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In January, Black lawmakers in Mississippi withheld their vote in the Senates attempt to pass a bill banning critical race theory. Lord, I cant believe people are still on this!

Make this make sense for me: Kids are too young to learn critical race theory and their role in dismantling systems of white supremacy in a country that preaches equality. Yet, theyre not too young to internalize privilege, stereotypes and hate for Black people?

Thats actually a rhetorical questionno one can make it make sense because it doesnt! Its resistance to whats become a politically charged framework being used as a justification for the continued erasure of Blackness and whitewashing of American history in public education.

See, I knew this Black lives matter sentiment wasnt going to last too longI called it when everybody jumped on the bandwagon after George Floyd was lynched in public. And since then, weve seen more Black lives stolen in white rage.

Truth be told, our lives only matter when it comes to sustaining structures of capitalism and white supremacy. They matter when America wants us to stop burning shit down in protest of racism and oppression. They matter when elected officials need our vote. And they matter big time when yall need our kids in these raggedy-ass schools.

This rolling ban and criticism of teaching critical race theory has become a grander pile of shit in the existing cesspool of policies and practices that are anti-diversity, culture and truth. Bottom line, theyve politicized and polarized critical race theory to keep public education the sameoppressive, biased and basic. And while we do have lawmakers trying to protect our rights and represent our history, theyre outnumbered by the ones that want to make America great again

Meanwhile, our kids will continue to sit in schools where theres no accurate representation of their history or identity, no teachers that look like them, and in company with other students whothrough their parents, media or socialized normsthink its O.K. to judge, look down on or mistreat people whoappear to be different from them.

The system will continue to teach our kids that slave owners were upstanding gentlemen. As if they were patriots that saved uncivilized Africans by bringing them to America and giving them jobs, our history lessons often reinforce white savior-ship and privilege.

Black people, these lawmakers are counting on us to just take their word for it and trust that theyre acting in all of our interest. They want us to believe our lives matter in the long run, but I hope we know that their racism and privilege continue to manifest in policies and practices. Their actions say otherwise.

I hope we know that they use scary language like indoctrination of youth to befuddle the masses in their crusade to curb truth and representation in education.

I hope our kids are smart enough to question and challenge what theyre being taught. Because if everythings all good in the hood, equality is real, and race doesnt matter, then whyd we need a Civil Rights movement in the 60s and a Black Lives Matter movement now?

I hope were aware of the Karens who call themselves parent advocacy groups but are really modern day women of the Klan. Manyhave harassed and threatened the lives of Black school administrators for attempting to diversify curriculum and leadership in school districts.

Finally, I hope well one day remove our kids from this system that hates who they are, who they came from and what they could be. Their self-actualization can be realized and will be embraced in schools built by us, for ustrue Freedom Schools.

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If Black lives matter, stop resisting the teaching of our history in schools - The Black Wall Street Times

In a case that sounds eerily similar to that of Crystal Mason, a Black Lives Matter activist from Memphis, Tennessee, has been sentenced to six years in prison because voting laws are often unclear and because America loves throwing the lives of Black people away for no real or practical reason.

According to Daily Kos, 44-year-old Pam P Moses was sentenced Monday after she was convicted in November for registering to vote while ineligible to do so.

But Moses told The Guardian she simply didnt know she couldnt vote. Her confusion was, of course, perfectly understandable to anyone who wasnt hellbent on putting a Black woman in prison for a non-violent crime others get treated leniently for.

In 2015, Moses pleaded guilty to charges, including stalking, theft, forgery, and tampering with evidence. According to state law, the evidence tampering charge rendered her ineligible to vote ever again. But Moses said she didnt know that because she wasnt informed of it at trial.

They never mentioned anything about voting. They never mentioned anything about not voting, being able to votenone of that, she said.

Moses voting eligibility came into question in 2019 when she tried to run for mayor and was asked for proof of her right to vote. Thats when she found out her voting rights had been revoked. She evenfiled an officialCertificate of Restoration of Voting Rights,along with her voter registration, with the Shelby County Election Commission. And thats when the court started playing in her face.

Moses asked the court if she was still on probation and the court determined that she was. But Moses wasnt satisfied with the judges conclusion, and for good reason. Because when she asked her probation officer for a second opinion, that probation officer confirmed that her probation had ended and filled out and signed a certificate confirming it.

