What Does It Mean To Grow Up Black in the Age of Black Lives Matter?
Members of the American University NAACP lead a Black Lives Matter protest in November 2015. Photo by Johnny Silvercloud.
It is a story we know all too well. One that, if you aren’t careful, you may become desensitized to and may accept as simply the way things are. It is the plight of countless Black people in the United States, a shocking pattern of state-sanctioned violence, going back generations, punctuated by officer-involved shootings and acquittals of white officers by white-dominated juries. The birth of the modern consciousness around police violence occurred on February 26, 2012, when Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old Black boy, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman in the gated community where Trayvon had been visiting family. Martin was walking, iced tea and Skittles in hand, until an altercation with Zimmerman claimed his life. Zimmerman, having called the police upon identifying Trayvon as a suspicious presence in the neighborhood, ignored police advice to cease pursuing Trayvon, a decision that ultimately resulted in the seventeen-year-old’s brutal murder.
When the six-person jury returned a verdict of “not guilty on all counts” after two days of deliberation, something sparked. Almost instantly, aggrieved people across the nation took to the internet to express their discontent with the verdict and distrust of a legal system that would allow Trayvon’s killer to walk away unscathed. Meanwhile, Travyon’s family mourned the loss of a child taken hastily, recklessly, and far too soon. Many started wearing hooded sweatshirts with the hood up in protest of the outcome of the case, in reference to Zimmerman’s predetermination that Trayvon’s hoodie made him look “suspicious.”
The “Million Hoodie March” in Union Square shortly after Trayvon Martin’s death. Photo by David Shankbone.
To many, Trayvon’s death represented a failure of the justice system to value the lives of Black people in the United States. It was out of this concern, this simultaneous fear and recognition of a legal system that prioritized justice for some over justice for all, that the Black Lives Matter Movement found its footing. Founded by Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors in the aftermath of Zimmerman’s acquittal, Black Lives Matter began as a “call to action in response to state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism.” In the years following Trayvon’s death, BLM would again mobilize to protest the deaths of Mike Brown, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, and dozens more Black Americans whose lives were cut short at the hands of law enforcement officers.
Black Lives Matter co-founders Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi.
It is with this in mind, eight years after Trayvon’s death, that I asked Black Columbia students, students who have grown up in the age of social media, internet activism, and widespread protest against state-sanctioned violence, what Trayvon’s life and death meant to them. What does it mean to grow up Black in the age of Black Lives Matter?
For many of the students interviewed, growing up during this time meant experiencing a new dimension of community care. It meant adults in all facets of life, school, church, the neighborhood, taking it upon themselves to give them The Talk. The talk for Black children growing up in America today is not the quintessential birds and bees of days past. Rather, for Black American families, there often comes a time when parents sit down their child to inform them of what to do in case of police altercations. Though delivery may differ, the message is essentially the same: You must ensure at all times that you are behaving in a way that will protect you from the violent hatred of Black people in this country that has claimed millions of lives and claims more every day.
Columbia College sophomores Ugochinyere Ndukwe, Christian Robinson, and Colby King know this talk all too well. According to Ndukwe, it was during a routine drive home in 2014 when her mother decided it was time to instruct her older brother on how to behave in order to avoid unnecessary altercations with law enforcement. “He couldn’t always do what he wanted to do” was the gist of the message. She recalls her free-spirited older brother’s disdain for this message, wondering why he had to monitor himself so closely. Black parents understand that any action, however big or small, taken by their child could be life-threatening. To let your Black child run free is to put your child at risk.
For Robinson, the talk went beyond how to interact with the police and included how to avoid running into other manifestations of anti-black violence. Robinson recounted a grisly crime that shook the Detroit area where she grew up. It was the murder of Renisha McBride, a nineteen-year-old Black woman who, after crashing her vehicle early in the morning of November 2, 2013, wandered up to a home in a state of disorientation seeking help. The white homeowner opened the door to a dazed McBride, and immediately fired a shot that hit McBride in the head, fatally wounding her. McBride’s murder was another that drew the attention of Black Lives Matter, with many wondering if there was a proper protocol for asking for help while Black. Robinson’s talk thus not only included advice to call her parents as soon as she was pulled over and to always try and drive with others in the car, but also to avoid certain neighborhoods entirely, where the residents would be far less inclined to aid her were she to need assistance solely due to her race.
For King, this time period ushered in a new understanding of the impact of respectability politics in his life. King recalls an instance when he was walking out of his home just to get to the mailbox. His mother stopped him, concerned that his wearing a hoodie outside of the home could be dangerous, and to let him know he could not exit the house dressed that way. He had already been aware of the necessity to present in a certain way in order to avoid being perceived as dangerous or threatening, but recognized that the sociopolitical climate of the time required an even greater adherence to the mandates of respectability politics. King believes it was this heightened concern with projecting the image of a Black life worth sparing that led so many Black students to seek Ivy League education, as though the name “Columbia University” splashed across a heather grey hoodie would be our saving grace.
