That's an unfortunate reaction to what should have been a teachable moment. You're not wrong, in so far as all lives truly do matter. The statement "Black lives matter" seems to have an implicit "more than yours" tacked on in a lot of people's heads, and that's what seems to grate.
It's not that Black lives matter _more_, it's that systemic institutionalized racism dating back to the origins of the US make it so that Black lives matter _less_ than white lives when dealing with organs of power.
> It's not that Black lives matter _more_, it's that systemic institutionalized racism dating back to the origins of the US make it so that Black lives matter _less_ than white lives when dealing with organs of power.
This is definitely true, I'm just puzzled as to why you'd focus efforts on solving a subset of the problem rather than the whole problem. Wouldn't that lead to fragmented movements of "<race> lives matter" rather than one single effort?
Black Lives Matter is, among many other things, a hook to draw attention to systemic institutionalized racism from white voters who haven't ever questioned their privilege (the teachable kind, not the kind PG is talking about).
The legislative programs that people are advancing in the wake of this attention do indeed focus on solving the problem for everyone, not just Black people. For example, Colorado recently passed a police reform bill that does a lot of beneficial things, none of them specifically targeted at the Black community[1].
> Black Lives Matter is, among many other things, a hook to draw attention to systemic institutionalize racism from white voters who haven't ever questioned their privilege (the teachable kind, not the kind PG is talking about).
Ahh, okay, that makes more sense, thanks. I wasn't aware of that.
It's not just a hook - black people are oftentimes the testing grounds for unjust programs that expand in scope to engulf other peoples (e.g. the prison industrial complex). The full tag line should be "All lives will matter when Black Lives Matter" because they are at the intersections of so many institutional inequities.
Something I've said for a while is that many "conspiracy theories" are distorted, garbled versions of "what if the US did to white people things that it has done to black people".
Yes, and also you're wrong. The efforts that will solve this problem for Black people will solve the problem for everyone else, too, or else it's not an acceptable solution.
People are focusing on Black Lives Matter as a rallying cry because the police system is expressing its terrifying lawlessness through overtly racist terror-inducing acts.
The problem won't go away without massive reform to the system. And asking "what about these other people?" in the general context is not useful; asking "what about these other people in the specific context of 'will this proposed solution work for these other people, too?'" is very useful.
To the extent that the problem can be solved, the solution isn't going to be race-specific! There's no subsetting going on here.
The people complaining are black. They want their lives to matter. If you can't campaign for that without there being something in it for you as well .. why not?
I hear what you're saying, but I think you misunderstand what the protesters are saying.
“Black lives matter” is not just asserting that black lives are among the lives that matter. Like, it IS asserting this and that observation IS somewhat banal and that IS kind of the point.
The banality of the statement is meant to invite you to think, “wait, why do we even have to say this?” which exposes a deeper meaning.
That deeper meaning is more like “We occasionally get hunted and killed out in the streets like rabid dogs by the very institutions that are supposed to protect people from violence—and this can only be understood as the culmination of America’s vast history of trying to ignore and bury and forget about its racist history rather than talk about it and address it, to the point where that «we don’t wanna talk about it» inclination has metastasized into an active implication that our lives are valueless to the culture at large. And we cannot breathe this stifling choking smog of «oh well another black man was shot but let’s not put it in the news, they don’t matter enough for that» any more, as happens when death transitions from stories into statistics. Fuck that. We DO matter.”
In turn the deeper meaning of “Blue lives matter” is “we respect our police enough to give them unconditional arbitration of who lives and who dies in cases where they feel their lives are at stake and sorry black people but we don't see a way for your needs to not die be satisfied without good honest police officers losing their lives because some of y’all shoot them—like, not the majority, I am sure most of you are good, but like when I think of inner city gang members shooting the police I think of black men stereotypically. Fix your gang problems first and then you won’t get shot by police.” You can see why that seems to have a kernel of truth but really came across as tone-deaf (see how it takes a statistical view rather than a story view?) and not understanding that most of these actual stories are about getting shot in the back while walking away or being strangled slowly while being totally immobilized and protesting that you are being strangled and could they please not do that, others involve very young innocent children being killed as collateral damage or worse.
