A Sunday morning Facebook post asked “Is Black Lives Matter still a thing?” and I immediately did an eye-roll. The technical answer is in the affirmative. They still are a thing. I still get emails from them. I also know that in many activist circles that Black Lives Matters functions as a real, almost tangible entity. But, I know that that’s not what the social media post really meant. The post was getting at the sentiment that most people are wondering or have finally stopped caring about: why haven’t we heard from Black Lives Matter the way we did before the election of Donald Trump?

I read this post and proceeded to climb up the intellectual mountain from which that question was generated–for whatever reason, when I wake up sometimes my mind brings a piercing alacrity to a thought–and I realized that there was a marked shift in how I…