Since its founding in 1971, the Black Caucus has been the political voice of minority people and the frail communities of which they come from. Along with a mission to empower the at times neglected 35% of the American population. The 42 member caucus maintains that the constitution be upheld. With their permitted powers in order to assure all the proper opportunities to the American dream. While recent years have reprised many social justice issues.
That were evident in the years of the Black Caucus’s creation. The media and social media has held a strong influence in the expression of their efforts to provide legislation. That pursue initiatives from access to a premier education from birth to post-secondary. To comprehensive capital and equitably-compensated employment. With Congress’s unproportioned members of white and other raced legislators, how do Black Caucus members use social media for social justice issues compared to other races?
Besides the epidemic of cop on black killings. 304 killed by police in 2014 (Samuel Sinyangwe, “The National Police Violence Map”, Mapping Police Violence, 2014. http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/), some of the other social justice issues that. I have noticed in America now is the raising of minimum wage. Maximizing opportunities for equality in minority group’s education and employment including the LGBTcommunity. And finally solidifying the most basic civil rights such as voting and freedom of religion.
Modern times have continued to provide instances that there are issues that need attention, even if the CBC is one of the Congress’s few groups that support legislation about the certain issues. Because of the Caucus’s continuous advocacy for social justice issues, it has required that more members of Congress become acclimated with social media as well; even if the median age for the CBC is 51 and many of the members gaining seniority on other committees show their aging.
According to my research, CBC members tweeted about crime twice their counterparts” percentages. With the CBC members tweeting about crime 4.9% to the white congress members 2.9% and other races of 2.1%. During the first half of this project in the fall. Our country was still seeing some of the aftermath from Mike Brown’s death in Ferguson, MO and questioning why crime has emerged into a perplexed issue in the last couple of years.
Despite the recent thirtieth anniversary of the Rodney King beating on, we still find that cops have been able to escape conviction by grand jury decisions for unnecessary killing of black individuals. While this would have been a grand moment to gain political constituency and show efforts to let their voices be heard on Capitol Hill, not one tweet or FB post by a CBC member was directed toward the decisions of the grand jury in either cases, nor in the second quarter of the research.
While some Congress and Senate members that may have been closer to the situation as far as state or district goes, I was puzzled to see that nothing was really concentrating on the decisions or responses of protesting for the two high profile cases that gained national attention along with others. My findings also puzzled me because more talk from one of the senior members of the CBC, Barbara Lee, who during the first half of the social media project made tweets about crime such as this.”
