OPINION: The battle of colors: #BlackLivesMatter vs. #BlueLivesMatter and Brooklyn
Two police officers left home this past Saturday expecting to return to their wives and families. They were focused on their beat in Bedford-Stuyvesant that day.
I am certain they did not expect to have their lives forever tied to a fight for criminal justice reform, or used as a clear case of how social media can be a tool for cultural change and simultaneously possess the very death knell to the change it is attempting to effect.
The nation has been in protest against an epidemic: the high rate of death of men of color by the hands of police officers and a criminal justice system that has displayed an institutional bias against black and brown communities (both the victims of violence and the perpetrators).