Why Black Lives Matter

Tall, short, black, white, straight, curls, or whatever you look like, we are all part of one race – the human race. Differences in our physical attributes should never be an indicator that one is superior to the other. Especially not our skin color. But it has come to a point that we have to create movements such as Black Lives Matter and stage protests just to get basic human rights. Children grow up to look down on their mates of ‘color’. Why the ‘of color’ term? When did white become the approved color? When did anyone with a contrary skin tone become inferior? And why black lives matter?

How did we get here?

For centuries, racism has been and is still one of the many things that set the cultural divide. It is an ideology among other ideologies that humans invented for social and political power. Powerful tools designed for slavery and colonization. It’s naive to think that racism against black people has been abolished along with slavery. Up to this day, we still have to constantly endure the shame of not being white. We still have to watch our backs and grow accustomed to people seeing us as a ‘threat’. Black parents constantly teach their kids how to survive as a black person in this world. We learned how to put our heads down when spoken to by a white person, especially a white police officer out of fear of being killed.

Yes, we are lucky that in this generation we get more support than before. Different media play a huge role in making our voices heard. Award-winning films and TV series like ‘The Help’, ‘Twelve Years A Slave’, ‘Fences’, ‘Dear White People’, ‘When They See Us’, ‘Pose’, among so many things, forced us to pay attention to the realities of racial discrimination. We have brilliant artists behind every film, series, music, art, other types of media to thank for educating us.

But the fight is not yet over.

As long as we wake up to news about a white woman calling the cops on a black man harmlessly bird watching in the park, black citizens getting randomly pulled over and even killed by white policemen, we will not stop fighting. We will not stop calling people out whenever they make a racist comment nor refuse to stop pointing out your privilege. We will not stop protesting until everyone hears the cries of our brothers and sisters. Not until we get justice and absolute equality.

Before you start commenting, criticizing, judging, humiliating, discriminating, hating, killing us, ask yourself ‘where is this coming from?’ Try to dig deeper than the initial instinct. Ask all the whys. Ask all the questions that contradict your feelings and open your mind. We are not asking for special treatments nor excess power in our society. Our goal is to be on equal terms with everyone else. We deeply seek the same level of care and respect that everyone deserves, human to human. Black lives matter not to enslave us nor to make anyone feel superior. Black lives matter as we have the same beating heart pumping the same blood in our veins just like the rest of the human population and we will fight to make it matter to everyone.

Let’s keep educating ourselves and the people around us. To support the movement, visit Black Lives Matter website https://blacklivesmatter.com/

Praise

Praise is one of the content writers contributing to social and political matters at Filter No Filter. She has a degree in History And International Studies and an advocate of the BLM movement.