BLM Update #1 - BLM as a class

There are a LOT of voices shouting things about the ongoing blacklivesmatter movement and so far I've mostly avoided saying anything of my own because I prefer to find quieter spaces to speak rather than enter a discourse that is already so "noisy".  It's been a few weeks since I've started diving into this stuff though, so it's about time for an initial post.

I've always hoped that my blog can provide a journaling of my own thoughts and experiences that others can connect to in a more personal way.  In the same vein, I'll be attempting to reflect upon and provide some updates with my experiences with blacklivesmatter.  My intent is not to tell you that you should follow the same models and patterns as I have (though you are welcome to do so if you wish), but simply to give you personal thoughts of what it might look like to incorporate this movement into day-to-day life.  I can't claim to be the best at this, nor the most knowledgable...far from it.  But amongst all the call to actions I've seen, I haven't heard any stories about personal everyday people things, so here we are.

Well, that's already more than enough of a foreward...let's get into it, then.  I'll try to start with the more abstract stuff and then narrow in on concrete things later.

For brevity, I'll simply use "BLM" to refer to the blacklivesmatter movement as a whole (which of curse is not to be confused with the "Black Lives Matter Foundation", which is an entirely different thing).

BLM as a class

My basic model for incorporating BLM into my day to day life has been to treat it as a sort of class.  Classes require you to do readings, listen to lectures, complete homework assignments, and do research projects.  And yes, every once in a blue moon, you might get a pop quiz.  BLM is much the same way for me, and the number one thing that I would tell anyone hoping to get involved in the movement is simply to DO YOUR HOMEWORK.

Let me drill down into some of the various ways in which the "BLM is like a class" analogy makes sense to/for me.



BLM takes time

Deconstructing systemic racism is a project that takes time, even if we are talking about the small bubble that is your own daily life.  If you don't feel like you can fit an extra 3-unit class into your current daily schedule, you might want to evaluate just how effective you can be and what your level of commitment is here.

On the plus side, you're in charge of your own course curriculum.  If this movement is important enough to you that you really want to dive deep and are prepared to do a lot of work (you need to do the homework!) for it, then by all means, give yourself a larger workload and bump your unit count up to 5.  If you feel like all of your free time is eaten up by this other "Surviving in a world of Covid-19" course that you're struggling to pass, then maybe you can think about taking BLM as an introductory seminar instead.  Sure, you won't come out on the other end with as much knowledge and training, but sometimes that's all you have the space for.  And hey, there's always next semester.



You're "behind"

There are a lot of people (including myself) who are just now starting to realize that BLM (and various associated issues) are important to them.  Qualms about herd mentality aside, that's a great thing, it really is.  But one of the first things you have to realize is that these issues are....really not new, not by any stretch of the imagination.

So yes, you're showing up for this new class and you're really eager to learn but...unfortunately, you registered a bit late.  And by "a bit late" I mean many of your peers have been enrolled in this class since they were born.  You've really got some catching up to do.

This could just be me, but in my personal opinion, being late to the party isn't really something that is particularly worth advertising.  "Hey guys!  I know you've been working hard for months to learn all the material in this class, but guess what, I'M HERE NOW!"  Now, if you put in the effort (do the homework!), I'm fully confident that you'll be able to pass the class with no problems.  But let's just not get carried away here.



Asking for help

I think a lot of people's first instinct upon thrusting themselves into #hashtag blacklivesmatter might be to ask others to give them a rundown.  "Can you help teach me about racism?"  "I really want to help, what are some things I can do?"  Yeah, about that......so like, imagine that you've just stepped into a class that's been going on all quarter and you turn to your neighbor and say "Hey!  So...I know we've got this midterm coming up, but I just signed up for this class yesterday.  Can you quickly teach me what we've gone over in the past 2 months?"

Do.  Your.  Homework.  Asking other people to educate you feels disrespectful of their time, and of the course itself.  There's an entire syllabus for this, you can't just skip all of the work and suddenly go from zero to hero.

Now, that doesn't mean you can't ask others for help.  But there's a big difference between "The homework is too hard...tell me how to do it..." and "So I read the textbook, but I'm really confused about this problem.  I think you need to use recursion, but I'm stuck trying to figure out a recurrence relation because..."  People will always be much, much happier to engage with you after you've put in the effort.  That applies across all subjects, not just this one.  It's OK to ask for help when you're stuck.  It's not okay to ask for handholding before you've tried.



