CHAPTER 7

CONSCIENTIZATION

Inner and Outer Transformation for Liberation

BLACK LIVES MATTER

On April 11, 2012 George Zimmerman, a member of an Orlando community’s town watch program, was charged with the second-degree murder of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black male returning from a corner store where he had purchased a drink and some candy. A struggle ensued and Zimmerman shot and killed Martin. While Zimmerman claimed he was acting in self-defense, the Florida State Attorney claimed that Martin was not a threat and charged Zimmerman on that basis. After lengthy pre-trial deliberations and extensive media coverage, jury selection for the trial began in May 2013 and the trial began on July 11. After sixteen hours of deliberation over the course of two days, the six-person jury rendered a verdict of not guilty on all the charges against Zimmerman. When news of the verdict became public, Alicia Garza, a community organizer from Oakland, California wrote a Facebook post entitled “A Love Note to Black People.” In the posting she wrote “Our Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter.” Patrisse Cullors, a friend and fellow community organizer in Los Angeles, read the posting and created the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Opal Tometi, a sister organizer based in Phoenix, Arizona, had experience with social media and helped spread the hashtag on the Internet. With this simple online interaction between three black women, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was born. Like so many other African Americans, the three women had reached a point where a protest against the pattern of violence against black people needed to be initiated. One year later in August 2014, BLM came into wider public view when they organized a Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride to Ferguson, Missouri, to call attention to the shooting death of Michael Brown by police officer Darrin Wilson. After a St. Louis grand jury investigation, Wilson was not indicted for the shooting. Demonstrations emerged in the Ferguson area and all over the country. While BLM was only one of many groups involved in the demonstrations, it eventually emerged as the most visible. Later that year on the day after Thanksgiving, so called “Black Friday,” fourteen BLM activists led by Alicia Garza were arrested in San Francisco for delaying the public train for more than an hour. In December over 2000 people gathered at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota to protest the killings of unarmed black men; there the slogan “Black Lives Matter” was used.

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Since 2014, BLM has spread to communities across the United States and Canada. The slogan “Black Lives Matter” has become a slogan and call to action against unjustifiable killings of black people at the hands of police. While drawing on the Civil Rights Movement slogan “None of us are free until all of us are free,” BLM has widened the sphere of oppression to include members of the LGBT and Womanist communities. BLM has been quite adept at using social media to mobilize its members quickly for marches, die-ins and other disruptive actions in response to local and national events (Ruffin, n.d.; Day, 2016; Anonymous, n.d.). Then in July 2015, BLM held a national gathering in Cleveland attended by 1500 activists where there were strategy sessions and a chance to evaluate the status of the movement going forward. BLM uses a decentralized leadership model (leader-full). While some BLM chapters continue peaceful marches and demonstrations, others have been more confrontational, calling for economic boycotts, and more public accountability for officers involved in shootings (Eligon & Smith, 2015). On their website and in their literature, BLM explains its focus this way: “When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all the ways in which Black people are left intentionally powerless at the hands of the state. We are talking about the ways Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity” (Anonymous, n.d.). The statement goes on to list issues such as disproportionate poverty among People of Color, mass incarceration, the treatment of undocumented immigrants, the neglect of people with disabilities, and discrimination of members of the LGBT community. The statement concludes: “#Black Lives Matter is working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise” (Anonymous, n.d.). Though it has been twenty years since his death, and over 50 years since he was expelled from his native country of Brazil, Paulo Freire would recognize in the Black Lives Matter movement the pattern of socio-political and cultural awareness leading to action to challenge and change the world; he called this process conscientization. While essentially a pedagogical and political concept, conscientization carries within it an implicit spirituality that guided and encouraged Freire’s thought his career.

THE NATURE OF CONSCIENTIZATION

Conscientization or the Portuguese word “Conscientização” is so central to Freire’s pedagogical and political philosophy that we can give only an abridged overview here. While conscientization reflects the heart of Freire’s theory of teaching and learning (Elias, 1976), he lays no claim to originating the term. He first encountered the word at a 1964 meeting of professors at the Brazilian Institute of Higher Studies. At that gathering Freire understood conscientizacao to represent the idea that education is an act of freedom inviting the learner to take a critical approach to understanding reality. While the word in English is most closely associated with Freire, he claimed it was Father Dom Hélder Câmara, the Roman Catholic bishop

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