and struggles against the African American community. He also discussed how we fail to also think about the anti-Blackness in our own communities and with the BLM we only focus on the state and police violence but not on the social aspects. This really stood out to me and made me really reflect on my experiences. As a Chicanx even though, as Santos mentioned, we have so many similarities with the African American and we are connected by a lot I still see that we still have anti-blackness sentiments. I think that in order to fully show our solidarity we need to reflect and look at the ways in which we differentiate ourselves from other minorities and how we can change that to look at the similarities that we all share.

Question:  Does the media play a role in creating these differences amongst minorities?

Resources:

Ramos, S. F. (2016, April 20). Building a Culture of Solidarity: Racial Discourse, Black Lives Matter, and Indigenous Social Justice. Retrieved from http://enculturation.net/building-a-culture-of-solidarity

Schneider, R. J. (2015, August 22). [Photograph found in Minneapolis]. Retrieved May 27, 2017, from http://www.startribune.com/black-lives-matter-group-to-rally-disrupt-operations-at-minnesota-state-fair/322479171/ (Originally photographed 2015, April 29)