By Doug Brown 
Black Lives Matter started as a small social media movement and hashtag. According to The New York Times, Black Lives Matter may be the largest movement in American history. But what began as a simple movement has now become a vehicle to push a Marxist, anti family agenda that has already seen 1,000s of black lives actually made worse through attacks on black owned businesses and neighborhoods.
Four recent polls — including one released this week by Civis Analytics, a data science firm that works with businesses and Democratic campaigns — suggest that about 15 million to 26 million people in the United States have participated in demonstrations over the death of George Floyd and others in recent weeks.
If you find yourself as a newcomer to the movement, here are a few ways you can get yourself oriented.
Connect
Black Lives Matter is a large-scale organization with many local chapters across North America. Find the closest chapter and reach out. Connecting online or in-person will allow you to put faces and names behind the stories.
Listen
If you enjoy listening to podcasts, you can check out episodes or entire series that focus on issues of race, racism, and the roots of the BLM movement.
If you aren’t sure where to start, here’s a list of popular episodes.
Read
One of the best ways to connect with the issues driving the BLM movement is to read.
Current bestsellers such as Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow are excellent places to start.
Bulk Books, a wholesale book store that provides bulk books to organizations, authors and educators recently created an Equality Library book collection, which is a bundle of books about racism, offered at-cost. Their stance is that education on racial issues is one piece of moving the ball forward, and their mission is for schools, churches, businesses, and other organizations to establish an “equality library” in their facility.
Befriend
As you read, study, and learn, be sure you’re making friends with people who can encourage and assist you on your journey.
Nurturing friendships with people who come from different backgrounds and who do not look like you will both reinforce what you’re learning and teach you lessons you could never have gleaned from a book or a podcast.
Dig In
Whatever you do, find a place to start.
Whether you start with a new friend, a book, a podcast, or even by reaching out to the BLM organization itself, don’t stop there.
The issues that brought us to this moment didn’t evolve in a day, and they won’t be fixed in one either.
Dig in, pace yourself, and invest your energy in the long haul.
SME Paid Under
Digital Editor