VR: Racial Injustice Movement Immersive Experience

The article offers information on Blacks who were arrested in the Black Lives Matter movement. It also discusses views of Coricia Campbell on involvement of racism in her arrest, views of criminal-defense lawyer James Smith on racial disparity in protest arrests, and rearrests of Black and Hispanic protesters.

The article features the selection of racial-justice organizes as the Guardians of the Year by the magazine "Time" for 2020. They have encouraged millions of people to stage protests to demand an end to institutional racism and injustice in the U.S. They have organized Black Lives Matter rallies, vigils and marches across the country and have tried to turn U.S. history into a campaign issue in 2020.

Protest expert Aldon Morris explains how social justice movements succeed.

Print citation and full text available without photographs in our databases: "THE POWER OF SOCIAL JUSTICE MOVEMENTS.
Authors: Morris, Aldon Source:
Scientific American. Mar2021, Vol. 324 Issue 3, p24-37. 14p. 12 Black and White Photographs."

The article focuses on the social justice movement known as Black Lives Matter. Topics include the resurgence in Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of African American man George Floyd by a Minneapolis, Minnesota, police office on May 25, 2020, and the founding of the movement in 2013 by civil rights organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, after the murder of African American teenager Trayvon Martin.

We show that Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests shift public discourse toward the movement’s agenda, as captured by social media and news reports. We find that BLM protests dramatically amplify the use of terms associated with the BLM agenda through- out the movement’s history. Longitudinal data show that terms denoting the movement’s theoretically distinctive ideas, such as “systemic racism,” receive more attention during waves of protest. We show that these shocks have notable impact beyond intense, or “viral,” periods of nationwide protest. Together, these findings indicate that BLM has successfully leveraged protest events to engender lasting changes in the ways that Americans discuss racial inequality. [

..." As the country continues to grapple with the killings of Black Americans like Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, those most affected by these tragedies have built pathways to open up new spaces for collective memory and mourning. Young Black Americans are engaging in protest and public rage not for the white gaze, but for themselves. As such, this political moment offers us a different vision, one in which those most excluded from history are the history-makers. This global effort toward mass memory-making presents both a theoretical and chronological disjuncture that bends us further toward a future where all Black people are free. "

The article comments on the U.S. violation under Article 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as U.S. federal, state and local law enforcement's restricted the right of peaceful assembly through attacks and arrest of protesters responding to the police killing of African American citizen George Floyd in May 2020. Topics discussed include a background on the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests across the U.S. and the country's law on the right to assembly.