As a result of growing unrest at the time, more and more members of the Black community were taking it upon themselves to give these talks and ensure that the Black children they held dear knew how to compose themselves in times of trouble, but hopefully how to avoid these situations entirely. For Wesley White (CC’22), as well as Ndukwe, these talks occurred in a school setting. Both living in densely Black areas, Jackson and Chicago respectively, they attended predominantly Black middle schools. Ndukwe reminisces on the talk her Black social studies teacher gave to a classroom entirely composed of Black twelve-year-olds that were seeing news of Trayvon’s murder everywhere they looked. “It could have been any of us,” she recalls, reflecting on how his words stayed with her to this day. The message that they could suffer the repercussions of even the smallest of mistakes for their entire lives especially as Black children shook her to her core. “That’s something kids of other races don’t have to experience,” she adds, quietly.
Children at a Black Lives Matter protest in Oakland in 2014. Photo by Annette Bernhardt.
For White, the conversation went past a single classroom and was a school-wide phenomenon. White recounts the gendered assemblies the school would facilitate, describing how female students were taken into one room to discuss topics such as motivation, while male students were instructed on how to dress and act in order to be perceived as palatable Black men. Essentially, according to White, the assemblies were a crash course in code-switching. White remembers realizing that this alone was no longer enough to protect a Black person from violence, saying “In the beginning, I thought that was what I was supposed to do, but then we saw so many cases when people did what they were expected to do and still [suffered at the hands of] police brutality.”
The murder of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent rise to prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement also resulted in a new age of activism, one in which physical presence was no longer necessary. While “#BLM” made its way into social media bios and onto the front of t-shirts, temporal hashtags like #Blackout mobilized social media users to post information about various anti-Black injustices to their Instagram stories or Facebook statuses. One such hashtag, “#SayHerName,” was utilized after the death of Sandra Bland in a Texas county jail to bring awareness to the lesser-known female victims of state-sanctioned violence. The hashtag has since been used to draw attention to the murders of Black transgender women, who experience the highest rates of violence out of any group in the United States and who shoulder a life expectancy of only 35 years.
For students like Briana Wood (CC’22), the newfound capabilities of internet activism were empowering, a point echoed by several other students interviewed. At such a young age, Wood was not able to physically attend the protests, despite how much she wanted to. It was not feasible for a 14-year-old girl to get herself from Atlanta to Ferguson in order to participate in the protests that ensued following the murder of Mike Brown. Despite this, Instagram offered a possibility to make her voice known. She could post stories and join in hashtags, but moreover, she could educate herself on topics like intersectionality, the prison-industrial complex, and the carceral state, topics that were not included in the Georgia state ninth-grade curriculum. Social media became a tool for social justice education, providing specialized language to describe the phenomena of anti-Blackness and its effects, as well as community with which to grieve and grow.
To grow up Black in the age of Black Lives Matter was learning the reality of collective struggle. It was Black adults around you—teachers, uncles, and even the elderly woman next door who would tell your mother if you were still outside when the streetlights came on—taking collective responsibility for you, tasking themselves with ensuring that you knew how to be okay. It was learning to restrict your own behavior and then unlearning that habit when you realized the futility of that act. It was opening Twitter every day in the summer of 2016 to a new video of a Black person being shot or beaten or brutalized, but finding a community online through which to express and then process the emotions that accompanied the onslaught of brutality that made its way from Philadelphia to you via your iPhone.
Data from a 2016 study by Deen Freelon, Charlton McIlwain, and Meredith Clark on social media usage.
When I asked what Black Lives Matter, the media, or the general population got wrong about all of this, I got various answers. Some lamented the failure of protest movements to have been inclusive of Black women, Black queer people, and Black trans people from the outset, while others lauded the work of these movements in showing the diverse faces of Blackness. Some wished those asked to speak on CNN about police brutality were everyday citizens who live these experiences and not Ivy League professors who analyze them, and others wished people would wait to inform and educate themselves before taking up a platform to speak on behalf of the United States’ over 40 million Black citizens. Some claimed BLM would never have existed without Trayvon’s murder, while others said it was only a matter of time. Others wished we made more space for conversations about how tiring it is to have to perform anger in order to let others know that you care.
The response to this question that stood out the most came from Julian Briggs (SEAS’22). When asked what he thought the general population got wrong about Trayvon’s murder, Briggs criticized the use of the word “martyr” to describe him. “Martyr feels intentional,” he says, painting the image of Trayvon Martin as a seventeen-year-old boy that just wanted Skittles, so he went to buy some. To Briggs, Trayvon’s death was not martyrdom; it was victimhood.
Eriife Adelusimo is a staff writer at CPR and a sophomore in Columbia College studying Political Science and Public Health. She is from Lagos, Nigeria by way of Northwest Arkansas. Reach out to her about all things Black, feminist, and Madridista.