How to Support Black Lives Matter Online

This post is provided by vpnMentor and suggested by community member.

Str8jacket doesn’t own the content.

Tom Read

Updated on 27th July 2023

Cybersecurity Researcher

The threat of Coronavirus means many of us must continue to support Black Lives Matter online. Unfortunately, fighting social justice issues online isn’t always a risk-free protest in itself.

Are you looking for a way to stay safe as you continue to fight for Black rights online?

Well, don’t worry. vpnMentor has compiled all of the most important safety information you need to know as you show your solidarity for BLM on the internet.

You need to know this stuff because there are malicious and hateful individuals that will do whatever they can to make you feel afraid or stop you from affecting change. Whether you're posting on social media or lobbying on other parts of the web, you’ll likely have already experienced your fair share of distasteful responses. But there’s also the possibility of hackers, abusers, political rivals, government organizations, and hate groups that can target you for your views, or their personal gain.

While this may all sound a little bit scary and overwhelming, we mustn’t allow antagonists, racists, criminals, and opposers to impede BLM or the broader social justice movement. People across the internet must take action by persisting with the crucial message of BLM. By adopting the tips in this article, you can continue to support social justice issues safely for years to come.

9 Steps to Stay Safe While Supporting Black Lives Matter

The internet is full of people who are up to no good. During times of social change, it’s no surprise that people with their own agenda are looking to exploit the situation.

Targeting someone because of their opinion is simply not acceptable. Here are some ways you can avoid these spiteful groups, all while reducing the risk of threats as you support Black Lives Matter online.

1. Keep your social media private and secure

If you engage in social activism online, malicious people and groups can use the information on your social media against you.

Harassers might comment on your social media posts with hateful language to disparage what you say. They may even go as far as analyzing your content and personal information to dox you (revealing your private information online), harass you across other platforms and in real life or target your friends and family.

Snoopers, hackers, or other bad actors might use your contact details or personal information to launch phishing attacks against you, either to monitor what you're doing or to commit various types of fraud.

By making your social media private and secure, you can reduce the risk of exposure to these threats.

• Restrict your past posts

• Control who can see your new posts

• Make sure your privacy settings hide any personal information that could be used against you (like where you live, your phone number, job, or email address)

• Enable two-factor authentication on all of your accounts.

2. If you publicly support BLM or other causes, put safeguards in place

If you plan on supporting BLM publicly, and you're confident in engaging openly in conversations, debates, or collaborative discussions online, be careful about what information you share.

Consider keeping at least two separate public and private accounts on any social media. For example, you could create a public Facebook profile that’s completely open, and a 2nd private account just for close friends and family.

When supporting BLM online publicly, limit how much of your personal life, relationship, location, other information you reveal. Make sure your posts or public profile don’t accidentally reveal anything that could be used to hurt you or make you vulnerable to attacks.

As soon as you start supporting BLM online, you could experience an onslaught of attacks, bullying, and attempts to dox you.

But by creating a buffer between your public ‘persona’ and your private online life, you can shield yourself from most attacks.

3. Filter your social media

If you choose to support any social justice cause, it’s not always possible to prevent others from responding negatively to your content. A friend, colleague, or family member may suddenly expose themselves as hostile and bullying.

It's exhausting dealing with negative comments, messages, and other forms of online bullying. Still, there are some effective ways you can stop bad actors from interfering with your support for Black Lives Matter.

Individuals may post comments rubbishing your opinion, being racist, abusive, or generally unpleasant. In this case, you should simply report and block them, and take screenshots of any nasty remarks you receive in your comment section or inbox to use as evidence or to publicly out them for their bullying or racism.

You’ll get called a snowflake or ridiculed for ‘cancel culture.’ Just ignore it.

Follow these steps to avoid persistent online abuse while holding on to evidence of this harassment should it become a real problem and you need to report it to the police. In doing so, you’ll stop malicious individuals from spoiling healthy conversations about equality, or making you feel unsafe online.

4. Don’t trust strangers who approach you online

This one seems obvious, but it’s vital. If someone pops up in your online network, reaching out privately and asking to connect, be extremely cautious. However trustworthy they may seem, they could have very sinister intentions.

Bad actors with all sorts of different motivations could appear as friends or sympathizers to build trust and extract information about you. From here, they could launch cyberattacks or other forms of abuse.

We need to continue to have healthy conversations about rights and racism, but keep your personal information to yourself. That way, you can prevent the threat of strangers with ulterior motives.

20 Funding Sources for Black-Owned Businesses in 2023

This post is a cross post from DownloadAstro, Str8jacket doesn’t own the right of the content.

