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Everson details goals of Black Lives Matter
Mark Twain wrote in his 1869 chronicle “The Innocents Abroad” that, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness ... Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Twain’s sentiment set the tone for a discussion with Greencastle native LaToshia Everson Tuesday evening about the mission of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement now and into the future.
The open Zoom meeting was hosted by the Greencastle League of Women Voters as a Continuing the Conversation program.
A 2009 graduate, Everson is the associate director of financial resources and student employment at DePauw University. She is also on the executive board of the Greencastle NAACP branch and a member of the Greencastle LWV. Many will also know Everson as “Her” in the duo Him & Her with husband Joel.
“I am an educator at heart,” Everson began. “It’s educating people to new information, (and) to get rid of dis- and mis-information, which is such a problem in our world today where we have social media and things that we can get in an instant.
“Yet we’ve not been taught how to actually look up sources and validate the information,” she admonished. Everson later provided that mis-information is incorrect information, while dis-information is intentionally misleading.
In this vein, the talk was meant to be informative about what Black Lives Matter is, in which she addressed where the movement came from, what it looks like now and where she believes it is going.
Everson said the BLM organization, which was established in 2013 after the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his killer George Zimmerman, works in a partnership with the individual movements seen nationwide. Those movements are for what she called “collective liberation.”
In its essence, this means that when the least of these are helped, everyone will then be helped.
“After we saw that, this organization -- led by three moms -- basically said, ‘Listen, we cannot stand for this anymore,’” Everson related. “What they decided was, ‘We want to try to eradicate white supremacy,’ which is what they saw was allowing these things to continue to happen.”
Black Lives Matter, she said, was and is meant to be both a political and social movement that is focused on nonviolence and civil disobedience.
“So many of the Black Lives Matter protests that I’ve been a part of are extremely well thought-out, they’re extremely organized and well-prepared,” Everson said. “You will notice that if you’ve been a part of them or connected to them on social media, they will tell you when they begin and when they end.
“They want you to know that if any shenanigans are going on after the time we have ended, this is not us; we have not sanctioned this,” she added. “Our mission is not to engage people who are trying to be antagonistic.”
As to the goal of “defunding the police,” Everson acknowledged that this has been a point of contention within and outside the movement. However, she argued that this should not be as controversial as it has become.
“In my opinion, ‘Defund the _’ has been around forever,” she said. “This isn’t something new. But when we look at it in terms of police, then it’s like this outrage of, ‘Oh, now they’re saying that we’re not gonna have anybody on the streets looking out for crime.’
“What ‘Defund the Police’ simply means is that you’re divesting funds and reinvesting those funds into community. You’re looking at social services. You’re looking at health care. You’re looking at youth services, housing.”
Everson advocated that Black Lives Matter, as the organization, a chant or a slogan, is not intending to say that other lives do not. Rather, it is a movement to show that African Americans are disproportionately targeted or otherwise ignored.
Put another way, she said, this is like one’s house being on fire and the fire department hosing down the others in the neighborhood. For her now, “This is the house that’s on fire; this is the house that needs water.”
Everson sees the “tomorrow” of Black Lives Matter as action apart from the organization and protests. This means people evaluating their own biases and prejudices, as well as calling out racism that may exist in political and social systems.
She said anti-racism is an active way of “seeing and being in the world in order to transform it.” It is recognizing different people’s challenges and also being aware of how racism affects the lived experience.
“A lot of people say, ‘Well, it’s a heart matter,’ and yes, it is,” Everson said. “Again, the Mark Twain quote. I reduce it down for all the -isms. It helps you to see humanity in the way that we should be viewing it. But until we get there, I need policy. I need policy that says that if you do this, then you have a consequence to that.
“Nothing within Black Lives Matter’s saying that I matter more than you,” she emphasized. “It’s saying we all matter, and so we need to redistribute the power and the funding to equitably show that we all matter.”
Everson segued into the “beyond” for Black Lives Matter through a quote by James Baldwin: “The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.”
With Black Lives Matter (both the organization and the movement) and efforts to promote anti-racism, she said, transforming the reality of racism ultimately becomes possible through allyship. However, this cannot merely be performative.
“What I’m talking about is true allyship, which sticks around when things get hard, when it gets long, when things get tough; they just keep fighting for the marginalized,” Everson said. “The arch is bent toward justice, but it’s just bent. I’m ready to take some tool and completely cut it off, but that’s not how it works.”
Everson was adamant that this work is arduous personally and organizationally. Its strength depends on the solidarity of those in the movement, as well as in having people outside it “open (their) eyes.”
“In my opinion, we’re all at this human level of experience, and skin color does not negate that we’re all living in this human life,” Everson said. “This is a transformative movement here to say we are equal; we will be heard; we will not stand for injustice.
“This is stuff that’s, like, self-work, so it’s not for the faint of heart,” she ended. “I always say it’s okay to be wrong, but you gotta do something about it. We don’t dwell on how wrong we were, we just fix the problem.”