Imagine yourself, driving on the freeway, speeding just a little bit because you’re hangry and you know the line at In-N-Out burger is going to be unnecessarily long. Then you hit traffic. Eventually you realize, not one car has moved and you still don’t have your number two burger with grilled onions. Once you start hearing sirens and get a sense of what’s going on ahead, you shout, “Really! The Black Lives Matter movement couldn’t wait until after I got my shake and fries?” 

Besides making it difficult for you to get your burger, slightly less significant in the grand scheme of things, I have yet to see how the Black Lives Matter movement has done anything to improve the black community by protesting or making demands.  

Chaining together and stopping traffic on the freeway has never granted people health care.

If the Black Lives Matter activist put nearly as much effort into reconstructing the black community as they do protesting and making the news, maybe success for the black community wouldn’t seem so out of reach.

As a movement, striving away from systemic black oppression, the Black Lives Matter movement has done nothing to keep the black community from oppressing themselves.

When it comes to the this movement, most black people only understand the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. But what does this movement actually stand for?

According to their website, the Black Lives Matter movement is more than a national organization against police brutality, and more than a call for black people to love other black people. It’s a political project in demand to bring all black, queer, and transgender persons from the shadows of society, systematic oppression, intentional targeting, to freedom.

To be completely honest, the Black Lives Matter website is full of jumbled contradictions and ironic ideas. For one, a black movement cannot do any good for it’s community if it’s main concern is not focused on the importance of black on black love.

In 1969, the Black Panther Party helped the black community by starting a free breakfast for children program, so black kids wouldn’t go to school hungry. During the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 , the black community set up a carpooling system, so black people had rides to and from work.

Those were acts of love and unity.

Black Lives Matter advocates that they want systemic equality for all black people, including queer and trans, yet most of the hate crimes against transgender people are committed by people of color.

The lack of love within the black community now, tears it apart more than the racist system itself.

So why hasn’t the movement made any progress?

From what I’ve found, there’s no clear message and there are too many leaders. I finished my research on the Black Lives Matter movement more confused than I was before. There are the co-founders of the movement, the activists, and then the people that walk around in the t-shirts they find online. Through this the message gets skewed — almost like a game of telephone.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a clear message, he wanted equality for all. His message was clear because he was a strong prominent leader. When the message of a movement is unclear, you get misinformed people who think they understand the movement, but really don’t.

The current state of this movement is misleading and all over the place. The co-founders and activists, are focused on and demanding the wrong things from the wrong people, which plays a major part in the movements failure. A successful movement needs to have a level of unity and togetherness; Black Lives Matter lacks a strong coalition.