By 3. On #MuslimLivesMatter and Co-Opting:
Linda: I think that hashtag was well-intentioned… The obvious is that all lives matter, which is why we don’t use that… I think that #blacklivesmatter became a mantra for a movement, it wasn’t just a hashtag, it was a call-to-action, to get people to start working towards a society where black lives do matter.
It was kind of hard to tell young Muslims who were using it, and feeling like they were helping leverage that hashtag to tell a story that wouldn’t have been told in the same way… What I don’t enjoy, that we do in our community, is the attack on people who use the hashtag, not understanding the place that it’s coming from.
As we move forward, this is going to happen again and again… we need to be careful about not alienating people in our community by attacking them for a hashtag, because at the end of the day, this is not about a hashtag, this is about a movement for justice, a movement about equality, about the sanctity of life, of all life, but particularly in the black lives movement, it’s black lives.
Abed: What really upset me were the individuals who were using the #MuslimLivesMatter who really didn’t care about the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, who needed some education about the movement. It’s a new age of activism out there, and it’s an opportunity to reach out to Muslims and educate them on the origins of the hashtag and pull them into the movement as well.
Malik: People were addressing the popularity of the blacklivesmatter hashtag to apply to their troubles, this is totally acceptable. We saw this 20 years ago with the million man march. The disrespect were people who were talking about AllLivesMatter, saying these balck lives don’t really matter because we should be talking about all people. Well, not all people are being impacted by the same things. I, on the other hand, don’t look at it as a co-optation… if people are using it for a positive means, have at it.