A friend from the Rez made a post on the Facebook and I just couldn’t hold my tongue. He said All Lives Matter. So I dedicated ten minutes…
All lives can’t matter unless black lives also matter, and its pretty clear from the way we shape our media narratives, to the way we turn the majority of tv criminals into black folk, to the long-standing history of slavery that morphed into systemic racism and policies designed to keep black people down, to the way the we had to wait longer than every other social or racial group in America to get a national museum, to the continued disavowment of the very statement ‘Black lives matter’ that black lives don’t in fact matter as much as everyone else.
Black and brown women are murdered at a horrific rate in our country but do we see those stories on tv? Turn on dateline any Friday and you’ll see a sad tale about a pretty white girl who was murdered. She’s usually blonde and that image usually attracts a lot of viewers.
People don’t care nearly as much about the loss of black folk. Black folk like me don’t matter hardly at all to the average person unless we can tackle, dance, sing, shoot baskets, or make people laugh. Black beauty is even secondary to white beauty.
There is truth in the line that all lives matter. All live SHOULD matter but all lives clearly don’t matter equally, and that is the argument that BLM is putting out there. Black Lives Need To Be Treated As Having Value.
We have to stop with the blaming. We have to stop seeing dead black men and saying, well he must have done something to deserve it. That right there is the default. That right there is what we’ve been conditioned to believe the same way we are conditioned to believe that every Hispanic person you see in Arizona is an illegal Mexican immigrant or every Native American is a drunk. Those statements—those stereotypes condition us to think of those groups as less than and devalue those people the way blacks have been devalued and commoditized since We showed up here in chains.
This movement; this energy; this crisis is not a joke. Every time I get pulled over I know my life could end, and I’ve never been arrested or committed a crime. Yet I’ve had cops pull guns on me for as little as not using a turn signal. This has happened multiple times. In multiple states. Am I that much of a threat?
Or do I just look like someone they need to worry about? Do I look like someone who doesn’t matter as much as another color or creed? Or do I just look like someone who has been criminalized; Somebody who shouldn’t have nothing in life and should be questioned if he does, because he probably stole it?
Do all lives actually matter? Do we care about all people? Or do we ignore some and treat others as less than? Do we see the poor and homeless at the strip mall entrances and highway exits and turn out heads so we don’t have to face that interaction? Do those lives matter as much as our neighbors? Would we want those people in our neighborhood? And when we see them in our neighborhoods how many of us have the thought to get rid of them, to call the police, to feel nervous that they are around our families?
I was born into that. I was born less than. I didn’t tell myself that. I don’t feel that way about myself. Teachers told me that. Co workers told me I got hired because I was black, as if to say my skills weren’t enough to be there and I needed the government to fight my battles and force them to hire me/treat me as an equal.
How can all that be true and black lives not have less value—especially in America?
Look, I want all lives to matter. I wish this movement could be seen as us as a collective humanity recognizing some real messed up tendencies. It isn’t that. It’s folks trying to belittle a life and death struggle that some of us are having because it doesn’t impact you negatively and in some cases makes you uncomfortable. We should all be uncomfortable. We should all be flat out pissed off that we need laws to remind us not to crap on people just because of the color of their skin, the name of their God, or who they choose to love and marry. Yet, here we are.
Wake up folks. All lives don’t matter. The statement is a meaningless whitewash. That’s just an easy way of saying we don’t want to be forced to look at our own behaviors and we want to act like everything is all good.
It isn’t. It never has been.