Many African American small business owners face challenges with funding due to post-pandemic hardship, inflation, and fierce competition. Yet black-owned businesses have been integral to the U.S. economy in the past and present. 

To help you out, we’ve rounded up a list of 20 places where you can seek grants and funding for your business in 2023.

Backstage Capital

What’s cool about Backstage Capital is that they intentionally back underrepresented founders, particularly those of color, female genders, and LGBTQ orientations. Founded in 2015, this private firm set out to support early-stage startups that traditional venture capitalists often overlook. It has since funded 200 startups, most of which are based in the United States.

One of the key initiatives of Backstage Capital is its interest in helping its portfolio companies grow. Rather than give out one-off grants, the firm sources for equity rounds, convertible notes, and Simple Agreements for Future Equity (SAFEs) from its accredited investors. 

Besides investment, Backstage hosts events and provides opportunities to network with mentors, investors, and industry experts. 

Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund

The CDFI Fund is a public funding source designed to empower CDFIs servicing America’s underserved and distressed communities economically. This Fund provides various programs to support CDFIs, including the CDFI Bond Guarantee Program, which has guaranteed over $2 billion worth of bonds so far. 

CDFIs are financial institutions such as banks, credit unions, loan funds, microloan funds, or venture capital providers that provide residents and businesses loans funded by the U.S. Treasury Department to create economic opportunities in low-income communities.

To become certified as a CDFI, a financial institution must apply to the CDFI Fund and meet certain criteria. These include having a primary mission of promoting community development and being a financing entity.

The CDFI Fund isn’t exclusively for black-owned CDFIs. But it does encourage CDFIs in low-income communities by helping them with grants, tax credits, and loan services. This empowers the CDFIs to give people in those communities loans to open businesses, buy homes and so on, improving their living standards. 

Grants.gov

Grants.gov is a federal website that provides a centralized location for grant seekers to find and apply for funding opportunities. While Grants.gov offers a wide range of funding opportunities for businesses of all types, they do not specifically target Black-owned businesses. 

Some of these programs may focus on promoting economic development in historically underserved communities or supporting small businesses in certain industries. 

Please remember that Grant.gov doesn’t disburse grants. Rather, grantors can advertise grant opportunities to potentially interested communities on Grant.gov, urging them to submit their applications. 

Reign Ventures

Reign Ventures is a private venture capital fund that invests in startups led by women and minorities. They focus on companies in the tech industry that have high-potential founders. 

Reign doesn’t stipulate specific periods during which interested business owners can pitch their ideas to the board of investors. You’re welcome to send your pitch to them at any time. 

IFundWomen of Colour (IFC)

IFC is the perfect platform for female coloured entrepreneurs to raise capital through crowdfunding, grants and coaching. If you choose IFC, you can access its exclusive Slack community, where you can share your business strategy and learn more about branding and marketing.

IFundWomen also provides opportunities for women to learn from expert workshops and enlist the services of coaches to assist them on their business growth journey. 

To crowdfund your business, start by taking IFC’s crowdfunding course and supporting other campaigns. Then download the grant planner to map out exactly how you intend to get the capital you need from crowdfunding.

For full content, please visit DownloadAstro’s post here

Bay Area hip-hop dance groups fight for Black and Asian solidarity

Cross post from Date Book, written by Erin Woo

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Lindsay Eklund and others dance in Rocko Luciano’s choreography class in the Zentrum Motors parking lot on Seventh Street in West Oakland.

Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

When George Floyd was murdered, the dancers at Full Out Studios didn’t want to stay silent.

The Oakland dance studio formed an informal board to discuss their options, sparked by a “base-level decent human reaction of being disgusted” by Floyd’s killing, said Full Out co-founder Rocko Luciano. But the staff — multiracial and led by three Asian American studio owners — was anxious about saying the wrong thing. For a few days, they waited to see if other studios would speak out, but they saw nothing on social media.

Four days later, Full Out posted a statement of solidarity with the Black community on Instagram. And then, Luciano said, “we put our money where our mouth was.”

Full Out raised more than $2,200 for organizations including Hip Hop for Change and the Black Lives Matter Global Network, hosted workshops to highlight Black dancers, and revised its policies to include specific anti-racism clauses. All this while struggling to stay open as a small business during a crippling pandemic and grappling with its position as an Asian-led group practicing an art form deeply rooted in African culture.

Full Out Studios’ Rocko Luciano teaches a choreography class in the parking lot next door.

Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

In the year since Floyd’s murder, Full Out hasn’t been the only Bay Area dance organization reckoning with issues of race and appropriation. Teams and studios across the country have pledged to honor the history of hip-hop, make their own practices more inclusive and use their platforms to support Black-led community organizations. The resulting change has been hard-fought, uneven at times and necessary, dancers say.

