Someone asked recently “Why isn’t it ‘All Lives Matter’?”
Here’s my response:
When a house is burning down you send the fire department to that house, not to all houses. You don’t say “All Houses Matter.” You say “For God’s sake, help put the fire out and rescue any victims.”
Black Americans are incarcerated at astonishingly high rates. Black Americans are an astonishingly high percentage of all prisoners worldwide. Black American families are several deciles below all other Americans when it comes to access to education and jobs, are at least one decile below all other Americans for assets, are more often tailed, confronted, arrested, jailed, tried, and convicted for the same kinds and rates of crimes committed by white Americans. Young black males and females are seen by teachers and police as older, stronger, and more threatening than other young Americans — witness Tamir Rice, for example, as 12-year-old boy who became an 18-year-old in the eyes of the police officer who shot him. In our language “black” is evil, wrong, ignorant, dumb, and primitive — the “dark” continent was dark not because of black Africans, but because it was seen as ignorant, backward, and waiting for the rescue of white Europeans. The word most people use to denigrate black Americans, the “N-word,” is synonymous not just with black Americans, but also with lower-class and despised. Look it up in the dictionary — it records actual usage.
The reason it is “Black Lives Matter” is because for much of white America, black lives are invisible and Black pain is dismissed.
It might not be possible for white Americans to understand the lives of black Americans.
It is entirely possible for white Americans, when confronted by the puzzling cry of “Black Lives Matter,” to ask “what do they mean by that when they say that?”
Maybe we could listen to them, our fellow Americans, instead of dismissing them.