Meanwhile “all lives matter” is a similarly banal statement but it serves the function, when used as a response to “black lives matter,” of saying that “no, you know, I really like our racist history being buried, I liked it when we didn't talk about race. We should focus on the global human condition and forget the specific gruesome stories of what’s happening to folks of your race right now as just the smaller problem of what’s happening to you right now. But I find myself very worried that if I am sharing these black stories someone is going to get mad at me for not sharing the Mexican stories of police injustice and then the poor white stories of police injustice and, well, can’t we just go back to a time where we didn’t talk about the race problem that we were having?”
The basic response to this I suppose is “we have been trying the ‘all lives matter’ approach for hundreds of years and we don’t seem to be improving, meanwhile cultures with similar race dynamics, like South Africa, are actually processing their difficulties over much shorter time scales, possibly because they are willing to talk about it and be frank. There is no reason to believe at this point that the mentality of ‘all lives matter’ leads to a better outcome for the black lives that are hemorrhaged today in such quantities that it becomes numb statistics rather than individual stories if we don’t make a point of getting outraged over every single damn death.”
The first half clarified some things for me, thank you. The second half is replying to the dog-whistle "all lives matter", which is not what I was talking about.
I think my misconception was that I thought BLM is a movement against police brutality, where it's actually more general than that. Under that light, it makes sense.
Every time I see the thin blue line flag or a "support our police" sign (or both combined, as in several yards just outside of town) I get angry. It's willfully ignoring everything you just wrote about, at best.
I think people are operating with incomplete, non-overlapping sets of information.
A day or two ago, a police officer in my area was killed on duty in a gunfight. Some of the reactions on Twitter were deranged and vile, literally celebrating that an officer was killed. I saw the same shit the day or two before when a police department near me tweeted about one of their police dogs dying, apparently of old age.
People deliberately try to ambush and murder police on a fairly regular basis. It doesn’t get reported much—partly because it doesn’t fit any popular media narrative, partly, I suspect, to not encourage copycats, and partly because it’s not really news. In 2013 a man in Southern California—you might recognize his name but I won’t give him the dignity of using it—carried out a brief campaign of murdering police officers and their families in a self-declared campaign of “unconventional and asymmetric warfare” against the LAPD.
I used to personally be very strongly biased against the police. I’m less so now, and part of the reason for that is that I’ve had the opportunity to see dozens of dashcam and bodycam videos of actual officer-involved shootings. The vast majority of the shootings I’ve seen were situations where the officer’s life was very much at risk.
I can even pick out patterns when people post videos of police not shooting people, presumably because those people are white. It’s not because they’re white, it’s because while they might have a bladed weapon and occasionally lunge in an officer’s direction, cops usually hold their fire and maintain distance until the guy breaks into a full-on sprint to try and close that distance.
I’m not trying to minimize or dismiss the actual police brutality that takes place, and I agree that we need higher standards and accountability. But from actually listening to some of the people on that side of the issue and seeing their evidence, I can understand where they’re coming from.
Sure. Stories are important. It's really not all that common, though, if we're being honest. According to this random memorial page[1] 48 police officers were killed in the line of duty last year in the US, an annual fatality rate of 0.006% assuming 800,000 active officers.
The numbers aren’t that low for lack of trying, though. The majority of attempts fail because the police are better-equipped and better-trained than the people trying to kill them. That’s part of why there are so many officer-involved shootings in the first place.
I'll admit that the phrase "black lives matter" makes me nervous, but not because I feel like it implies other lives do not matter. I was taught to never single out a group based on race, and that it was supremely rude behavior. On a fairly irrational level the phrase makes me nervous because it goes against what I was taught was polite behavior.
It's not that Black lives matter _more_, it's that systemic institutionalized racism dating back to the origins of the US make it so that Black lives matter _less_ than white lives when dealing with organs of power.