Black Lives Matter: A Social Media Analysis

Black Lives Matter is making a difference because of the new possibilities that social media offer. In the short span of a year, they moved from demonstrations to policy proposals: Campaign Zero, a movement offshoot, has put forth a comprehensive set of recommendations for potential remedies, and activists recently met with Democratic presidential candidates. This is possibly a tipping-point moment in terms of addressing killings by police. In terms of how social history happens, there is an intangible point at which transformations occur because of a phase shift in general awareness that becomes impossible to ignore and generates further action. Examples include the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s — recall that Black activists had been demanding justice for centuries before then (McWhorter). According to Coleman, Deutsch, & Marcus (2014), in sociology, a tipping point is a point in time when a group—or a large number of group members—rapidly and dramatically changes its behavior by widely adopting a previously rare practice. The phrase was first used in sociology …show more content…
According to Bell Hooks (1992): In White supremacist society, White people can “safely” imagine that they are invisible to Black people since the power they have historically asserted, and even now collectively assert over Black people, accorded them the right to control the Black gaze. As fantastic as it may seem, racist White people find it easy to imagine that Black people cannot see them if within their desire they do not what to be seen by the dark Other. Black slaves, and later manumitted servants, could be brutally punished for looking, for appearing to observe the Whites they were serving, as only a subject can observe, or see. To fully be an object then was to lack the capacity to see or recognize