In Tennessee, once a felon receives that certificate, they are allowed to vote, Daily Kos reported. So Moses submitted the document to election officials and all was right in her worlduntil it wasnt.

The day after she submitted her certificate, Moses got an email telling her that the probation officer was incorrect and the certificate was given to her in error. Because of that supposed error, she ended up back in court facing charges of perjury and falsifying election fraud charges.

Even if her probation officer did make a mistakeand, at this point, thats a huge ifhow is that her fault and why should she face charges over an error?

Well, prosecutors claimed she filed the certificate knowing she was on probation, despite the very certificate in question, a signed legal document, stating that she wasnt.

Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center who is working to challenge voter suppression in Tennessee, is calling bulls**t on the prosecutions assertions.

That seems absurd to me on its face, Bowie said. The instructions on the certificate of restoration form are very clear to the probation officer or the clerk. They say you will check these records and you will sign off on this based on what the records say. Theyre saying that she tricked the probation officer into filling out this form for her. That creates a really scary prospect for people who think theyre being wrongly told theyre not eligible.

And thats exactly what prosecutor Amy Weirich reportedly arguedthat Moses somehow tricked a probation officer into not knowing their job and signing off on the certificate. Weirich also claimed Moses refused to file the correct paperwork and fraudulently voted multiple times, an allegation Moses vehemently denies, according to Daily Kos.

I did not falsify anything, Moses said in court Monday. All I did was try to get my rights to vote back the way the people at the election commission told me and the way the clerk did.

She also said she had no idea the evidence tampering charge meant she would never be allowed to vote again.

They included that charge on my indictment because (Weirich) knew that would keep me from voting forever and running from public office, Moses told WREG.

If youve read this whole thing and youre still wondering what crime Moses committed thats worth throwing her in prison for six years, all you need to do is remember Mason, remember the effort conservatives put into keeping Black people from the ballot box and remember that throwing Black lives away is simply what America does.

SEE ALSO:

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White Man Loses His Mind Over Black Lives Matter Sign In Bar, Shouts Im White, Kill Me

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Black Woman Sentenced To 6 Years For Registering To Vote While On Probation, Despite Certificate Saying She Wasnt - NewsOne

2016: I was asked to create a duet for RAWdance (Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein) in San Francisco at a time when my heart was caught in a perpetual state of reeling from the constant murders of African Americans by law enforcement, most recently the murder of Walter Scott, who was shot in the back in South Carolina after being stopped for a nonfunctioning brake light. I knew I had to address the killings, but I didnt know how. I felt incompetent, my work felt inadequate. So after a career dedicated to the intersection of choreography and social activism, I created Enough?, a piece that asks whether dance can meaningfully address social movements like Black Lives Matter.

1991: I was finishing Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams, my first commission for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a work juxtaposing the early 1900s stories of my sharecropper Creole grandmother in the swamps of Louisiana with my own stories as a gay African American in New York Citys East Village at the apex of the AIDS pandemic. The work called out the sexism, racism and homophobia that extended from my grandmothers era into my own. One night after rehearsal I participated in ACT UPs (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) takeover of Grand Central Terminal at rush hour in order to bring that evenings commute to its knees and force attention to Americas anemic response to the AIDS pandemic.

And take over we did. Being part of hundreds of screaming protesters taking up space in Grand Central turned an act of desperation into an act of empowerment. AIDS received the attention we demanded. What AIDS did not receive was empathy. We were hated by the understandably livid commuters; they spat at protesters, shouted AIDS-phobic slurs, and the event was one step from erupting into violence. Our protest was necessary and I was honored to be there. But I wondered what the impact might be if the commuters could deeply feel the enormity of the grief that propelled us into this takeover?

Creating this empathy was not the purpose of our takeover. But it became the purpose of my art-making. Without losing the political urgency of my work, I now wanted to create those bridges of empathy that would better transcend the boundaries of difference and allow the disenfranchised to shout tales of their personal and political histories while also allowing viewers to see themselves in the lives of these very disenfranchised. As a politics major at Princeton, I understood that a necessary first step in oppression of any kind is to dehumanize the oppressed. At that protest, my mission consciously became to re-humanize. Urban Scenes remained an urgent calling out of racism, sexism and homophobia, but the piece became less about those isms and more about the eternality of devastating loss due to those isms.

