If you didn’t already know, we are in the digital age of communication. In the last 40 years we’ve seen rapid advancements in they way we communicate, particularly through means of social media and hashtags. “Hashtag activism” is a product of social media, specifically Twitter, coined by news outlets to decribe the use of hashtags to call attention to particular political issues. Although it gets a pretty bad rep for not being “real activism”, we’ve seen time and time again that it is essential in our fight for getting accountability and awareness.
I’m sure you all remember the tragic story of Trayvon Martin. On the evening of February 26th, 2012, Trayvon Martin was chased and then shot and killed less than 100 yards from his father’s home by a local neighborhood watch memeber. Trayvon had no criminal record, was not engaged in criminal activity, had no intentions of participating in crimincal activity, and was racially profiled. He was on his way back to his father’s house after buying skittles at a local 7-11. The police arrested Trayvon’s shooter, who was later released with no charges against him. Trayvon’s father didn’t even learn what had happened to his son until after filing a missing person’s report to the Miami-Dade Police Department.
The only reason any of us know about this is because Trayvon’s family started a Change.org page calling for signature in support of the arrest of their son’s murderer. Paired with the ability to share the campaign on Facebook, the campaign got over two million signatures, becoming a national story. After the acquittal of Trayvon’s killer, you see the birth of #BlackLivesMatter.
We are now in 2019, and Black Lives Matter in a full blown movement, hashtags and all. Hashtags are a documentation of our lives, our history, and it’s not an overstatement to say that they are incredibly powerful tools in the fight for equality. In a journal written by Yarimar Bonilla and Johnathan Rosa called #Ferguson they used the example of Nigerian American novelist Teju Cole’s encouragement of #TheTimeOfTheGame on Twitter during the 2014 World Cup. These tweets were coming from people from different timezones all over the world, and with the use of that hashtag, millions of people were in the same moment.
And that’s the beauty of hashtags and hashtag activism.
genderracemedia 