Summary
#SayHerName refers to a social movement that aims to create awareness about Black female police brutality victims and anti-Black abuse in the US. It is based on the unfortunate truth that Black girls and women pursued, brutalized, and convicted of murder are often left out of conventional police violence stories. While their identities and experiences are absent from people’s requests for accountability, their family members remain saddened. Their achievements are just as deserving of praise and encouragement. The #SayHerName initiative celebrates the lives of Black women killed by police or victimized by gender-based police abuse (Fluker 33). The concept gives detailed frameworks for realizing their encounters and broadens prevalent views of individuals subjected to government ferocity and how it demonstrates. Individuals forget that women are routinely the racial violence when they do not have frameworks to recount.
The police are more likely to stop and kill Black women than white women. # SayHerName attempts to expose the gender-specific manner in which tragic acts of systemic racism disproportionately afflict non-white women. The ‘African American Policy Forum’ (AAPF) developed the #SayHerName movement in December 2014 to make a massive social media availability alongside existing social equality initiatives, including the #BlackGirlsMatter and #BlackLivesMatter (Fluker 33). The AAPF published “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women” in May 2015, which described the #SayHerName campaign’s aims and outcomes. Sandra Bland, a woman arrested for a traffic offense in July 2015, was discovered hung in her prison cell shortly afterward.
After Bland’s murder, the AAPF amended the initial report in collaboration with Harvard Law School’s Institute for Intersectional feminism and Social Welfare Research and Soros Freedom Associate Andrea Ritchie. The new version contains a summary of the events preceding Bland’s killing and stories from Rekia Boyd and Tanisha Anderson about recent occurrences of authorities’ violence against Black women. The amendment gives recommendations on how to successfully mobilize and educate overall society to campaign for social equality and a conceptual approach for comprehending what it claims are Black females’ vulnerability to police abuse and state-sanctioned murder. The #SayHerName initiative, which is based on the AAPF research, aims at addressing what it sees as the exclusion of Black women in both mass press and the #BlackLivesMatter movement (Fluker 34). One of the protest’s main goals is to remember the women who have died due to police violence and anti-Black terrorism.
Evaluation
An antiracist endorses antiracist plans by their doings or articulating an antiracist supposed. The communication strategy used by the #SayHerName movement does not encourage antiracism but instead favors one gender, the killings of African women over men. Even though the movement creates awareness of the killing of African women, it does not acknowledge the differences and inequalities of favoring women over men, even though men have been favored in other movements. Instead, the strategy could consider both men and women since both experience the killings. Even though the antiracist movement is fighting discrimination against women, it fails to offer solutions to the incident. Antiracists enhance antiracist guidelines via their oversights or activities or encourage antiracist viewpoints. By articulating for the protection of black girls and women, while forgetting black men and boys, the strategy shows racial unfairness and should reflect whether the strategy justifies fairness.
Though the intersectional antiracism approach is appropriate, the movement does not regard the various features of human individualities, such as ethnicity, gender, and orientation, that link race but only consider one gender. Individuals cannot make efforts to be antiracists without captivating actions (Ruiz). As per Kendi, an individual implies to take accomplishment is to sustain local managements that contest laws that source racial unfairness. People can support these administrations by undertaking or creating a monetary contribution. Kendi inspires people to apply their influence or pursue inspiration to change biased instructions where they happen, such as in government, school, and jobs, to necessitate taking actions to help alter discriminatory strategies.
Connection Between Dr Kendi and the Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter emphasizes the inequalities, racism and discrimination that black people experience. In contrast, Dr Kendi explores racism among individuals, including the activities that discourage racism. When the Black Lives Matter supporters united, they aimed at protesting racially encouraged violence and police brutality against black individuals. The campaign and its associated organizations recommend numerous policy variations regarding black individuals’ liberation. While particular departments denote themselves as ‘Black Lives Matter’ exist, including the ‘Black Lives Matter Global Network’, the overall movement denotes a centralized network of individuals and corporations without formal hierarchies.
Kendi, a writer and archaeologist from the United States, combines social criticism with narrative. He narrates his growing sense of racial bias throughout his life, drawing on his perceptions and perspectives as a child, young adult, student, speaker, and current events (Kendi 10). Dr Kendi and Black Lives Matter show how racism may take multiple forms, including racial superiority and inequality. These expressions are connected to other characteristics like class, age, and sexuality, showing that discrimination is deeply rooted in social class and situations. Kendi contends that racial separatism is the polar opposite of racism, not exclusion. Racial disparity must be actively combated or permitted to proceed through acts or omissions.
While Kendi concentrates on opportunities to strengthen antiracism behaviors, Black Lives Matter investigates attributes that lead to racist actions, including the frequent murder of black people. Antiracists, as per Kendi, support antiracist techniques through their actions or by voicing antiracist beliefs. Antiracism entails becoming conscious of and addressing inequality and imbalances that favor white people or other ethnic groupings over people of color in terms of material benefits (Ruiz). For instance, discrimination in school admission fees is antiracist, according to Kendi, because it strives to address prior racist attitudes. Racists support racist policies by their motions or exclusions or voicing a racist ideology.”
Individuals who indulge in racism must face trial, according to Black Lives Matter. Nevertheless, Kendi believes that people should assess if their views, beliefs, or election results supported it after witnessing racial injustice. For example, avoiding enrolling a student on a primarily black school impacts opinions on punishment and charter institutions linked to racism and discrimination. Anyone, regardless of ethnicity, can be racist and sexist if they make hazardous judgments about entire populations depending on what they perceive to be injustice throughout their lives.
Effectiveness of the Movement’s Communication Strategy
The movement’s communication strategy is not practical for mobilizing young people. It brings attention to the identities and stories of Black girls and women killed by police and does not encourage equality, motivating antiracism. The movement could have effectively mobilized young people if it favored both men and women killed by police and encouraged the facing of trials by the suspects. Even though it is complex to name several Black women slain by cops, that does not indicate it does not occur with the same frequency as Black males. Black women are dying, and for several reasons, there is not a similar level of increasing concerns or uproar as there should be.
Racism is connected to several aspects of people’s identities, such as sexuality, masculinity, and ethnicity, radical egalitarianism and hence the antiracist movement must use an integrated response. It is impossible to be effective without making progress (Ruiz). Supporting local governments that battle legislation that causes racial injustice is one way to take action. Participating or conveying a monetary donation can help in mobilizing young people since it encourages them to protest against the regular killings of blacks. Further, the slogan could mobilize youths successfully if it used the authority or influence to change unfair regulations in any setting where they exist, such as education, ministry, or the workplace, and commit to taking measures to help alter these policies.
The slogan is ineffective in mobilizing young people but seems to favor only women who face racism. The slogan somehow depicts institutionalized racism within a company and denotes discriminatory racial practices, unfair regulations, or biased procedures that lead to inequitable results for whites and persons of color that go far beyond hatred. These institutional practices aim to create advantages for one party, yet they rarely specify racial groups. The slogan may further define structural racism, which offers particular individuals advantages over others. Nobody is naturally an antiracist or a racist; prejudice and radical egalitarianism result from human choices (Ruiz). Racial separatism results from a continuous commitment to making equitable, fair, and high quality.
Works Cited
Fluker, Jaime L. “The Liberating Narrative of #SayHerName: A Womanist Social Justice Movement in Black Women’s Stories.”Currents in Theology and Mission, vol. 49, no. 1, 2022, pp. 33-38.
Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist. One world, 2019.
Ruiz, Rebecca. “6 Ways to Be Antiracist, Because Being ‘Not Racist’ Isn’t Enough”. Mashable, 2020.