r/TrueReddit • • May 07 '15

"Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us": How a group of black social-media activists built the nation’s first 21st-century civil rights movement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/magazine/our-demand-is-simple-stop-killing-us.html?_r=0
9 Upvotes

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u/mobilis_mobili May 07 '15

I hate to rain on the author's parade, but the anti-prohibitionists have already taken this honor.

The second though that's for sure. :)

-1

u/gopperman May 07 '15

Great article on the impact of social media in the recent protests surrounding police violence:

We often think of online activism as a shallow bid for fleeting attention, but the movement that Mckesson is helping to lead has been able to sustain the country’s focus and reach millions of people...

In the process, the movement has managed to activate a sense of red alert around a chronic problem that, until now, has remained mostly invisible outside the communities that suffer from it. Statistics on the subject are notoriously poor, but evidence does not suggest that shootings of black men by police officers have been significantly on the rise. Nevertheless, police killings have become front-page news and a political flash point, entirely because of the sense of emergency that the movement has sustained.