Oct 27, 2015 President Barack Obama recently said that the “Black Lives Matter” movement is raising a legitimate issue about African-Americans that needs to be attended to.
During a discussion on the importance of criminal justice reform, President Obama made his first public remarks about the group saying:
“‘Black Lives Matter’ is a social media movement that has tried to gel around Ferguson and the Eric Garner case and some other cases that came up. And very rapidly it was posited as being in opposition to the police. And sometimes, like any of these loose organizations, some people pop off and say dumb things”
The Black Lives Matter movement grew on social media after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teen in August 2014. However critics have accused the group of promoting bias against other groups, including white Americans and police.
While commenting on that, Obama said:
“I think the reason that the organizers used the phrase, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ was not because they were suggesting nobody else’s lives matter… What they were suggesting was, there is a specific problem that is happening in the African-American community that is not happening in other communities. That is a legitimate issue that we’ve got to address.”