Well Informed 2.0: Racism and Law Enforcement

Across different social media platforms we saw the hashtag #blacklivesmatter arise. Soon after came two more hashtags that meant to discredit the first hashtag and create a divide against it. Those hashtags were #alllivesmatter and #bluelivesmatter. The irony of this is that the first hashtag means that black lives matter just the same as all other lives. So these redundant hashtags were pretty much arguing against what they were arguing. It just didn't make sense. What also didn't make sense was the blue lives. Because a profession is not comparable to a race in any way. But these hashtags all have a lot of backing and following despite all of this. It's been incredible to watch yet again our nation split apart instead of coming together over the tragedies that spurred these hashtags in the first place.

Social media has been such a powerful medium in spreading awareness about systematic racism in law enforcement across the country. But for some reason social media has not been successful at all for hosting civil public discourse. There are huge divides for every issue, and it seems unacceptable to be involved and not align yourself with a specific hashtag. And again, remember that they all mean the same thing. I know that the opposing parties believe the same thing too. They just seem to be the people who don't or can't believe that racism and segregation still exists in America, or the people who fear for their friends and families in the police force.

The big question is how do we bring all of these parties together as they should be? I struggle over this question for every major issue, myself. How do we get humans to love and support other humans? It seems so absurd these days, to remember that we are all the same no matter how different we are.

A student mentioned getting cops involved in the community outside of their law enforcement duties, I think that would be incredibly successful in eliminating the us against them mentality from both sides. I also know that cops are trained to kill in the U.S., and maybe if we changed their training they would have other resources at hand in the moment rather than pulling a trigger. What's also missing throughout a lot of these occurrences are ethics and accountability on both sides.

What we can do as a public, would be to make sure the information we view on social media platforms is credible, not react in the heat of the moment, and do more to help the problem rather than only spreading the fire with our fingertips.