“Before we start posting any black squares or videos, we need to start learning what we’re doing first, because that’s where the respect comes from,” said JC Caoile, the executive director and artistic director of Str8jacket, a predominantly Asian hip-hop team based in San Mateo.

Hip-hop emerged in the 1970s, created by Black and Latinx youth in a postindustrial Bronx scarred by gang violence and a cratering economy. It has five pillars, according to the New York hip-hop collective Zulu Nation: DJing, breaking, MCing, graffiti and knowledge.

But even from the beginning, Asian martial arts and kung fu movies helped influence break-dancing styles, said Khafre Jay, founder of Hip Hop for Change, an Oakland-based nonprofit that uses hip-hop education to advocate for social justice causes.

Nearly two decades later, Asian American college students who grew up steeped in hip-hop culture began forming collegiate dance teams tied to Asian cultural organizations at their schools. Then the success of groups like the Jabbawockeez, which originated in the Bay Area and won the first season of “America’s Best Dance Crew” in 2008, brought Asian hip-hop dancers to mainstream attention.

“The spirit of it was connected to providing a space where people have a sense of belonging, where people who grew up in hip-hop culture can come together and express that love,” said Arnel Calvario, who started Kaba Modern, the first of the groups, as a freshman at UC Irvine in 1992.

But as mostly Asian hip-hop groups sprouted up across the University of California system and beyond, dancers started using the now-disavowed term “urban dance,” and the ties to hip-hop’s cultural roots began to fray. “We were all of these Asian people doing hip-hop and there were no Black people,” said Sammay Dizon, who danced on UC Berkeley’s Main Stacks team from 2010 through 2014.

In the Bay Area, with Asian American dancers the majority on competitive dance teams, Black dancers reported microaggressions ranging from use of racial slurs by Asian dancers to a feeling of tokenization during routines. Those dynamics were compounded on college campuses like UC Berkeley, where Black students’ share of the population dropped from 7.8% of the entering class in 1997 — the last year UC schools were allowed to use race as a criteria in admissions — to 3% in the 2020-21 school year.

“I get uncomfortable because there’s a predominantly Asian community and then sometimes you guys are dancing to rap and hip-hop songs with the N-word in it and it’s not bleeped out,” said UC Berkeley student and Bearettes drill team member Cherie Hughes, a Black dancer who spoke at an October panel discussing anti-Blackness within the Berkeley dance community.

Last summer, the renewed cultural consciousness spurred by the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement cast those tensions into sharp relief. First to go was the term “urban dance,” with team after team posting the same message via social media apologizing for its “harmful racial implications.”

Dancers participate in a pre-pandemic class at Oakland dance studio Full Out.

Photo: Rocko Luciano

Danyel Moulton, a half-Black, half-Japanese dancer from Southern California who emerged as a leader in the dance community’s fight for social justice, led virtual conference calls with hundreds of participants to discuss anti-Black racism within the dance community and outlining concrete ways to improve.

In August, Dizon’s former Berkeley team, Main Stacks, issued a statement acknowledging that “after listening to previous members’ experiences, we realize that Main Stacks has not been a place where all BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) individuals have felt welcomed, included, and heard.”

The team pledged to increase its hip-hop education, require leadership to take an implicit bias test and include a zero-tolerance clause against racial bigotry in its contract. Over the summer, team members raised $855 for the Black Organizing Project, an Oakland grassroots community organization, through a series of workshops featuring Black artists. They also helped organize the October panel on anti-Blackness in the Berkeley dance community.

Full Out hosted classes to raise money for national and Bay Area Black activist organizations including the Black Trans Protesters Emergency Fund and So Oakland LLC. Internally, the studio educated its training team on the history and fundamentals of hip-hop and revamped its internal contract to include more specific clauses condemning racism and detailing a complaint and discipline procedure for future instances of harassment or discrimination.

Black staff members at Full Out said they’re proud of the work that the studio is doing.

“They are super supportive, and they have so many resources on their website,” said Raquel Tansier, a Black dancer who began teaching at Full Out last summer after leaving two other local dance studios because they weren’t showing support for Black Lives Matter.

Arayah Fleming, another Black teacher at Full Out, said the support the studio has shown her and other Black staff members has given her the confidence to be more assertive with friends in other aspects of her life. “I got used to non-Black POC not saying anything, but not here,” said Fleming. She and Tansier are two of seven Black leaders at the studio, making up roughly a fifth of the staff.

