Dear Selena Gomez...

Dear Selena Gomez and people alike,

Please listen up!

I am just going to start off bold as fuck and say BLACK LIVES MATTER is not just a hashtag. Although I am sure to you, and you alike, it is. When you don’t care about a cause, you try to belittle it and make it irrelevant, so that you don’t have to acknowledge it or look it in the face.

Well hello there. I’m looking you all in the face to say a few things.

Black Lives Matter is a movement, is a revolution, is a necessary and important cause needed to remind the world, and people like you, that…black lives matter. And you know it is not just a bunch of black people posting online, they go out in the streets and they protest, and they FIGHT, and they demand to be heard. They are supporters, legal aid, a voice, a friend, an activist, a responder, a fighter.

I am writing this in response to a few things miss Selena Gomez did regarding BLM that speaks to a larger issue, that of the inherent lack of support BLM gets compared to other protests/revolutions/causes of change. So, this is not just about her, it is about all the people who belittle or demean BLM by limiting it or narrating it in a way to make it unimportant. I will admit that this post was triggered due to Selena Gomez, and that is why she is addressed. On twitter in 2016, Selena Gomez was asked why she has not spoken out about Black Lives Matter and her response seemed to claim that Black Lives Matter was just a hashtag, when she said: “If I hashtag something I save lives? No…”

And sure, she is right. By typing a hashtag, you are not physically saving a life. You are not doing CPR, or surgery, or taking the gun from the murderer’s hand. So, there, she does have a smidge of a point. And now two years later, she goes to a protest for March for Our Lives, to regulate gun safety laws, and posts a couple pictures to her Instagram with the hashtag: #notjustahashtag.

And that is when I tilt my head, squint my eyes, and say what the fuck?

Because it seems like she is referencing her earlier, two-year-old comment, about Black Lives Matter being only a hashtag. It seems like she is, correct me if I’m wrong, saying that by her going out to support a cause, and taking pictures to post to her Instagram she is proving that March for Our Lives, is more than just a hashtag, unlike Black Lives Matter.

But wait….

Black Lives Matter has BEEN out in the streets for years and guess what? Without support! They didn’t wait for endorsements, or cheques, or set-agreed-upon dates, or celebrity approval, or a platform on Ellen, or magazine covers with captions like; Enough! or colored schemed award shows to show support, or pins, or boards, or letters of approval. They went out there on their own and stood up for their rights. I think that speaks volumes, don’t you?

I think that every protest since then, every revolution since then, should thank Black Lives Matter for marching in the streets, getting tear-gassed, beaten up, sent to jail, and brutalized in the media, so that they could open doors that were sealed.

Let’s be REAL. This movement started, not because a police officer shot a black person but because a civilian shot a teenage boy who was walking down the street with an Arizona Iced Tea, Skittles, and his hood on. He was murdered: shot and killed in cold blood, because the murderer had a gun. The murderer, followed, attacked, and killed him because he was black. A young boy named Trayvon Martin. His murderer was acquitted of all charges. A man had a gun and abused its power. Just like the teenager who shot and murdered 17 people in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Black Lives Matter brought gun talks to the table LONG before March for Our Lives, but no one listened. And no one cared. And NOW that this has happened countless times and NOW that white kids have decided they are sick of it, they come forward and people listen. People all over, nod their heads and say “YES, this is wrong, we must do something about it”, but where were all these people, for Trayvon? Where were they when Black people came forward and said, ‘what happened to Trayvon has happened before and needs to end.’ Where were they when a racist white man walked into a black Church in Charleston and murdered nine black people…with a gun…during a church service?

Where were they then?

And since then, black people have had to prove that they are mistreated, that they are brutalized, that they are murdered, by pulling out their cameras and filming it happen, so that no one can say we are over-exaggerating, we are just complaining, we are the fault, we are the problem. Do you think we want to film our brothers and sisters being tortured, beaten, and murdered? Do you think we want to share that with the world, the death of our own? No, but we must. We must go that far just so people will listen, just so people will hear us. Just so they will understand that cops use their guns unnecessarily to kill us. Is that not a part of gun laws? Should that not be addressed in the same March for Our Lives protest?

