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The two most notable figures in Civil Rights History are Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. Two great leaders, amazing orators, highly educated warriors for equality, but complete opposites in ways to achieve it. Malcom X was known as militant, defending yourself by any means necessary, calling out black leaders that aren’t true to the cause. MLK Jr. was known for nonviolence, turn the other cheek, peaceful protests, marches, overturning legislation. Both never came together before being assassinated, and were actually at odds. Their contrasting views divided followers and even to this day some will pick one over the other. One plight that black people must overcome is the failure to completely unite, and put aside envy/jealousy and come together, something even the movements greatest leaders didn’t do. It is one thing to find one more relatable but still both should be celebrate, revered, and appreciated for what they have done and the jewels they left behind long after there deaths.

These past couple weeks, Kanye West has been doing and saying some off the wall things regarding the black community. Many people feel that Kanye’s comments may have put him in the position to be one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters. In an interview with TMZ, Kanye West stated “When you hear about slavery for 400 years… for 400 years? That sounds like a choice.” How would you feel if you were interviewing a celebrity and that statement was said? As a black man, I would feel very disrespected considering he’s a black man himself. Kanye has been on an outrage these past couple of weeks and it’s ridiculous. I think just because people just brush things off in this generation, it’ll blow over their heads and continue to listen to the music he makes. Some people may believe he’s in the “Sunken place”, which is not necessarily real. However, this isn’t the Kanye West people have known before dating Kim Kardashian.

 

 

 

Citation :

“Will.i.am Leads Kanye West Backlash over ‘Ignorant’ Slavery Remarks.” BBC News, BBC, 2 May 2018, www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-43973090.

 

On April 12th in a Philadelphia Starbucks two black men, Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson, were arrested under the suspicion of trespassing. The men were waiting on a friend to show up and while they were waiting they asked to use the restroom but because they didn’t buy anything the employee refused. They did not leave and eventually the employee called the police. A video of the arrest was posted onto twitter and in that video you can see both men being handcuffed by police and escorted out of the Starbucks. The man Robinson and Nelson were meeting to discuss real estate, Andrew Yaffe, confronted the police saying, “This is ridiculous. What did they get called for? Because they’re two black guys sitting there meeting me?”. Yaffe wasn’t the only customer bothered by what was taking place. Another customer says, “They didn’t do anything, I saw the entire thing.”. This specific store in Philadelphia has a rule stating that customers must buy something in order to use the bathroom but Matthew Kreitzer, a Virginia based attorney, states that such policies are useless unless they are consistently enforced. Some people believe that the cops had the right to arrest them and have argued that none of this has to do with their race. These people have expressed their opinions in a longer video which will be attached below.

Nonetheless such occurrences are not rare for black people. Even if this had nothing to do with the color of their skin being racially profiled is something that many people of color have experienced throughout their life. Since this incident Starbucks has apologized and on April 15th they announced the closing of 8,000 stores in the United States for anti-bias training which will take place on May 29th.

You can find the video here:

http://time.com/5241671/starbucks-philadelphia-bathroom-rights/

https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/does-implicit-bias-training-work-starbucks-racial-bias-plan-will-probably-fail.html

 

With 67% of African Americans being Facebook users, its hard to believe how many times Facebook has messed up for the Black community. It seems that Facebook has turned a blind eye to many things that occur on this means of media.  To start, they have a laissez-faire attitude towards their privacy protection as they have a lack of vigilance to protect one of their most vulnerable user demographics. An example of how this is true is when Facebook let Russian sponsored ads that portrayed African Americans badly. These ads displayed Black Lives Matter activists as murders, attempting to be a political motive, swaying voters toward one candidate, who was then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. In addition to these ads, Cambridge Analytica worked with the presidential campaign and found that pictures, profiles, and even direct messages were misused, leading to voter manipulation. Not only has this occurred, but recently, news just came out that the largest Black Lives Matter group on Facebook was a fraudulent page as it was created by a white male in Australia and his goal was to discredit the youth-based civil rights group. This is enough to seriously question the integrity of Facebook as they lack transparency, reliability, and accountability. Facebook has made strides in the correct direction with attempting to remove hate speech, but devoting more resources to this effort would help remove more of this problem. In addition, the company is almost all white. This was an issue that was brought to CEO Zuckerberg on his 2nd day of his hearing as his Rep mentioned that the company’s Black representation has only risen from 2 percent to 3 percent. Clearly, Facebook has a lot of things that it needs to tweak in order to fix its problems with failing the Black community.

Kayne West had an interview with TMZ on Tuesday morning in which he made some very bold commentary. He explained that if slavery occurred for 400 years, it had to be a choice for African Americans. This is a crazy comment that he stated as we all know that slavery was a forced action and no individual would willingly go through the process. Slaves were beaten, worked endlessly, raped, etc. and yet, Kayne still made a claim that these actions were prime choice for blacks, as if they really wanted to go through all these hardships. Van Lathan from the TMZ newsroom was quick to counter Kayne’s statements. He said “I think that what you’re doing right now is the absence of thought,” which is completely true. To think that Kayne stated this knowingly, and to think that people look up to him as an artist and a role model is appalling with the words he said. He knows that his voice is big and many individuals look to him, so it was nice to see an average man stand up to him saying “I’m disappointed, I’m appalled, and brother—I am unbelievably hurt by the fact that you have morphed into something to me that isn’t real;” I was pleased to see this occur. Kayne then tried to explain himself on Twitter, only giving in to making the claims relate back to him. He tried to make society feel bad for him for having new ideas on slavery. Clearly, he was just being egotistic and was completely wrong in his claims about slavery.