A cell phone video from the back of a car dashboard lays out the horrible scene: a black man showing no resistance is aggressively slammed against the hood of the car and shoved to the ground by two policemen.

Two gunshots cut through the air, followed by screams’ of witnesses. A woman in the car starts to sob.

The victim is left dead with a large bloodstain on his chest.

Tragedies like the one of 37-year-old Alton Sterling,  who was killed in Baton Rouge, Lousiana on July 5, have become more common in the United States.

According to the Washington Post, 37 percent of unarmed people killed by the police in 2015 were African American, who making up only 13 percent of the U.S. population.

The disproportionate amount of these calamities have sparked anger across the nation and all over the Internet, which has led to the start of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, a campaign dedicated to ending racism against African Americans.

BLM is a necessary and relevant movement that addresses the deeply embedded racism that has been ignored for too long by privileged individuals in our society.

Racism is no longer an issue that can just be pushed to the side. It is heavily impacting the lives of innocent people on a day to day basis.

Every day,  African American people are killed for crimes they did not commit. This isn’t an issue that will “fix itself” if we leave it alone. It is time for people to take action.

According to Propublica, an online news publication, African American youth, from ages 15 to 19, were killed at a shocking rate of 31.2 teens per million.

However, white youth within the same age range were killed at a rate of only 1.5 teens per million.

This means that black male teens are 21 times more likely to be killed by police officers than white male teens.

Despite all of the evidence, there are still many attempts to silence and ignore the BLMmovement.

All Lives Matter (ALM), a movement stating the BLM movement is misleading because it should be advocating rights for people of all races, including whites, is one way many people have tried to undermine the BLM movement.

But the ALM movement falls short in many places. For one, nobody said All Lives Matter until people said Black Lives Matter.

It is rarely brought up in regards to any other issues, such as refugees, LGBTQ, or minorities, indicating that this movement was purely made to silence the BLM movement.

Furthermore, being pro-black doesn’t mean anti-white or anti-law enforcement.

ALM advocates have tried to claim that BLM is a form of “reverse racism” against whites, which isn’t true in the slightest.

If this were true, then people who aren’t black would not be allowed to protest and would be shamed for supporting the BLM cause, neither of which actually happen.

Another argument often presented against the BLM movement is the reason there are so many killings of black people is because of the amount of crime in predominantly black neighborhoods.

“Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting suspects in those communities, raising officers’ own risk of using lethal force,” said Heather Mac Donald, a  researcher for the Wall Street Journal. 

Despite these arguments, research has shown time and time again that there is no correlation between violent crime and who is killed by police officers.

A report released by the Center for Policing Equity revealed that black residents were targeted for use of police violence more so than white residents.

If BLM gains more momentum and supporters in the coming months, we will most likely be able to see a shift in the racial divide and important steps to seeing complete equality.

But if this movement becomes silenced, the trends we are seeing will continually increase as more and more innocent black people will be killed by the police.

It is critical that the voices of the oppressed are heard and acted upon.

There is so much underlying hatred that has been integrated into American culture that it could be difficult for someone who has privilege to see these issues.

The only hope for improvement is to listen to what the BLM advocates have to say.