So, excuse me when I say fuck everyone who believes that Black Lives Matter is just a hashtag, because they have BEEN out there doing the dirty work, while other protests have waltzed in with money and power already on their side.

Black Lives Matter protests only make the front page, or the 6 and 11 o’ clock news when they are being narrated as hooligans, or rioters, or violent beings destroying property. When the SWAT team must be called in. When they want to make us seem like the monsters. And yes, shit like that does happen at protests, an angry kid throws fire on a police car, a bunch of teens rob a store, and all of a sudden Black Lives Matter loses its credibility, because they can’t control every single person who walks along in their protest. I think that is an impossible task. But of course, that is the way we are treated: placed with impossibility and asked to comply. Our kids are still dying, our mothers, our fathers, our sisters, our brothers, and we still don’t have the same level of admiration or support as March for Our Lives, even though we want the same thing. And more.

Black lives are being taken by the very people who should be protecting them. They are being murdered at an alarming rate right before our eyes and STILL nothing is being done about it. No justice is being served. Black people are being told repeatedly that they don’t matter. That they can be shot dead in cold blood, for simply being black. Now, if this same thing was happening to white people, white kids, white teens, white dads, white mothers, white brothers and white sisters, there would be outrage. The FBI, SWAT, ATF, The Secret Service, The Secret Secret Service, The Secret Secret Secret Service, the cast of Criminal Minds, David Caruso from CSI, frig even the President of the Oh so great USA, would be on the case, to put an end to police brutality. But it’s black people, so we must fight for ourselves.

And just because you don’t want to fight for us does not mean our movement does not matter.

Just to be clear, going to a protest, holding boards with slogans written on them, and posting to your Instagram does not save lives either. It does something else though, it shows your support. It shows that you are fighting for something, and it causes other people to look within themselves and ask where they stand. ESPECIALLY when you are famous, and you have a wide following. It asks your followers to pay attention to the world around them. And that is what a hashtag does, and that is what posting on social media does, it starts the conversation. It opens up the conversation and it shows people what you stand and fight for. Some people don’t have the money or resources to reach every protest or send money to organizations they believe in, but they can still help and be heard by using social media to bring awareness to a cause.

Black Lives Matter does more than just fight for black lives, it targets the failed justice system, and the failed policing in our countries, which at the end of the day, FAILS US ALL. Black people are the most marginalized group and by fighting for their lives, they are fighting for other marginalized groups as well. They are fighting for colored people, for gay people, for aboriginal people, for women, for men, for everyone. And if people would stop focusing solely on the movements name and educated themselves on what Black Lives Matter is about, they would be less inclined to demean and attack a cause that does more than they have ever done for other people, in their whole lives.

White people feel excluded by Black Lives Matter because it has the word Black in it, because it is targeting racism, and asking white people to look at themselves differently. White people don’t want to support and endorse and celebrate Black Lives Matter because they feel personally attacked. And they don’t want to dig deeper or educate themselves on a movement that they feel is not important to them, so they bash the name and they protest against it, they ignore it, they demean it, they wish it would just go away, so that they won’t have to ask themselves how they contribute to the racist, white washed, misogynistic, oppressive world.

But that is how you change it, by looking it in the face. By looking society in the face and acknowledging its faults and acknowledging your own faults and how you contribute to a faulty world. You just need to educate yourselves on the world we live in before you can ever fully understand what the F is going on.

SO, seriously, dig deeper Selena Gomez, and people alike. Dig deeper, and give credit where credit is due. Ya no, do what Kerry Washington demanded in Save the Last Dance: “Open up your pretty brown eyes and look the hell around!”

There is a world out there, a movement, a community and lives that the world refuses to acknowledge. But I know that we won’t give up, it is not in our blood. We have fought for our freedom and we will fight for our rights,

until we get them.

From: Teya

#BlackLivesMatterismorethanahashtag