Cheating

I really want to encourage everyone interested in this BLM "class" to try to be effective students of learning.  Yes, it's perfectly possible to scrape a passing grade by copying your friends' notes and by having them do all the work on the group projects while you simply show up for the presentation.  But if you do that, I feel like you're really missing the point of this class.

There are going to be students that are in this class just because they felt like it was "required".  If you want to treat this class as "just another general education requirement" and are taking it simply to prove that you're "BLM certified", then go ahead, do whatever you want.  Skip the homework, cheat on the tests, sure.  But I really hope that you're better than that.  (You're also going to need this knowledge if you ever hope to continue on to the higher-level versions of this course, etc.)

Keep in mind that copying your neighbor's answers or looking up the homework questions on stackoverflow is not a foolproof strategy.  I mentioned earlier that the "Black Lives Matter Foundation" is entirely separate from the BLM movement.  The "Black Lives Matter Foundation" is in fact an organization that's unrelated to the Black Lives Matter Global Network.  It's got a single paid employee whose goal is to "bring the community and police closer together".  A ton of folks (I'm talking $4 million dollars worth) have mistakenly donated to one thinking that it was the other.  Why?  Because they didn't do the homework.  I'm not here to tell you whether you should donate to or shouldn't donate to.  I'm just saying that if you want to "hashtag defundthepolice" you probably ought to do a little research before you donate to an org that "brings the community and police closer together".



Learning styles

Okay, let's face it.  Not all of us are go-to-lecture people (case in point....myself).  That's totally fine -- one of the things that we've hopefully learned through our education is that everyone has different effective learning styles.  It's on you to figure out how to work best in this class.

Do you want to....

"Watch speakers and lectures" -- There are numerous talks and videos on BLM subjects that you can stream for FREE from the comfort of your own home.

"Read the textbooks" -- Try reading through a few books on this topic (of which there are countless).  And I'm sure you've seen a billion articles on the interwebs about this by now.

"Form study groups?" -- Find a partner or two whom you can talk with regularly about BLM.

Heck, if you learn best by =taking tests= there's even a bunch of those out there that you can go through.

Not everyone's involvement with BLM needs to look the same and I'm sure you can find your own role in all of this.  Are you going to participate in nonviolent protests?  That's great, especially since I'm sure there are many who can't because they are ill or otherwise unable to.  Are you going to confront other family members and have frank dialogues with them regarding BLM?  That's great, especially since there are many people who are unable to do so due to barely being on speaking terms with their family.  Are you going to donate to (hopefully well-researched) organizations that will use your money to further good causes?  That's great, especially since there are many who simply don't have a stable source of disposable income that they can donate.

Everyone can find their own means through which to pursue this common goal of justice.  For myself, I'm not comfortable having a discussion about this with my family members, so that's off the table.  However I happen to have a handwritten letter hobby -- I can tie that into BLM by writing to legislators regarding relevant policy decisions.  We all have our part that we can play and I'm not going to judge you based on which you slot into.



Daily homework

Took a lot longer than I expected, but we're getting into my actual practical experiences now...

So, so far my self-assigned courseload for BLM has been "do something related to BLM every day".  I've kept that up so far, and hope to do so for some reasonable period of time.  Maybe a daily thing doesn't make as much sense for you as much as a weekly thing, that's totally fine.  Daily just happens to be a good cadence for me, while still allowing me a good amount of flexibility based on whatever else I happen to have going on that day.

Here's some examples of things that I've counted to fulfill my "daily BLM assignment":

- Watching a few TED talks given by people on color on what it's like to live in America, how we treat race, etc.
- Reading an article about white fragility
- Reading an article on "allyship" and what it means to be an "ally"
- Watching "Just Mercy", a film about a black civil rights attorney that is free to watch this month
- Literally looking down the "100 Greatest African Americans" list and clicking Wikipedia links on names that I recognized but didn't know much about
- Reading and learning about Muhammad Ali specifically cuz hey, boxing, that seems interesting
- Looking up my local police policies to see where they fall
- Contributing to non-profit organizations through my employer's donation matching program
- Doing initial searching into legislation such as the Justice and Policing act that is currently being pushed through the legislative process
- Writing this blog post....(took longer than I thought it would...)
...

I want to stress that I the amount of effort that I dedicate to this each day is sometimes a decent amount, but oftentimes it's very low and I'm OK with that.  I've literally had a TED talk playing on my second monitor while grinding out some daily quests on Ragnarok Online and that happens to be two things that I can comfortably do at the same time -- actually it works out shockingly well.  Could I be focusing more on whatever video I happen to be playing?  Sure, but I'm making it work for myself and that's what counts.  It's not a race here.



