All Lives Matter is divisive racism?

“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.” ― Albert Maysles

The framing of the name of the movement, and it’s insistence to speak to every single racist issue that has ever been an issue, from 1776 to 2020, makes it easy to dismiss the issue of police brutality altogether. And so black bodies, white bodies, latino and all other types of bodies continue to pile up, while the political movement claiming to work toward that end, continuously fails to force the people in power to wrestle with the issue. BLM continues to make it easy to deflect it by the obvious favoritism it pays to one marginalized community in the sea of hundreds of marginalized communities, ones that don’t have a twitter hashtag to unite around.

I don’t understand why the conversation about police brutality has to be included with racism. Are we all supposed to pretend cops don’t kill white people? Black people are 2-3 times more likely to be killed, but mentally ill people are 16 times more likely to be killed, one study said half of the people killed by police have a disability. Latino people are also overrepresented in police killings, the name of the movement isn’t brown and black, it’s black. All of this to say, there are 370 white corpses on the ground next to the 235 black corpses next to the 158 latino corpses and the 220 whose race couldn’t be identified. Are we really going to dilute the conversation with who gets killed more than the other? Wouldn’t it be more helpful to develop policies to help combat police brutality instead of talking about slavery, redlining, Fredrick Douglas, MLK, systemic racism and a billion other things that are important but not on topic? They are conversations we should have but how is talking about racism improving police brutality? Where are the ideas? Where are the solutions? Where’s the problem-solving happening?

Sometimes it feels like Black Lives Matter is more about beating America over the head as a cudgel than it is trying to save black lives. The most disgusting part about this whole thing is the way people are called racist and divisive just for saying All Lives Matter. They are accused of missing the point: Black Lives Matter is about the fact that white people think black lives don’t matter because of systemic racism. Oh really, thank you for telling me I’m racist because of the color of my skin, that’s definitely not racist.

So let’s look at the BLM arguments even a child can understand:

“We said ‘Black lives matter.’ We never said ‘only Black lives matter.’ We know ‘all lives matter.’ We just need your help with #BlackLivesMatter for Black lives are in danger!”

“Saying all lives matter is like saying all houses matter when only one house is on fire.The fact is that white lives have ALWAYS mattered in the eyes of the government and police force. The same cannot be said for POC. No one is saying your life doesn’t matter. However, until the day comes that Black Americans aren’t being shot in their homes, in the street, and in their cars, you CANNOT tell me that all lives matter in the eyes of our society. All lives won’t matter until black lives do.”

A gingerbread man has lost his leg and asks for help. Another gingerbread man with both his legs asks about his legs.

This Reddit thread uses an analogy of a family dinner to explain that “too” is implied at the end of the statement “Black lives matter,” and to say respond with “all lives matter” is to dismiss the statement “by falsely suggesting that it means ‘only Black lives matter," when that is obviously not the case.”

This video is too cringe to summarize into words.

“Black lives matter” does not mean Black people are “superior.” “We’re all people, of course we all matter. But are all races getting routinely killed by the police for no reason other than the fact that they are Black?” The bottom line: Until Black lives matter, there’s really no truth to the statement “all lives matter.” As Aliza Garza, one of the creators of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, put it in a 2014 article for The Feminist Wire, “Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean your life isn’t important—it means that Black lives, which are seen as without value within White supremacy, are important to your liberation. Given the disproportionate impact state violence has on Black lives, we understand that when Black people in this country get free, the benefits will be wide-reaching and transformative for society as a whole. When we are able to end the hyper-criminalization and sexualization of Black people and end the poverty, control and surveillance of Black people, every single person in this world has a better shot at getting and staying free. When Black people get free, everybody gets free."

And here are my counter-points for each.

Everybody’s life is in danger when the police have the freedom to kill people, get away with it, and even keep their job in most cases. We can focus on black lives, and all the other color lives too, when we gather to fight police brutality instead of turning the issue into a scapegoat to have a completely different conversation.

What about when five or ten houses are on fire, and there’s only a crowd in front of the black house? How the hell have white lives mattered to the police and government with 370 white corpses on the ground? I guess when white people get shot it’s because they deserved it, and when black people get shot it’s because they are black and every single police officer in the country is racist, even the black officers.

Kinda funny how in this analogy, we again pretend white people aren’t killed by the police. All white people live like Bill Gates, right? They don’t have problems or anything like that. And they whine about it too, like little petulant children. God, white people need to get back in their place and use their white voices to protect black lives.

Ah, the “too” is implied. Black Lives Matter too. The BLM statement doesn’t suggest that only black lives matter, obviously, but it does focus solely on them, doesn’t it? Mentally ill people and everyone else’s life taken by the police will just have to wait for the next hashtag movement I guess. Do you start to see the problem here? We can include everybody and achieve the same goal.

I’m not going to even bother responding to such a ham-fisted attempt to say that white people are cold, dumb and racist.

