A condensed and accessible intellectual history that traces the
genesis of the ideas that have built into the #BlackLivesMatter
movement in a bid to help us make sense of the emotions, demands, and
arguments of present-day activists and public thinkers.
Started in the wake of George Zimmerman's 2013 acquittal in the death
of Trayvon Martin, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a
powerful and incendiary campaign demanding redress for the brutal and
unjustified treatment of black bodies by law enforcement in the
United States. The movement is only a few years old, but as
Christopher J. Lebron argues in this book, the sentiment behind it is
not; the plea and demand that "Black Lives Matter" comes
out of a much older and richer tradition arguing for the equal
dignity--and not just equal rights--of black people.
In this updated edition, The Making of Black Lives Matter presents
a condensed and accessible intellectual history of the
#BlackLivesMatter movement and expands on the movement's relevancy.
This edition includes a new introduction that explores how the
movement's core ideas have been challenged, re-affirmed, and
re-imagined during the white nationalism of the Trump years, as well
as a new chapter that examines the ideas and importance of Angela
Davis and Amiri Baraka as significant participants in the Black Power
Movement and Black Arts Movement, respectively. Drawing on the work
of these revolutionary black public intellectuals, as well as
Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston,
Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King
Jr., Lebron clarifies what it means to assert that "Black Lives
Matter" when faced with contemporary instances of anti-black law
enforcement. He also illuminates the crucial difference between the
problem signaled by the social media hashtag and how we think that we
ought to address the problem. As Lebron states, police body cameras,
or even the exhortation for civil rights mean nothing in the absence
of equality and dignity. To upset dominant practices of abuse,
oppression, and disregard, we must reach instead for radical
sensibility. Radical sensibility requires that we become cognizant of
the history of black thought and activism in order to make sense of
the emotions, demands, and argument of present-day activists and
public thinkers. Only in this way can we truly embrace and pursue the
idea of racial progress in America.
