Understanding the Black Lives Matter Movement

By Richard McPatterson

The main theme of this book revolves around racism and how it has affected our lives in recent times. Across the US, racism and discrimination have wreaked havoc on the lives of African Americans. The author touches on the subjects of slavery, white supremacy, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. The deep-rooted impact of structural racism has been discussed in the book.
The brutal murder of George Floyd, which was recorded by a bystander, sparked nationwide protests and riots, demanding justice for the innocent Black man’s death. This unfortunate incident drew international attention, shedding light on police brutality in America. The author of this book goes into greater detail on the impact of this incident and how the Black Lives Matter Movement evolved into the force that it is today. This movement has ushered the country to a turning point. It has given a powerful voice to Black people demanding justice for the lives claimed by a racist system. The author directs focus on the struggles of Black people and their fight for justice. The hope for a brighter and just future is very much alive among the African American community. BLM is a powerful embodiment of that hope. The book moves about the theme, keeping its nature in mind and the author focuses on the strong voice of the African American community; how it will never be silenced until racism has ceased to exist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard McPatterson
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781801283526

Book preview

Chapter 1: Introduction

Think about your day. Think about when you woke up and started your day, talked to people, and interacted with your friends and family. You spoke the way you usually do, thinking about things you have thought for a long time, in a way that you typically think.

One can say that you’ve had a pretty typical day, right? What you don’t realize is the number of times you have inadvertently indulged yourself in the oppressive tongue used back in the times of slavery. A few examples of this might be words given to certain objects or places. For instance, every house has a ‘Master Bedroom,’ there is ‘Blackmail,’ and we have phrases like ‘sold down the river.’ All of these phrases started at a time when owning slaves was almost a necessity.

It may not seem like a huge deal today. These words and phrases have been incorporated into our everyday language. We surely don’t use them in the same sense as back in the day, right? Wrong! Language plays a crucial role in dominating your daily life. The way you think, speak, and write, plays a considerable role in defining your personality. Using words in our language that have racist overtones helps create a culture of oppression. Even though that mindset of racism and oppression may be said to have been finished, that is certainly not the case.

Racists exist everywhere, just as they were back in the times of slavery. If you come from a place of privilege, you might not know this, but the only difference between now and then is that racism now gets captured on camera. Only a few decades ago, it was challenging to present a visual of such racial oppression. You see many instances on social media where people post about the first time they got exposed to racism, and the result of that is, people get even more divided. On the one hand, you have racists, while on the other, you have those who abhor racism and want it to end.

The problem arises because there is inherent supremacy of one social class over the others. Racism is believing that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by their inborn biological characteristics. As if being born in a particular family means that they are inherently better than a whole other class. Racial separatism is based on racism most of the time. It is a belief that different races should remain segregated from one another to keep their purity.

Currently, people have much greater exposure to other people’s experiences due to increased social media connectivity. People before this generation experienced racism on a much more threatening level, but they didn’t have the luxury of reaching out to others beyond their own families. Even if you think of the old times, racism hadn’t only existed when slaves were brought from Africa. It has existed throughout history. Physical differences have always been a cause for quarrels among men.

Even the word racism hides what it truly is. It is hatred of one person by another or the belief that another person is less of a human because of skin color, language, customs, place of birth, or a myriad of other qualities over which a person has no control. It includes all factors that supposedly reveal the basic nature of that person. Racism has influenced wars, slavery, the forming of nations, and legal codes.

Look at the history of the past few centuries. Racism on the part of western powers toward non-westerners has had a far more significant impact on history than any other form of racism, such as among western groups or easterners like Asians, Africans, and others. The most notorious example of racism by the west has been slavery. It was the most atrocious, inhumane, and disgusting act committed by western powers. In particular, this is about the enslavement of Africans in the New World since slavery itself dates back thousands of years.

If you look at the actual reason that slavery started in the west, it is because the whites believed that black Africans were less human than Europeans and their descendants. In fact,

Reviews for Understanding the Black Lives Matter Movement

[Amy Hensley · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The author explains the roots of BLM and how in the United States, black people have systematically oppressed by structural violence, that still exists today in the 21st century.