I don’t think Black Lives Matter is a racial supremacy movement, but Terry Crews, a prominent black actor is certainly worried about it, at least. This argument makes the point that black people are being killed by the police because of their skin color, claiming that every single black killed by the police is racially motivated. Really? Not one of those 235 black lives was killed because he had a gun in his hand and was shooting at the cops? Not saying every death is justified, or a majority of them, but not one was due to another factor? That just seems hard to believe from a statistical point of view, but what do I know? As for the secondary argument, white supremacy? Why would a white supremacist nation kill more white people than any other category of people? Nazi Germany, a true white supremacist nation, killed more Jews than any other category, which is impressive when you consider how tiny of a fraction the Jewish population is, multiple times smaller than the black population in America, for instance. If America had it out for black people in the name of loving white people, you’d think they’d figure out which ones to shoot and which ones not to shoot, but they must just be that dumb.

So let’s talk about what Black Lives Matter is routinely about. It’s about putting the spotlight on black issues to the point that nothing else can be discussed. Players in the NFL turn the entire news cycle of football into a mouthpiece for their self-serving activism. Normally I wouldn’t care, but if anyone points that out they’re called racist too. And the only people that push back against this are people like Donald Trump, Rand Paul, Ben Carson and XXXTentacion?

The truth is nobody wants to argue with people from the BLM movement because the entire premise of the movement can be as benign as “we just want to stop police brutality”, to “America is a white supremacist nation leading the black genocide silently”.

Everyone likes to ignore the fact that the northern states in America outlawed slavery in 1804, the same year Haiti did, and then several decades later elected Abraham Lincoln which spawned the bloodiest war in American history. 800,000 northern American white people who hadn’t owned slaves for 50, 60 years died to free 4,000,000 black people from slavery. When they wrote “All men were created equal”, that line was supposed to facilitate the freeing of the slaves, but they decided to keep the nation together when southern government officials refused. The southern states used the bible to justify slavery while the founding fathers were all deists, not any specific religion. No one wants to see the black and white of this situation, they want to read between the lines and craft the situation so they are the most victimized because so often that’s how you get eyeballs in America, there’s so much unjustified white guilt in this country that it’s easy to pray on.

I’m sure I’ll be called every single form of racist under the sun just expressing my opinion on the matter, and that’s why no one wants to do it. I bet someone will even say “Mentally ill people should be killed more by the police, at least there’s a better justification than just the color of someone’s skin.” And if you want to open that can of worms, I’m gonna open the “black people do commit more crime” can of worms. Which is more due to poverty, and elements of past systemic racism whose effects still linger. But if that’s the way the conversation is going to go, we’re going to get so mired in nuances and historical fact that the entire reason why we gathered gets lost, nothing gets done legislatively, and people continue to die. Rich get richer, poor get poorer, so on, so forth. We need to start redirecting our energy and our pain into actually fixing issues instead of fixating on them from our devices and screens.

The quote at the beginning of this article is not supposed to be ironic, it’s supposed to remind us that nuance is not always helpful to attaining a specific goal. Sometimes issues are colorblind, and police brutality is one of those issues. We should not be calling to defund the police, we should be calling for a change in the way we train our police officers, for one, stop training them to be cowards who shoot first and ask questions later. They should be de-escalating situations, not firing the first unjustified shots at the people they should be protecting. They should be knocking on the door and announcing police in full uniform, not breaking down the door in plain clothes and shooting through walls into neighboring apartments at people who don’t even know that they are police officers. And when there are two police officers next to one applying unneeded deadly force, they should be trained to remove that officer from the situation and de-escalate. We give them trucks and guns from warzones instead of psychological training and experience. We teach them to pull out batons and tasers instead of real martial arts training. There are so many things we could do to save lives, but we just want to virtue signal and pontificate instead and it fucking disgusts me.

So use black lives matter if that’s how you feel but don’t pretend you’re gonna save any by doing it. When you’re ready to make some political progress, you can try something that includes all victims of injustice, and maybe something will finally change by leveraging every single resource at your disposal instead of giving people an excuse to feel unincluded.

“Aim at the highest good that you can imagine, and that would be a good that includes everyone.” - Jordan Peterson

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/

https://www.parents.com/kids/responsibility/racism/reasons-all-lives-matter-doesnt-work-in-terms-simple-enough-for-a-child/

https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/culture/a32800835/all-lives-matter-fake-equality/

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/black-lives-matter-essay-why-is-saying-all-lives-matter-wrong

https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/terry-crews-slammed-suggesting-black-lives-matter-could-morph-black-n1232549

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/founding-fathers-and-slaveholders-72262393/

https://namiillinois.org/half-people-killed-police-disability-report/

https://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/key-issues/criminalization-of-mental-illness/2976-people-with-untreated-mental-illness-16-times-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-law-enforcement-

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/blacks-whites-police-deaths-disparity/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPip3srJGxg