Missing the Point

I am getting very tired of listening to white people say, "All lives matter!" whenever anyone brings up racial injustice. I feel like a lot of this is lack of imagination and empathy, the old "I never had that experience so I don't believe it happened to you" excuse. Many people have written far more eloquently about this than I have, and I urge my readers to seek out information from another, blacker perspective than the ones they are used to. But let me illustrate with a few examples why saying "All lives matter!" is extremely offensive.

First off, you are minimizing another person's pain in their experience. Imagine that your grandmother died, and you told me, and I said, "Everyone dies." How would you feel about that? You are not disputing that fact when you tell me your grandmother died; you are telling me about your personal pain that you have lost a particular person you love. In the same way, nobody who is saying "Black lives matter" is disputing that other lives matter. They are trying to tell you something about their experience that is painful to them. How rude would my response to you have been? Well, that's how rude your response to the black community is.

Secondly, it is not entirely clear that "All lives matter," especially to people who use that phrase. So imagine, White Woman, that you are out shopping, and you accidentally pay with a counterfeit bill you didn't know was fake, or you get pulled over because you didn't know the brake light had burned out on your car. Imagine the cops beat you to death or shoot you, then say they feel justified because you were threatening them. Imagine there is no investigation because they turned their body cameras off, and nobody disputes their version of events. Imagine some of your family complain, and then people on the internet bring up how you were maybe fired from this job and got in that car accident, so clearly you are no angel and brought it on yourself. Can you imagine this happening? No, because society believes that white lives have value. But this happens all the time to minorities. That is why they have to keep reminding us that their lives have value too.

I am white, and I can never totally understand what it must be like to have so little value in this society. But I can imagine George Floyd's terror at having a cop kneeling on his windpipe, and I can imagine Ahmaud Arbery's terror at being hunted down by rednecks. I would ask my readers to exercise a little imagination too, and think what it would be like to have to live with that sort of terror ALL THE TIME, and then having white people remind you, "Our lives have value too!" It actually sounds like, "Remember, OUR lives have value, not yours!" So just stop it.

Famous Hat