Review of Social Movements

Summary

1. Social movements are sustained and organized action intended to bring about (or sometimes oppose) social change, which is large-scale structural or cultural changes in society.
2. Antiracism means supporting antiracist policy through actions or expressing antiracist ideas. It means actively challenging racist thoughts or behaviors or dismantling racist laws, policies, and practices. When we apply this to social problems, one way to take action is to identify racial inequality and the policies and practices that create it, understand the racist ideas that justify the policies, challenge them, and implement new policies and practices.
3. Similarly, feminism is the belief in gender equality in economic, political, and social realms. Being feminist at its basic means actively challenging sexist laws, policies, and practices. However, it also means challenging other systems of oppression, as all oppression is interconnected.
4. Sociologists have different ways to explain social movements. They can categorize social movements by their levels, types, and stages. They can also discuss why social movements are effective or ineffective.
5. Reform movements seek incremental change within existing social structures or institutions, whereas revolutionary movements seek to overthrow institutions in favor of a more just social structure. Reactionary movements are in reaction to unwanted social change or to another social movement. 
6. New social movement theory examines why social movements succeed using technology, interests based on identity, and harnessing the emotions of fear, anger, and hope. Resource mobilization theory argues that movements are successful when they can engage resources like leadership, membership, money, or social media to convince people to take action. Indigenous Perspectives argue that oppressed people use internal resources to sustain their activism rather than external resources.
7. The four stages of social movements are the emergence stage, when people become aware of an issue, and leaders emerge; the coalescence stage, when people join together and organize to publicize the issue and raise awareness; the institutionalization stage, when the organizing typically begins to rely on a paid staff, and the decline stage, when the movement successfully brings about the change it sought, or when people no longer take the issue seriously. In each stage #BLM organizers used social media in hashtags, tweets, web pages, Facebook pages, and other social media presence to achieve their goals. Although racism persists, they succeeded in expanding the possibility for liberation and social justice.
8. Policing in the US can be traced back to 'slave patrols' in the South that empowered white men to hunt Black people, who were considered the property of enslavers. After slavery was abolished, white people routinely overpoliced Black communities. In many communities across the country, laws were created to control and contain the movement of Black people, Native Americans, and immigrant populations who were perceived threats to white people and their property. While civil rights organizers, led by Black and Brown people, have successfully challenged and abolished most of these laws, racist ideas about who counts as a criminal persist.
9. BLM organizers articulated claims that identified historical patterns of overpolicing in under-resourced communities of color as the reason for disproportionate rates of Black (and Brown) people killed by police. The public responded with record-breaking protests to demand new approaches to public safety that would redirect public resources away from policing and towards programs that increase the well-being of people who live in under-resourced communities. The robust organizing network that emerged is continuing efforts to reduce police violence by rethinking policing, public safety, and community well-being.
10. We can use the BLM movement to apply the social problems process, starting with claimsmaking and media coverage in which claims that Black lives matter (too) were spread through social media via hashtag activism, to public reaction where many people across the nation engaged in protest and became involved in the movement, to policy making, social problems work, and policy outcomes in which a variety of strategies were proposed, implemented, and evaluated to address the concerns of the BLM movement. 

   

Questions

1. Imagine a future in which your needs are met, you and your loved ones are safe, and you are able to spend your time how you wish – what would be different, and what kind of world would we need in order to achieve this for everyone?
2. Do you consider yourself antiracist and/or feminist, and why or why not? If you responded no, does this mean that you don't believe in racial justice and/or gender equality, and why don't you?
3. What do you think when you hear “Black Lives Matter,” and how have your thoughts on it changed after reading this chapter?
4. Why is “All Lives Matter” a racist response to “Black Lives Matter?” Where does “Blue Lives Matter” fit into this conversation?
5. Choose another social movement apart from BLM – how did that movement move through the four stages discussed in this chapter, or which stage is it currently in?
6. Choose another social movement apart from BLM – how would you explain the movement using Best’s social problems process?
7. How is BLM an effective response to intersectional social problems?
8. What can you do to use your understanding of antiracism and feminism to support social justice?

  

Action Steps

As with all prior chapters, you are encouraged to take action! Select a social problem that you feel is pressing in this moment, use your individual agency to decide how best to achieve social change regarding that social problem, engage in collective action with other individuals or organizations to help address that social problem, and/or get involved in a local or national social movement to that fights to eliminate that social problem. You have the power to be a change maker.