19912016: I created a body of work with this new mission at its expressive core. These works often contained text that told the nonlinear narratives of marginalized BIPOC and LGBTQ people. But it was dances ability to speak deeply through an abstract metaphoric language that gave these works their emotional wallop and potential to jump the boundaries between us. I knew how to speak most accessibly through text, but I knew how to speak most deeply through dance. If the goal was to create bridges, then abstract kinetic languages were the stepping-stones to those bridges. And making work in this way was enough.

Until it was not.

2022: With the advantage of time, I look back at the creation of Enough?. I had entered the studio filled with both the despair of watching the slaughter of Black bodies and the hope of watching the response by millions that became BLM, as if life were a roller coaster plummeting between heaven and hell. That roller coaster became the core of Enough?.

The piece begins with the first in a series of projected tweet-like text passages: I have been thinking a lot about what a dance can do. We see the performers, Ryan and Wendy, in stillness as Aretha Franklins rendition of A Change Is Gonna Come begins, a recording that is lushly beautiful even as it calls for deep change. The dancers begin one long single phrase of sumptuous movement that matches the lushness of the music. As Aretha hits a gospel-inflected high note and bends it as only Aretha can, the text passages read YUUUUUUMMM!! Did your heart jump like your toes were skipping cross the clouds? The intersection of words, music and dance feels sublime. The dancers repeat the same exact phrase over and over, all the while dancing faster and faster; the swirling curves of lushness slowly transform into a jagged thrashing frenzy. At the apex of this superhuman speed the intersection of words, music and dance feels like a whirlwind of despair. Media coverage of Walter Scott being shot by law enforcement is projected into the work as the core of Enough? is revealed to be a searing indictment of the murder of African Americans. The text reads A dance can show you how my heart feels when I see that video. Because that video makes my heart feel like Ryan and Wendy are dancing. Right now. A dance can tell you how quickly life moves from toes touching clouds to hearts mired in hell. Arethas voice ends. The only sound is the dancers gasping breath as Ryan and Wendy fall to the ground exhausted. The final passages of text read, Yep, dance can do all that. But when I see that video, I am left to wonderis it enough?

Enough? altered again my choreographic tactics towards creating socially engaged choreography. The text asks whether we can act while its deeper undercurrentsthe movementinsists that we must act. The narrator (assumedly the choreographer) is less someone to identify with than a neutral voice to propel the conversation forward. Questioning the adequacy of my own response invites you to question the adequacy of your response; our viewing the news footage together asks whether your heart also feels like Ryan and Wendy are dancing when you view an assault on Black bodies. Enough? does not seek empathy towards a character. It seeks empathy towards a political movement; it seeks to spur you into action not because you care about the narrator, but because you care about Walter Scott, because you care about humanity.

I went to protests. I made donations. But when I was truly lost I did the one thing I could rely on: I made a dance. Was that Enough? That is for the viewer to decide. But tapping into the immense power of performance to provoke, to prod, to move, to have heartfelt conversations in a seemingly heartless timethat felt like the most important thing I could do.

Choreographer/writer/director/filmmaker David Roussve has created 14 full evening works for his company David Roussve/REALITY.

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Is Dance "Enough" to Meaningfully Address Something Like Black Lives Matter? - Dance Magazine

By Collin Atwood@collinatwood17

After George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges for fatally shooting 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012, an uproar sparked throughout the country. The death of Martin, who was unarmed, sparked a viral Twitter hashtag and a widely known organization now recognized as Black Lives Matter (BLM).

The movement was started by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi in 2013. The movement and hashtag made headway in 2015, ranking at No. 8 on Twitters Top-10 News Hashtags list.

Springfield College senior Jennifer Charlera was supportive of the organizations message when she first heard about BLM in 2014.

I was all for it, she said, I felt empowered and I just like the message it was trying to portray.

BLMs mission of fighting for the rights of people of color lives through Charlera at Springfield as she currently serves as the Secretary for the Black Student Union (BSU) and the Vice President of the Student Society for Bridging Diversity (SSBD).

By August of 2017, #BlackLivesMatter was used over 41 million times. The support for this movement kept rising and spiked following the acts of injustice that occurred in 2020. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery among others increased the gap between support and opposition of Black Lives Matter.

According to a study done by Civiqs in June of 2019, 41% of registered voters supported BLM and 34% did not. A year later, weeks after the killing of Floyd, that gap was at its peak with 52% of voters supporting and 29% opposing.

