The Black Lives Matter Movement: Discrimination In The United States

Discrimination is the unjust or prejudicial treatment of people based on their race, age, sex, national origin, and/or other characteristics. Discrimination has been a large issue in the United States of America ranging from skin color to gender to one 's ethnicity. Slavery is one of the ways discrimination in America began. Whites believed they were superior to blacks because of their skin color. In 1619 the first African slaves arrived in America and in 1865 slavery was abolished meaning that slavery took 246 years to end and even after it was abolished African Americans still faced racism. Discrimination in America has not only been a conflict between whites and blacks, other races and religions have struggled with unfairness. Islamophobia is another discriminative act against Islam that

To this day, discrimination against people based on their ethnicity, age, gender, religion, etc still is evident through the Black Lives Matter movement, Islamophobia, and racial profiling.

Although slavery may no longer exist, African Americans have faced violent and unfair treatments by whites who in 2015 still believe they are superior to blacks. Black Lives Matter is an activist movement that campaigns against police violence or any unreasonable treatments towards blacks. The Black Lives Matter movement emerged in 2013 when George Zimmerman shot an African American teen named Trayvon Martin to death. According to a Syracuse University historian Herbert Ruffin, Alicia Garza started the movement and stated, “Garza wrote a Facebook post which she titled “A Love Note to Black People”. For Garza, the injustice targeting black people was a disease called institutional racism that could not by just voting, being educated.. She ended by telling her readers that she loves them and that “Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.”” A year after Trayvon Martin’s death, eighteen year old Michael Brown was murdered by a police officer named Darren Wilson.