Professor Tiger wrote:Martin O'Malley said "ALL lives matter" just like you said.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/2 ... ves-matter#
Of course "All lives matter". And all lives matter equally, but by uttering this banal statement in response to a rallying cry for a very specific problem, O'Malley is avoiding the very root of the problem that black people face. How can the systematic oppression faced by black people at the hands of police be addressed if the issue of color is taken off the table? They are disproportionately abused and killed precisely because of the color of their skin.
To better understand this situation, from my perspective, let's tell a story.
Imagine a house that was on fire. Now imagine the homeowner, Janet, running to her neighbors, crying out for help, but instead of her neighbors helping, they take offense. "Why should her house get more attention than mine? I need a new roof!" thinks one. "Look at that rude Janet, yelling and screaming, I'm entertaining guests!" says another to her husband. Janet knocks on another neighbor's door, only to be greeted with a surly "I'm sorry, but all our houses are important".
In the story, Janet represents the BLM protesters and her burning house is the oppression black people face at the hands of police. Now, if you can understand why the neighbors' reactions were wrong then you can see why saying "All lives matter" (ALM) in response to BLM is wrong. It uses a very banal slogan (ALM) to draw attention away from the real and pressing issue that black people face, that other races do not feel to the same extent. If you feel offended when someone says BLM, then I say you're like those neighbors in my story. And I invite you to step outside your self-absorbed bubble and to try to imagine what it's like to wonder if your next encounter with a police officer will be your last.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... tter/?_r=0
When some people rejoin with “All Lives Matter” they misunderstand the problem, but not because their message is untrue. It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter which is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered, and are struggling to matter in the way they deserve.
Claiming that “all lives matter” does not immediately mark or enable black lives only because they have not been fully recognized as having lives that matter. I do not mean this as an obscure riddle. I mean only to say that we cannot have a race-blind approach to the questions: which lives matter? Or, which lives are worth valuing? If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, “all lives matter,” then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of “all lives.” That said, it is true that all lives matter (we can then debate about when life begins or ends). But to make that universal formulation concrete, to make that into a living formulation, one that truly extends to all people, we have to foreground those lives that are not mattering now, to mark that exclusion, and militate against it. Achieving that universal, “all lives matter,” is a struggle, and that is part of what we are seeing on the streets. For on the streets we see a complex set of solidarities across color lines that seek to show what a concrete and living sense of bodies that matter can be.
http://fusion.net/story/170591/the-next ... aragraphs/
Earlier this week, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley got booed when, speaking at the Netroots Nation conference, he responded to a group of #BlackLivesMatter activists by telling them that “all lives matter.” He was later forced to apologize.
O’Malley isn’t the first person to fail to understand why “all lives matter” is a tone-deaf rallying cry for a national politician in 2015. Hillary Clinton did the same thing earlier this year, though she has since corrected herself. And lots of white people have expressed confusion about why it’s controversial to broaden the #BlackLivesMatter movement to include people of all races.
The best explanation we’ve seen so far comes from Reddit, of all places. Earlier this week, in an “Explain Like I’m 5” thread, user GeekAesthete explained, clearly and succinctly, why changing #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter is an act of erasure that makes lots of people cringe.
GeekAesthete explains:
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 that 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.