Str8jacket dancers Miky Chau, Janna Aspidov, Namaad Jackson and Lexi Nutkiewicz at Westfield Valley Fair for the mall’s Lunar New Year Celebration on Jan. 18, 2020.

Photo: Jho Vilar

Str8jacket, which has long incorporated education on the history of hip-hop into its curriculum, added an hour of conversation before its practices to discuss current events and social issues in the dance community, and raised $900 for organizations supporting Black Lives Matter over the past year.

Teams also united for big events. In August, dozens of organizations partnered with the 2020 Project, an Asian American voter mobilization organization, to host Dance to the Polls, a virtual dance workshop series to get out the vote and share dance community perspectives from Asian and Black performers. In November, Main Stacks turned Prelude NorCal, its annual national dance competition, into a two-day speaker series “to investigate the issue of cultural appropriation of hip-hop dance as a Black cultural art form, and our privilege as non-Black dancers.” And earlier this year, Main Stacks and Str8jacket were two of many sponsors of the Invitation, an event to discuss ongoing social issues within the community.

Hip Hop for Change founder Khafre Jay and Hip Hop for Change communications director Stephanie Liem.

Photo: Courtesy of Stephanie Liem

Over the past year, activism within the dance community has happened against a backdrop of ongoing police violence against Black Americans and escalating hate crimes, bigotry and violence against Asian Americans.

Outside of the competitive and studio scene, organizations like Hip Hop for Change are working to build solidarity between Black and Asian communities in the Bay Area, partnering with other community groups like the Chinese Progressive Association. They’ve hosted workshops for dance teams and schools to emphasize a history of Black and Asian community organizing as well as “hip-hop as a pathway for solidarity,” said Hip Hop for Change communications director Stephanie Liem.

Full Out is also continuing to host events to make an impact. On Friday, May 28, for instance, the studio is hosting classes, including one taught by Moulton, to raise money for Compassion in Oakland, a volunteer organization that provides chaperones to seniors in Oakland’s Chinatown.

The efforts show that Bay Area dance teams have sustained their activism, even if Moulton cautions that success stories like these aren’t the norm across every organization. In the 15th month of the pandemic, as many teams haven’t yet held in-person practices or performances, the true test of lasting change will depend on how well their new anti-racist practices translate to a post-COVID world.

“In the next couple months, as more things open up, we’ll see how the wider community has been changing altogether,” said Str8jacket co-director Kristie Lui. “But I think definitely for Str8jacket, we’re forever changed in our mentality.”

Full Out Studios presents “AAPI Fundraiser: Dance for a Cause”: 6, 7:30 and 9 p.m. Friday, May 28. $25 for one class or $60 for all three, with a portion of the proceeds going to Compassion in Oakland. Ciel Creative Space, 935 Carleton St., Berkeley. www.fulloutstudios.com/aapi

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About this story

This story was produced in partnership with AAJA-SF Bay Area and Comcast California for Rising with the Tides, a storytelling project aimed at amplifying Asian American Pacific Islander stories and voices. AAJA-SF Bay Area is the local chapter for the Asian American Journalists Association, a nationwide nonprofit educational and professional organization based in San Francisco. www.aajasf.org/rising

Erin Woo

Erin Woo is a Bay Area freelance journalist and the editor in chief of the student-run Stanford Daily newspaper.

Support Black-Owned Businesses: 181 Places to Start Online

This is a cross post from Sophia Conti

Racial and wealth disparities in the United States have been thrown into sharp relief by the COVID-19 pandemic and racial unrest throughout 2020. We see more clearly than ever just how often Black business owners and creatives have been thought of as less than their Caucasian counterparts – and Black businesses are paying the price.

Black businesses are impacted more deeply than Caucasian businesses by COVID-related closures, due to the long history of racial inequality that’s now exacerbated by the ongoing state of emergency.

It feels like an overwhelming problem – and it is – but there’s one simple thing you can do right now to help: Shop at Black-owned businesses whenever you can.

Supporting Black-owned businesses helps provide much-needed stability to business owners that have been hard hit by the pandemic. And you’re laying a foundation to continue to support Black businesses long after the crisis is over.

Once you start paying attention to who owns the businesses you shop at and where your money is going, you’ll be surprised at how your mindset starts to shift. It’s an easy, practical step to start changing the way you think while providing tangible support to Black business owners who need your help right now.

Where to start? We’ve got you covered. We’ve compiled a list of 181 Black-owned businesses across the United States in many different categories. Check out the list below.

Sophia Conti

Sophia is a freelance writer, editor, and content strategist. She specializes in digital marketing and B2B content for small businesses and entrepreneurs. When not writing or editing, she can be found searching used bookstores and watching the penguins at the San Diego Zoo.