All lives matter. That is just facts to me. I don’t choose to feel as though one color of skin has inherently more value over another. However, when people say ‘all lives matter’ they run the risk of falling into the same trap as saying, ‘I’m not racist, because I have black friends’. The term All Lives Matter argues against putting the focus on black lives and what is happening in the black community and the systemic racism that keeps my people down. Instead it argues that we should avoid looking too closely at any one group and institute change that impacts all groups. On the surface it may still sound like a good idea. However, change for everyone still ignores the specific issues that impact those of us who are the most vulnerable.
One of the most impactful conversations I’ve had about race in America was with a writer named Tim Wise. He used the analogy of his college roommates to describe the problem. To paraphrase, he talked about this pot full of some kind of stew a roommate had made. Now everyone ate the stew but the person who made it never cleaned it up. The stew sat there for better than a week collecting bugs and stinking up the place, but nobody felt the responsibility to clean it up. Instead they worked around it and the problems kept mounting.
In a sense this describes how we have been struggling with Race in America. Black Lives Matter as a movement seeks to speak to the pot that was never cleaned up. We never dealt with our history of slavery. We allowed slavery to morph into Jim Crow to morph into systemic racism in the laws we make (for example, why is the penalty for crack much higher than that for cocaine when they are chemically the exact same drug?). We have built a society that looks at black and brown people as criminals and something to be feared. This is why when the Black Panthers showed up on the steps of the capitol building with assault rifles there was movement for a ban, but when the Michigan militia did the same, nobody batted an eyelash. It is even more obvious in our humor. This scene from Whose Line is it Anyway, shows two white men and a black man in the middle and the Joke goes, “Can you pick out the man who robbed you?” The crowd (and all of us) instantly get the joke. That right there is the problem. It is a joke. Because it is a joke we tend to laugh and move on. But is it really all that funny when that joke is a reflection of how nearly every black man is treated? I personally have had a cop pull a gun on me while I was in my car with my kids. I have no record and have never been accused of a crime. So why did it happen? Who did the cop assume I was. More importantly, what led to that assumption?
Black Lives Matter exists as a slogan to draw attention to the specific plight of being black in America. All Lives Matter takes the focus off of that plight and encourages us to ignore the problems inherent in our racial and social class structure. All lives DO matter, but the problem is that we instinctively recognize that some lives matter and we instinctively don’t recognize that other lives do. Every friday for the last 28 years Dateline NBC has run a story about pretty white women being murdered. This is an inherent reminder of the value of that category of people. How often do we hear stories about pretty black women being murdered? How often do we hear stories about black people being murdered at all when it is not by the police? Black Lives Matter strives to bring attention to our struggle at a time when that attention is needed the most.