Retracing the butterfly effect on the BLM movement Lynn Chen

Retracing the butterfly effect on the BLM movement

Lynn Chenexplores how one small event rippled through history to create the Black Lives Matter movement that we know today.

IF ANYTHING IS FOR sure this year, it is that the BLM protests were not unprecedented. But, how did we get here? With the onslaught of monthly events that seem to shake up the tectonic plates of our human world, living in 2020 feels like one tireless dystopian novel. Trace strains of COVID-19 end up in the markets of China and cause a worldwide pandemic. Citizens of the United States become fed up with racist police violence and are hungry for revolution. Life changes and we're forced to begin afresh in learning new truths in both our personal lives and the larger world.

The Butterfly Effect One year ago, no person would have believed in this timeline of chaos. But, Edward Lorenz's Butterfly Effect theory on the predictability of the Universe comes close to giving us an explanation. In 1961, after returning to his computer from a coffee break, Lorenz discovered that his mathematical computations showed that one small insignificant action could accelerate into a large chaotic event; most commonly, we've heard the example of how a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil, at the right time and place, can trigger a tornado in Texas.

At our first guess, this may suggest that our universe is predictable, but checking every small variance in our world would be such a laborious task that it renders it impossible. However, looking into patterns of history can

be a source of prediction.

Accelerations

Humour me for a second and think about the similarity of all political issues within and across nations: freedom, equality and power. If

all disagreements stem from this triad, then forgetting the past is a mistake we can't afford - particularly when lives become oppressed at the hands of others.

While George Santayana's aphorism “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is one etched into the clichés of the English language (so much that we ironically forget its important truth), a startling truth can be seen if we layer it on top of Karl Marx's quote “History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce”. The composite of the two quotes is proved true when we look back at BlackAmerican history. US Constitution with the billing of the 13th Amendment in 1865, the terms and conditions about slave labour were too a farce - it legalised involuntary servitude in the form of penal labour and today, black Americans are overrepresented in incarceration rates. About 600 years before the transatlantic slave trade, which forced enslaved African people to build the Americas, captured women were enslaved by Italian merchants to process on sugar after the 4th Crusade in 1204. Eerily similar, many African slaves worked on sugar plantations in the Americas during the 19th century. History repeats itself again and again, as we are chronic amnesiacs to the past. Sugar isn't the important coincidence in the stories of slave trade. Instead, sugar points out the insatiable consumption of the privileged - that many will have something, even if it does ensnare on equality and freedom of others. Today, we are all complicit in the exploitative function of

underpaid sweatshop labour blighting in South-East Asian countries, which are allegedly contracted by fast-fashion retailers like H&M, Urban

Outfitters and

Zara. This occurs of chocolate as well, in which the supply

in the production

History repeats itself. When slave trade was abolished in the

-Picture: Imogen Bayliss-Smith chain of world's largest chocolate across Cote D'Ivoire in West

corporations utilise child labour Africa. We’re driving faster and faster into the future and into its ramifications. But, our surroundings are blurry with no indication of where we are or where we have been or if we have been driving around in circles. Perhaps

it's better to feel the jolt of braking and even if we get whiplash, retrace our route.

The magic of the Butterfly Effect means that everything is unpredictable in the present, and destructive patterns can be turned around.

Reflecting on the mass solidarity for the BLM protests of 2020, Rebecca Solnit articulately notes that “many must have been ready for it, whether they knew it or not. Not in the sense of planning it or expecting these events, but by having changed their minds and committed their hearts beforehand”. What seemed like a sudden wildfire of international protesting was really the Butterfly Effect of a growing civic responsibility to speak out. Watching the jerky real-time Instagram stories of passionate protestors on the streets geotagged from Minneapolis to Sydney to London and the often peaceful means of police resistance reveals one thing, whatever your stance is: having access to a phone and a WiFi connection is having an obligation to not be silent. When new information is so instantaneous and accessible, silence with these protests going on, is considered an act of complacency. This is simply what changed in the hearts and minds of many people.

A Stationary Point Through patterns we thrive, stagnate or even degenerate. Before dashing into those patterns and embarking on our own Butterfly Effects, we have to remain stationary and have a clear look behind, around, and in front of us. That is the only way to predict and prepare for the future.

Picture: Lucia Mai