The use of the hashtag also peaked in the weeks after Floyd was forcefully choked to the point where he could no longer breathe. According to Pew Research Center, #BlackLivesMatter was used around 3.7 million times per day from May 26 to June 7. The hashtag set a record on May 28 when it was used 8.8 million times.

That summer was the pinnacle of the BLM movement. Not only did tweets flood the phones of millions, but protestors all across the country made sure that their message was heard. A poll done by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that 26 million people protested in America from June 8-14.

Unfortunately, Black Lives Matter has not reached that level of momentum ever since even though the organizations mission to fight for Freedom, Liberation and Justice may be needed now more than ever.

People are really excited about it, especially after something has occurred that devastated the community, and then it dies out and you dont hear about it anymore, said Dr. Mark Flowers, a professor at Springfield College.

This is Dr. Flowers second semester at Springfield College and he teaches African American Religion. His claim about movements being less heard about after its initial surge is correct.

Once the summer of 2020 ended, so did the uprise of supporters. As of Jan. 31, 2022 the gap between supporters (44%) and opposers (43%) is slim. Just because there isnt a tragedy going viral on every social media platform like the ones that did in 2020, doesnt mean the mission of BLM is any less significant.

I think (BLM) is extremely important especially since whats going on right now with societya lot of Black people are suffering, Charlera said.

Charlera, an English and secondary education major, believes in educating todays youth to be aware of the Black Lives Matter movement and other social justice issues in our country. During her time as a student-teacher she took that belief into her own hands.

I did a whole social justice lesson about BLM and womens rights and I thought it was important to tell the students, especially the next generation or our generation, to keep pushing the movement, Charlera said.

Charleras mission statement for teaching is to teach for Black lives, and that is exactly what she plans to do with her future as an educator.

A common message from Black Lives Matter that gets misconstrued is that supporters believe #BlackLivesMatter means that other lives dont matter as much. Hence the start up of #AllLivesMatter.

Dr. Flowers, who has been a part of rallies that fought for Black rights before the movement became an organization in 2013, believes that the most important message coming from BLM is that it doesnt mean Black lives matter more than others.

Its not saying that other lives dont matter, because common sense would dictate that all lives matter. Its just that that common sense has stopped when it comes to Black people, Dr Flowers said.

For all lives to matter, first Black lives have to matter. It is important for people to learn the true meaning of the movement and why its mission still holds relevance today.

I just think its important, especially today, Black History Month, people should definitely go educate themselves and be a part of the movement, Charlera said.

Related

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At the start of Black History Month: looking at the decline of BLM in the media - SC Student Media

The Brooklyn Liberations Protect Trans Youth rally at the Brooklyn Museum on June 13, 2021. Photo: Michael M. Santiago / GettyImages/Getty Images

Let today be the last day that you ever doubt Black trans power, I cried into a microphone in the summer of 2020. I was addressing a crowd of nearly 15,000 people dressed in varying shades of white outside the Brooklyn Museum. Our uniform paid homage to a 1917 NAACP silent march for Black lynching victims. Now, more than a century later, we had gathered to honor the Black transgender people murdered during the coronavirus pandemic and before it. We chanted the often overlooked names of folks like Layleen Polanco, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, Dominique Remmie Fells, and Riah Milton. We imagined a world where Black trans people didnt have to fight so hard to exist.

The Black Trans Lives Matter rally sprang from the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, but the movement is anything but new. Since the emergence of BLM, trans organizers had been building a national network to combat discrimination and violence in our communities. A month after a verdict was reached in the George Zimmerman case, New York activists mobilized around the killing of a Black trans woman named Islan Nettles on the streets of Harlem. You can find work like this happening in every corner of the country groups like the New Orleansbased House of Tulip, a collective committed to finding long-term housing for those who need it, or Atlantas Solutions NOT Punishment Collaborative, which supports the political education of trans people. In the spirit of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnsons historic STAR House, the Knights & Orchids Society in Selma, Alabama, takes a holistic approach, helping Black trans and queer people access food and gender-affirming health care, among other basic human needs.

The past few years have been complicated. Ive never felt more connected to the Black trans community and more disconnected from the wider population, which so often ignores our struggles. With each passing year, we reach record new highs of murders in our communities. But we continue to fight. And that day in the summer of 2020 will forever serve as a bridge between the rich history of the Black trans movement and a more liberated future.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

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Black Trans Lives Matter and the Cry to Be Included - The Cut