Black Lives Matter verses All Lives Matter

I know this will sound nuts, but there are times when someone says "all lives matter" I get very angry.  It's because the phrase is being said not as a true statement of conviction, but rather as a cheap way to try to shut up the group Black Lives Matter.

For the record, I believe all lives do indeed matter, and I believe the African American community has been kept at a lower and different standard than the white community; a discrimination I cannot understand fully, but I still know is wrong.  I have no problem with Black Lives Matter.  The real crime is how we allowed their lives to be so neglected for so long.

Most people I know who say "all lives matter" are only doing so as a way to dismiss Black Lives Matter.  What they don't want to hear, or do hear and just want to silence the outrage, is the undeniable history of racism and bigotry that has lead the African American community to finally say enough.  The black community has been screaming for decades about unfair treatment at the hands of law enforcement, prosecutors and the courts, and white America went about their business, ignoring them.

It's the prolific abundance of cell phone cameras which is showing the real story. The African American community was telling the truth; they are being treated differently, many times with fatal consequences.  The horror is obvious to everyone, even the most racist of fools.

I was getting ready to start screaming and typing less than flattering things to the "all lives matter" trumpeters, but Bill Corbett, from RiffTrax and MST3K fame, sent me a link to a piece on the Reddit "Explain Like I'm Five" board from GeekAesthete which addresses this in a calm and rational manner, with incredible simplicity.  It's so good:

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 the 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.

Well said indeed.  Now if we can only stop the anti-Black Lives Matter folks, and their incompetent media, from using every death of a white person at the hands of a black person as an equalizer, a way to dismiss 10 or more dead African Americans by implying the one dead white guy makes it even; a macabre quid pro quo to delegitimize from a different angle.  Yes, please stop that too.

If only it was that easy.