For my Paradigm Shift project, I have selected the Black Lives Matter movement, specifically its notable presence in mid-2020. I seek to tell the stories of countless black citizens who were murdered at the hands of the police. I will begin the project by covering this movement’s origins of when it began in 2013, and then discuss how it has developed over time.

 

I am still deciding if I will begin at the civil rights movement, but it is likely that I will due to this being a longer time period with much more information than only 7 years. Despite this overview of the past numerous decades, the most prominent part of my project will be how the Black Lives Matter movement impacts life today in the year 2020, especially in the current tumultuous political climate.

 

This specific shift of increased attention to this movement is significant enough to merit my close investigation and an audience’s attention because the black community’s lives are at stake. People should need to live in fear of being characterized as suspicious based on their skin tone. This shift needs to be investigated and explored because racism has somehow shifted from a general-knowledge amorality to a political opinion. In the year 2020, where uncertainty is all around, this movement brought people together (or apart, depending if the person in question is racist or not) for the common idea that something needs to systemically change to prevent so many innocent black people from being killed.

 

A common anti-BLM argument states, “maybe if they weren’t doing anything illegal they would be alive”. In response to this, there are many ideas that combat the statement.

1. The majority of victims the BLM movement demands justice for are innocent people whose killers did not receive any punishment for their unnecessarily violent actions.
2. Even if someone was doing something illegal, the police is able to use weapons such as gunfire for self-defense, but cops are not supposed to eliminate a life. Instead, they could stop the possible criminal by shooting somewhere other than one’s chest or head.

 

Overall, the Black Lives Matter movement’s presence in the year 2020 caused a paradigm shift because it provided a new perspective numerous white people had previously never considered and ideally influences people to change their ways, spanning in forms of small-scale microaggressions to larger-scale statements and actions.