By 
There aren’t enough cameras in the world to capture all the injustice that’s happening against black lives – Me.
As excited as I was to upload a new look and gush about my baby’s progress yesterday, I couldn’t. I found it hard and uncomfortable to post about something as trivial as fashion when gruesome videos of people who share the same skin colour as myself being murdered keep popping up.
I’ve never felt comfortable sharing my opinion on political issues on a platform that was initially created for lighthearted content. Seeing this message wedged in between a post about makeup and another about shopping the latest trends is something might offend a few people.
But then I thought about it again and decided what’s the end use of a platform if you can’t use it to educate, to help someone or at the very least to express your inner thoughts?
Sharing a picture on Instagram, or retweeting a #BlackLivesMatter photo or writing a blog post will not save any lives or bring those back whom we’ve lost already. But in the grand scheme of things, it offers a sense of unity. A sense of sensitisation that not only are people not oblivious to what’s going on around us but we are all READY FOR A CHANGE.
The same thing goes for peace marches and protests. The #BlackLivesMatter movement has never been about violence. It’s not about spewing hate against white people. It has NEVER been. Not every white person or white cop for that matter agrees with what has happened. Hell there are white activist fore-fronting the need for change. That’s because it’s always been about ‘HOW ABOUT YOU TREAT US LIKE HUMANS? HOW ABOUT YOU NOT ASSUME EVERY BLACK MAN YOU COME ACROSS IS VIOLENT OR HAS A CRIMINAL HISTORY?!’ I sympathise with the families of the 5 police officers that were shot dead yesterday during a peaceful protest. Clearly the protesters had no idea those snipers had other plans of their own. The last thing they wanted was for people to have an excuse to yet again refer to Black people as savage, violent animals (which they did, SMH). People react to crises in different ways. A few people will choose to go down the violent route. But an eye for an eye only makes the whole country blind.
All we want is to be treated as humans. To exist as black people but with the same privileges as every average white person.
I don’t live in America but I’m black, African and about to bring a child into this world where by default we as a people have to be twice as good or fight twice as hard as the average person to survive.
Nobody is too far away to make a difference.
To voice protest for Alton Sterling and Philandro Castille visit the links on Beyonce.com.
To support Issa Rae’s campaign to financially support Alton Sterling’s family visit her GoFundMe page.
I’ll resume posting next week, have yourselves a lovely weekend! xxx
alton sterlingblack lives matterphilandro castilleracesensitive
Sandra Ekukole
July 9, 2016So sweet of you ABY xoxo
Cin
July 9, 2016xoxoxoxo
Barbz
July 10, 2016I Hope things get better sooner..
Scott Mitchell
July 10, 2016Great post Lydie! This country has some very bad history (everyone knows that,) and I’ve always been so color / culture blind (except for attraction preferences as you might have guessed.) I just love people lol, especially when I can interact with different cultures than I grew up with. I grew up in a small all-white town that wasn’t at all racist, but were still ignorant of race topics. Now I see diversity when I’m in town. So peaceful here and I smile as I take note of the changes. I just want black and white American’s to attack these problems together, but it often feels like an “us against them” coming from the black communities, probably because the past has trained the minds to think that, I don’t know. Soon there will be change of some type; there’s just no other way. 10 years ago and more people of larger cities were very furious and saying that racism was causing there to be less police in their communities to get thugs off the streets and crime was running rampant. Now, you see what happens when officers respond to a 911 call about the guy having a gun in front of a store. They quite obviously acted poorly (I guess there may be details we still have to learn, idk.) But, if you imagine a flow chart of a person’s decisions they can choose from I’ve seen the same go down on all my white friends in my party years too. Thank God none of them got shot, but the really stupid ones got beat downs. The flow chart starts with AM I DOING GOOD or BAD before the cop comes? Then the next leg from each one says COP SAYS STOP AND GET ON THE GROUND and then the next one YOU GET ON THE GROUND or…… YOU FIGHT COP, RUN, RESIST, etc etc. The listen to cop option doesn’t lead to being shot in any circumstance unless the cop really is incapable of doing their job. I fear what this country will become if we change the order of working law enforcement methods being used for centuries if they need to have a special procedure for black Americans, or just.reduce the number of cops where these incidents will occur. Perhaps I’m a little ignorant myself since even around Detroit (mostly black Americans here) we don’t have many problems like the recent ones on the news elsewhere.
I JUST WANT PEACE! It bothers me endlessly that there doesn’t seem to be any working solution
AlamodeFran
July 11, 2016Wow great post, you summed everything up perfectly, i couldn’t have said it any better, from the beginning of the white invasion from Africa to America all our people have been asking for is respect, for our lives to be given the same value, to be treated as equals. Slavery and colonisation might be dead but racism still lives and it has to change, we should no longer continue to make apologies for being black.