juxtaposing the black boy & the bullet

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a social justice movement in America that began in 2013 after a string of high-profile killings of unarmed Black people. While the gun deaths of Black people in America was not a new phenomenon, a few elements helped lead to the popularization of BLM, including a shifting culture after the election of the country’s first Black president in 2008 and the continued emergence of social media sites like Twitter that allowed better outreach and an easier approach to grassroots organizing.

The BLM movement continued throughout the 2010s as more murders occurred. While the main public conversation around BLM focused on the murder of unarmed Black people by police officers, BLM actually focused on many other societal inequities and examples of systemic racism, including economic inequality, discrimination, representation in media, education, and other aspects of American culture.

BLM gained its most widespread popular reach during the presidency of Donald Trump and especially after murder of George Floyd in 2020.

While BLM is a term representative of a broad array of political actions and beliefs, at its core the movement is about affirming the humanity of Black people. Despite this fundamental belief and due to widespread civil unrest in the nation exacerbated by multiple facets, BLM became one of the most divisive entities of the late 2010s.

Along with BLM, the issue of gun violence in America was also a hot button topic throughout most of the 2010s. While gun violence has always occurred in American culture, the modern arguments around gun violence really erupted after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 when two teenaged gunman killed 13 people at their school in Littleton, Colorado.

Since this massacre, the country has experienced more mass shootings than any other country in the world while also boasting more gun crime and death than any other country. The United States is also home to more guns per capita and in total than any other country in the world. Because of these things, many people in the country have become fierce advocates for gun control; however, because of the country’s long relationship with guns and because of the Second Amendment which guarantees citizens the right to bear arms, many people in the country fiercely oppose gun control. This divide has led to heated debate over the past few decades.