Activist and social media personality Calvin Martyr has spent the past two months promoting the campaign after raising the idea in a video that has been shared thousands of times on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Big companies like Procter & Gamble (PG) and Cisco Systems, Organizations like the historic black women sorority Zeta Phi Beta and celebrities like rapper TI have voiced their support for the initiative on social media.
# BlackoutDay2020’s goal is to compel politicians and the business world to end institutionally racist policies and practices that have led to the death and marginalization of African Americans.
Black Americans spent more than $ 1 trillion on consumer goods in 2018 alone, according to Nielsen.
Martyr has compared the initiative to the Montgomery bus boycott for a year in 1955, when the Black Alabamans who were legally required to sit in the back of city buses refused to pay to ride them until they were allow you to sit where you want.
“The only way we are going to change is when they fear hurting us like we fear hurting them,” Martyr said in a May video introducing the idea.
Is it still relevant?
The # BlackOutDay2020 campaign began in early May following the murder of Ahmaud Arbery on February 23 in Brunswick, Georgia, and the death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville by police on March 13. It was introduced about a month before the George Floyd tragedy that sparked a wave of civic, political, and economic action to tackle institutional anti-black racism.
Since then, city government officials in Minneapolis, New York, and Los Angeles, among others, have put forward proposals to fund or restructure police departments. President Trump has signed a controversial executive order on police reform measures. And big corporations have set aside billions of dollars for social justice causes, in addition to changing some of their own systematically racist practices.
Still, on Friday, Martyr suggested that many of the actions that politicians and companies have taken in the wake of Floyd’s death do not go far enough.
“I don’t care about the BLM painted on the streets, I don’t care about the syrup, the rice or the bandages,” Martyr wrote on his Facebook page on Friday. “WHAT MATTERS TO ME: #JUSTICE for BREONNA TAYLOR; #JUSTICE for VANESSA GUILLEN; #JUSTICE for Elijah McClain; Tearing down systemic strengths built to hold the privilege of some and keep others in captivity (mass incarceration, poverty, narrowing gaps salary, education, healthy food options, etc.) … You can have all those other things. “
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