Research

Even if none of us ever learned any of the =truly relevant= (read: shameful) history of our country back in Social Studies class, my hope is that we at least came out of our education with some sense of how to approach a large project that requires some sort of research and critical analysis.

Depending on what you self-assign for your BLM workload, you're probably going to undertake some larger, more "vague" projects.  Don't get caught in the trap of operational procrastination!  It's important to take these larger goals and break them down into microtasks so you can profit from checking off little checkboxes each day while making forward progress toward an otherwise-daunting task.

One example of a larger-scale "project" might be donating money to an organization(s) related to BLM issues.  You could just click on the first twitter link you see and call it a day, but here in this class, that's....barely worth a "C", honestly.  You can do better.  Come up with a breakdown that might look like this:

- What organization(s) should I donate to?
  - Should I donate to a larger organization or a grassroots organization?
    - What is generally more effective?  I should look up what other people have said about this
    - Search what are the most well-known BLM organizations and why.
    - Search what organizations are local to my city/county
- What is this organization going to do with my money?
  - I should look up what this organization has done in the past.
  - I should look up what this organization says they are going to do in the future.
- Is this organization trustworthy?
  - What are other people saying about them?  I should look up external comments on them
  - Who is leading this organization?  I should look them up.  Are there actual people of color running this organization?
- How much money should I donate?
  - I should think about whether I want to donate one-time or setup a recurring schedule

For myself, an eventual project is to use my voice to affect change via writing to legislators.  Here's what that process might look like.  This one has a bit more detail because I've already started digging into it, but there are still a lot of blanks to fill in.

I'm concerned about Police brutality, accountability, and injustice.  If my local community has issues with these things, I should write to my legislators to suggest change and express my opinions.
- What is the current state of the police force in my local area?
  * It turns out my local area has a unified public safety model, where staff are combination police+fire+emergency responders.  My local area is also known for being extremely safe and having a low crime incidence.
- Looking at https://policescorecard.org/, my city is rated as a "D-" for Campaign Zero.
  * I'm not going to take this at face value.  Where did this rating come from?  The rating seems to be "B" for police accountability and approach to policing, but "F" for police violence.
  - Where did the "F" come from?  Are these statistics artificially inflated because there isn't enough data?
    * For example, 100% of the times police said they saw a gun, it was never actually found.  This got assigned the lowest possible score...but there was actually only a single incident here.  So 1/1 = 100%.  That's silly.
  - policescorecard.org also says that the police have only adopted 2 out of 8 recommended campaignzero policies
    * Is this actually accurate?  I should verify with the actual department policies.  Fortunately the department itself has already issued a public statement regarding this where they reference specific sections of their policy.  In some cases the policies might have been updated and in other cases the policy might actually more reasonable than the policescorecard.org rule?

- If there is a problem with police behavior, how are the officers held accountable?
  - Are the violations escalated to a third party or are the policing officers responsible for enforcing themselves? (as is the case in many other places)

- What has the city council said on this issue?  I should look up past meeting minutes.

- I found a website that has a pre-written letter regarding defunding the police
  * I should evaluate the points brought up by this letter.  Do they actually make sense or not?

(Repeat all above steps, but for the state level....etc.....)

...

Does it feel like I'm writing a research report?  Yes, in a lot of ways, it does.  That's how it is.  Turns out that public education was.....ok, well I can't in good faith say they always really excelled in teaching us how to do this kind of stuff, but they gave us a good start, in any case.  Use those skills.  Do your research!



Motivate and enable

I've constantly said that you should do your homework but I think collaboration and cooperation is great and highly appreciated as a lot of us are all taking this class together (and a lot of us are....unfortunately behind where we ought to be).  Just remember that there's a difference between someone making a study guide versus copying homework answers from a friend.  The goal is for everyone to =learn= and contribute, so I think it would be cool if we could help make that as easy as possible for each other.

Share some strategies that worked for you, if you'd like.  If you have a cool "daily BLM assignment", maybe other people would be into it too.  If you found a grassroots organization that you researched and think is worth donating to, share it with other folks in your area and tell them WHY you think this organization is worth donating to.  Maybe ask a friend if they want to join you on a protest walk?  Above all else, I want this class to seem easy to get into, not confusing to start (....even though it's actually really hard and tough and miserable..........ugh).



This post is way too long so I'll save other thoughts for later.  I guess this ended up just being the "Treat BLM as a class" post.  I feel like this post is long enough that I probably said something silly in the middle of it, so apologies in advance if I was being dumb anywhere.  (We can't learn learn unless we allow ourselves to make mistakes, and correct them....)