These past few years’ events, and especially these past few months’, have given rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives Matter is an activist movement that campaigns against violence towards black people, police brutality, racial profiling and racial inequality and addresses how the criminal justice system treats black lives. Whenever Black Lives Matter addresses an issue, the movement is met with responses that hinder the movement, such as the infamous “All Lives Matter”. While some of these may simply be misguided, they’re still harmful. Here are some of the most common, derailing comments:
All Lives Matter.
Let’s start with the most obvious one. You might be thinking, well yeah, of course all lives matter. No life is worth more than the next. And that’s true. So what exactly is the problem here?
The problem is that all lives aren’t targeted the same way black lives are. This is an example of white privilege, because the issues that Black Lives Matter addresses do not affect you. All lives aren’t killed for selling CDs. All lives aren’t killed for playing with toy guns. All lives aren’t killed for reaching for their ID. All lives aren’t killed when walking back from convenience stores. And black lives shouldn’t be, either. Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean only black lives matter. It means black lives matter, too. Black lives should be treated equally, too. Black lives deserve justice, too. Black lives aren’t disposable, too. While media outlets use old mugshots of black victims, they use smiling yearbooks photos of white rapists. While black victims’ prior history is released, Brock Turner’s swim team achievements were printed. All Lives Matter only popped up after Black Lives Matter, simply to retort and silence Black Lives Matter. If all lives really were treated equally, then Black Lives Matter wouldn’t exist in the first place. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
President Obama addressed this, saying “I think the reason that the organizers used the phrase, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ was not because they were suggesting nobody else’s lives matter. What they were suggesting was, there is a specific problem that is happening in the African-American community that is not happening in other communities. That is a legitimate issue that we’ve got to address.”
A video explaining what All Lives Matter really means in simple way.
Blue Lives Matter.
Like All Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter is derived from Black Lives Matter. Blue lives aren’t smurfs or Stitch, but police officers. The difference here is that you wear the blue uniform by choice, but being black isn’t, and you stop being blue once you take it off. While Black Lives Matter brings awareness to minorities and overlooked issues, Blue Lives Matter dilutes Black Lives Matter. While black lives are targeted, blue lives are already institutionally protected.
Police killed 102 unarmed black people in 2015. 1 in 3 black people killed by police in 2015 were identified as unarmed, though the actual number is likely higher due to underreporting. And only 10 out of the 102 cases resulted in officers being charged with crime. Only 2 of those deaths resulted in convictions of officers involved, and only one of these officers received jail time. [src: mappingpoliceviolence.org] A black man is killed in the US every 28 hours by police. Black victims are often blamed, and their criminal records are dug up post-shooting and are used to excuse officers’ crimes.
More white people are killed by police than black people.
Yes, the number of white people killed by police officers is greater than the number of black people killed by police officers. But this is an unfair and inaccurate comparison. For more accurate statistics, the numbers have to take population into account. White people make up 62% of the United Sates population and about 49% of those who are killed by police officers. 24% of those shot and killed by police are black, even though they only make up 13% of the US population. This means that Black Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be shot and killed by police officers than White Americans. 13% of black people who have been fatally shot by police since January 2015 were unarmed, compared to 7% of all white people. In 2015, unarmed black people were killed at five times the rate of unarmed whites.
Stop using labels. Don’t say a black or white person died. Just say ‘a person’.
This would just make it harder to address the main issue here. We have to address the fact that those people were killed for being black.
So, how not to derail Black Lives Matter? Don’t use any of the comments or phrases in bold.
