Peace & blessings ~ Molly
By Kevin Roose
This week, high-profile police killings of
two black men—Alton Sterling of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile, who was killed in Falcon
Heights, Minnesota—have renewed heated debates about police violence, and
brought the Black Lives Matter movement back into the spotlight.
Every time this happens, cries of “Black Lives Matter”
tend to be met with the response “All Lives Matter.” Even presidential
candidates have made this mistake—last year, Hillary Clinton said “All Lives
Matter,” though she has since corrected herself.
And lots of white people have expressed confusion about
why it’s controversial to broaden the #BlackLivesMatter movement to include
people of all races.
The real issue is that, while strictly true, “All Lives
Matter” is a tone-deaf slogan that distracts from the real problems black
people in America face.
GeekAesthete explains:
Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your
family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don’t get any.
So you say “I should get my fair share.” And as a direct response to this, your
dad corrects you, saying, “everyone should get their fair share.”
Now, that’s a wonderful sentiment — indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda
your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you
should get your fair share also. However, dad’s smart-ass comment
just dismissed you and didn’t solve the problem that you still haven’t gotten
any!
The problem is that the statement “I should get my fair
share” had an implicit “too” at the end: “I should get my fair share, too, just
like everyone else.” But your dad’s response treated your statement as though
you meant “only I should get my fair share”, which clearly was not
your intention. As a result, his statement that “everyone should get their fair
share,” while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point
out.
That’s the situation of the “black lives matter” movement.
Culture, laws, the arts, religion, and everyone else repeatedly suggest that
all lives should matter. Clearly, that message already abounds in our society.
The problem is that, in practice, the world doesn’t work
that way. You see the film Nightcrawler? You know the part where Renee Russo
tells Jake Gyllenhal that she doesn’t want footage of a black or latino person
dying, she wants news stories about affluent white people being killed? That’s
not made up out of whole cloth — there is a news bias toward stories that the
majority of the audience (who are white) can identify with. So when a young
black man gets killed (prior to the recent police shootings), it’s generally
not considered “news”, while a middle-aged white woman being killed is treated
as news. And to a large degree, that is accurate — young black men are killed
in significantly disproportionate numbers, which is why we don’t treat it as
anything new. But the result is that, societally, we don’t pay as much
attention to certain people’s deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don’t treat
all lives as though they matter equally.
Just like asking dad for your fair share, the phrase
“black lives matter” also has an implicit “too” at the end: it’s saying that
black lives should also matter. But responding to this by
saying “all lives matter” is willfully going back to ignoring the
problem. It’s a way of dismissing the statement by falsely suggesting that it
means “only black lives matter,” when that is obviously not the
case. And so saying “all lives matter” as a direct response to
“black lives matter” is essentially saying that we should just go back to
ignoring the problem.
Yep, there you go. Bookmark it, print it out, give it to
your friends.
Please go here for the original article: http://fusion.net/story/170591/the-next-time-someone-says-all-lives-matter-show-them-these-5-paragraphs/
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