As Janay Watts studied in the Nugget last year, she noticed none of the televisions were tuned in to coverage on the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson, who killed unarmed black man Michael Brown.
Despite her deep sense of fear that Wilson would not be indicted, she held on to hope that maybe the system would deliver a due measure of justice.
When the news hit of Wilson’s non-indictment, her fears were confirmed, but nobody else in the room seemed to take notice.
“Looking around the Nugget everyone was happy and jolly just going about their lives,” said Watts. “I remember thinking, ‘Why is nobody else in this room so upset? So concerned?’ I had never felt that heavy, and I didn’t understand how we are expected to be students and carry on like life is normal.”
The next day she reached out to join a Black Lives Matter chapter and actively made activism a part of who she was.
According to its website, BLM is a chapter-based black-led national organization founded by Alicia Garza, Partisse Cullors and Opal Tometi in 2012. It was created in response to the acquittal of self-proclaimed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who fatally shot unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
Given the organization’s pro-black stance, BLM has garnered a lot of attention for its organizational structure and tactics. Specifically, the fact that white allies are not permitted to directly participate in the organization.
“Being a black-led movement is intentional because in every movement that we examined or seen in the past other people have tried to co-opt and take over,” said Watts. “Even if you’re an ally that gets it, there is no way to speak for someone who is black if you are not black- you can advocate, ask questions but you cannot live that same experience.”
According to Melina Abdullah, Los Angeles chapter leader and chair of Pan-African studies at Cal State University, Los Angeles, one of the main tactics employed is non-violent direct action through disruption of white spaces.
White spaces are settings that are overwhelmingly white and considered to be informally “off limits” for black people, according to “White Space” by Elijah Anderson, a Yale University sociologist and director of the Urban Ethnography Project.
Despite the restricted nature of white spaces, blacks are required to navigate the white space as a condition of their existence, wrote Anderson.
“As long as our community continues to live under a state of occupation, rage cannot be confined to the black community,” said Abdullah.
Though tactics are non-violent, many have associated anger and violence with the movement. Anger that is understandable and rightfully placed, said James Sauceda, race expert and director of the CSULB Multicultural Center.
“What I think a challenge for a movement like the Black Lives Matter Movement is, is to restore a kind of moral philosophy, because what we are seeing is just angry group against angry group and that doesn’t change anything,” Sauceda said.
“The non-violence shows you who the real perpetrator is, there’s the brute, but if you can’t differentiate who’s the brute because they are both doing the same thing then that’s not civil disobedience, that is not a higher level that we are held to.”
