Mirren Gidda’s report on the spike in hate crimes and other racist incidents following Election Day underscores the racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia that infused the Trump campaign. The Black Lives Matter statement on Trump’s election contains the following passage:

But we ask ourselves—how do we reconcile our vision for future generations’ prosperity with the knowledge that more than half of white voting Americans believe a white supremacist can and should decide what’s best for this country?

We organize.

Here’s what we know: Civic engagement is one way to engage democracy, and our lives don’t revolve around election cycles. We are obliged to earn the trust of future generations—to defend economic, social and political power for all people. We are confident that we have the commitment, the people power and the vision to organize our country into a safe place for black people—one that leads with inclusivity and a commitment to justice, not intimidation and fear.

I am struck by the observation that “Civic engagement is one way to engage democracy, and our lives don’t revolve around election cycles.”  In my view, this is an important point, and ideally, we would all become more civically engaged in the intervals between national elections. Increased incidents of racial intolerance and violence, in particular, compel our civic engagement.  What do you think?

Black Lives Matter activists uses confrontational tactics to protest racialized police violence.  But group members have also formed Campaign Zero, which outlines objectives, issues reports, and devises strategies to influence the legislative process.  Take a look around the Campaign Zero website.  What are some features of its program for ending police violence in the United States?  How does Campaign Zero complement the street protests that are also a crucial feature of the Black Lives Matter movement?

Throughout this course, we have critically considered the role that the media plays in shaping (or misshaping) U.S. democratic politics.  In “Teaching Trayvon: Race, Media, and the Politics of Spectacle,” Noble critically examines the media’s role in representing episodes of “violent racialized death in the United States”(13). Noble suggests that media coverage of Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012 obscured more than it revealed about racial violence. Does Noble’s perspective help you to think differently about media reports of more recent deaths of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement or white civilians?

In “Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politics: From Democratic Sacrifice to Democratic Repair” (2016), Juliet Hooker writes the following:

The Black Lives Matter protests have, to a certain extent, rendered continued willful white ignorance about how the dehumanization of black life begins prior to incarceration more difficult to sustain. Disregard for black life antecedes fatal encounters with the police; it has its origins in the development of urban ghettos as a specific aim and consequence of state policy and in the criminalization of entire communities in order to make them subject to predatory looting by corrupt iterations of the state. A conception of acceptable black politics that emphasizes further sacrifice in the form of peaceful acquiescence to democratic loss appears both inadequate and counter-productive in such a context. (463)

Are you persuaded by Hooker’s critique? Does her perspective on the politics of democratic sacrifice cause you to think differently about the historical civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s and/or the visibly defiant activism of Black Lives Matter?