Chapter 4: Mattering in Allied Youth Fields: Summoning the Call of Black Lives Matter to Radically Affirm Youth Through Programming

Few rallying cries have rung out louder and more effectively for social transformation than Black Lives Matter . The irrefutable power and popularity of “those three words” (Lebron, 2017) has catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement to the forefront of global-wide discussions and action for overturning racist social policies that keep Black life at the margins. Black Lives Matter, with its demonstrations, its discourse, and the feelings it elicits, serves as a powerful interjection into the status quo, which thrives on the fundamental, state-sponsored devaluing of Black life everywhere.

Black Lives Matter movement projects emerged as community responses to extra-legal, unwarranted violence primarily against Black youth, which was captured typically on bystanders’ cellphone videos and dispersed via social media outlets. Yet, the radical significance, importance, or mattering this movement affirms for Black life is more than a response to rampant extrajudicial killings of unarmed Black people. Black Lives Matter counters systemic racism appearing in social policies and practices by inserting and asserting the mattering of Black life against anti-Black structures that rely on Black peoples’ demise (Camp & Heatherton, 2016). For instance, the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately impacted the Black community, brought into sharper relief the devastating health vulnerability experienced by low-income communities of color. COVID-19 exacerbated and exposed the perilous realities of economically stratified Black life at the margins—the same realities that Black Lives Matter had been calling our attention to for years. For those within the allied youth fields (see Chapter 1 of this volume by Robinson & Akiva) Black Lives Matter, especially in the wake of COVID-19, forces us to reckon with and clarify our interventionist stance for children and families (see Watson et al., 2020), whose experiences with anti-Black inequities, prove to them—prove to us all—that their lives do not matter. Thus, we call upon those within the allied youth fields to build on the present energy to reorient their programming to ensure Black youth feel that their present and future lives matter.