Gen Z perspective on Black Lives Matter
Photography by James Eades on Unsplash
Maeve Hastings speaks of youth involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement.
I think we all felt a sense of hopelessness on Monday, May 25, when a video of a black man being senselessly killed by a white police officer surfaced online. What followed has been two weeks of protests etching George Floyd’s name into global conscience.
On Tuesday, my Instagram went dark. The monochrome felt somewhat colourful; users of every race showed solidarity against the oppression of black people, translated into a sea of black squares. Although posting on social media does not reshape physical reality, sharing and signing petitions and adding to the cacophony of voices rather than the harmony of silence means being active, for there cannot be a movement in a world defined by stasis. Social media has revolutionised the Black Lives Matter movement, sensitising users to a constellation of black deaths among the likes of Breonna Taylor, which would otherwise have been muted. In fact, the rhetoric of anti-racist activism has become the lingua franca of social media; as I scroll through the Instagram stories of friends, each one is written with an informed articulacy that demands to be heard. Monologues on legal reform demonstrate that being politically minded isn’t an aesthetic, it is rooted in being educated and being loud. Speaking with friends, Instagram has been a more mobilising and educative mechanism than news coverage, creating an ideological space. Activists have weaponised a seemingly superficial app for justice, education and rights. Far from a sugar-coated attempt to make injustice palatable, expected of a snowflake generation, the response I have seen from my friends suggests that feeling uncomfortable is imperative for making a difference. If we are a snowflake generation, our voices have created a blizzard.
Over the past two weeks, I have been inspired and enlightened by seeing people my age amplifying the work of black educators, sharing reviews of their favourite novels by BIPOC authors. Videos set against the overtures of Dave’s Black show protestors united in poetic rage. At the Rhodes Must Fall demonstration in Oxford, a friend spoke on genocide and ethnic cleansing. On Instagram, one girl posted a stripped back video, detailing her experience as one of four black girls in her year, reminiscing on a series of micro-aggressions such as “you’re pretty for a black girl,” a reminder that racism, if not explicit, is always latent. Another girl has started a podcast, Turn The Page, which highlights how the syllabus is tinged in white supremacy; all of these are occupying a lacuna within education that remains quiet. I was worried that the trending status of the Black Lives Matter hashtag would not be sustainable, but there is still an unequivocal sense of permanence. The anger hasn’t been subdued; it is tangible in conversations both on and offline. It, finally, feels like a prelude to a wider dialogue that needs to be spoken. Being not racist is being neutral; being anti-racist is the antidote.
The first time I studied novels by black authors was this year, as a fresher at university. That is 13 years of education which have excluded black discourses. I remember an English class in secondary school on Checking Out Me History, written by John Agard, and read aloud in a Caribbean dialect; adorned with metaphors for white blindness to black heritage, it was the only poem out of the 30 in the anthology written by a black poet. These omissions produce systematic distortions, and it is only by decolonising the curriculum and, by extension, the canon that we can dismantle the hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge. Racism is conditioned, and then internalised. I feel ashamed that my bookshelf features only two black authors: Malorie Blackman, whose supposedly dystopian Noughts and Crosses must surely hint at the dystopia in which we are living, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; I feel responsible to self-educate through book lists curated by anti-racist educators and centred on black narratives. In order to remedy miseducation by a system which operates on white privilege, we need to learn about racism not just through a historic lens, which would suggest that racial inequity is embedded in the past, but as a current pandemic.
A couple of days ago, I went to my first protest: Black Lives Matter in Oxford. A wave of signs with slogans such as ‘that’s not a chip on my shoulder, that’s your foot on my neck’ were the backdrop for speeches on institutionalised racism. Looking around, what was striking was the predominant youth turnout, and this rings true worldwide. So far, the universal protest against the disenfranchisement of black people has produced new laws on regulating no-knock warrants, bills on abusive law enforcement policies and the removal of racist statues. It has often been said that our generation will be the one to bring change, and in recent years, through marches against climate change, gender inequality and now systemic racism, I feel hopeful.
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