The Divide Surrounding the BLM Movement: White Privilege, Fake news, and Donald Trump

Abstract

This paper goes into some of the causes of the political and racial divide surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement. Causes such as white privilege, fake news and Donald Trump are detrimental to the movement as these factors continue to widen the divide as well as allow false information and propaganda against the movement to be spread. The topic of white privilege takes a dive into why it is not acknowledged in addition to what it is doing to the movement and how it also relates back to the other topics of fake news and Donald Trump. The impact of fake news and Trump causes the spread of misinformation and disinformation which allows users on social media as well as Trump's supporters to see this information and propaganda and then accept it as truth, allowing the movement to look bad and pushing people away from supporting it. This ties together with white privilege because white people are able to believe in fake news and listen to Trump without it ever affecting them negatively, but will inevitably affect the Black community and the movement. I speak to two people from my field site, one who supports the movement and one who does not, to get a better understanding of their views which I then applied to my research.