If the parallel response was “all lives matter, but I understand that in our society black lives are being treated as mattering less and I want to do something about it” then you have a point. But ALM doesn’t get used in that way, doesn’t it?
A parallel example might be those who ignore discrimination against Muslims, Jews, atheists and Sikhs, to name a few, and insist that the real problem is discrimination against Christians, especially those who own businesses which can’t treat gay people like shit. Or who are oppressed by forcing to see gay people holding hands in public!
It seems a common tactic of the right to take their sins and project them upon others, with Trump being the master of this tactic.
When it comes down to it, a person who says “all lives matter” and honestly believes that they’re doing it independently of the context of BLM is wrong about their motivations. I would be willing to say that that is true of 100% of American citizens. Every statement of “all lives matter” is, as Miller notes, a statement about BLM.
Note, I am not suggesting that a person who expresses compassion and love for all people cannot do so sincerely, nor that they cannot communicate that compassion with words in a way that means ‘all lives matter’ in the literal sense.
“All Lives Matter” can insinuate that the person saying it thinks there is no imbalance in the system, that(as far as she/he is concerned) there is no problem that needs to be rectified. I think “All Lives Should Matter” is a better way to acknowledge that there is still work to be done.
Yeah, but specifically: if someone is a dick, in addition to being a member of some group, that’s just the way the cards fall; if membership of that group affords the person a specific opportunity to regularly exercise the practice of being a dick, then it’s a different kinda thing.
I guess because while I claimed to be a Christian, I really wasn’t one, at all. Oh I was the same as the many, many Christians around me - thinking I was all superior and hating and judging on everyone different than I.
When I was a teen, one of my friends hung herself and some of my other friends found her. I happened to be at the youth pastors house at the time he got the call about what had happened.
You know what he said to me? He said “Satan is laughing at Sheila in hell right now”.
That’s how we felt about someone we actually liked! Imagine how we felt about some poor gay boy being beaten to death.
People like that, like me, can call themselves “christian” and maybe that’s what Christianity really is, at its core - a religion of hate and intolerance.
But in my heart I just don’t think that’s what it was intended to be.
And then someone rushes to lower the lifeboats but no one helps them lower them. The person manages to make it back on board anyway and then the previously-overboard person runs right up to the person who was trying to help them and screams “WHY DIDN’T YOU HELP ME! I NEEDED HELP!” Because it’s their fault their compatriots didn’t do anything.
I will repeat an extract from a recent post, with underlining mine, as the underlining part is what I wish to address.
I do not agree that ALM is a way of dismissing or diverting the issue. It is a way of expanding the issue. Should we try to reduce the beating/killing of black people by the police? Certainly. But we should attempt to cover more ground, and try to reduce beating/killing of ALL people who are similarly, irrationally, targeted.
Whatever laws, review boards, investigations, prosecutions, etc. that result from BLM concerns should not be limited to color lines, but incorporate a humanitarian umbrella, and we’ll all be better off for it.
A personal note. I have never been subjected to police abuse for racial reasons, but I have been subjected to it because the police have considerable latitude and relatively little oversight to restrain them.
But based on numbers, it’s clear that we have done a great job reducing the risk to white people relative to people of color, even though some white people are also targeted by or fall victim to power-mad/ill-trained law enforcement and legislation. It’s clear that we have failed when it comes to black people.
With that knowledge, ALM cannot be anything but a dismissing of the whole raison d’etre of BLM, which is a response to the fact that blacks are predictably imprisoned, beaten, and killed in circumstances where white people are not.
“All lives matter” does not exist except as a response to “Black lives matter”, and so is always a commentary on and correction to BLM. It implies that heightened concern for mistreatment of black people relative to mistreatment of white people is unnecessary and maybe even a little racist against white people, even in the face of the numbers that show unequivocally that blacks suffer disproportionately at the hands of law enforcement and the judicial system than whites.
I would like to add on to begbert’s observation a bit:
Many (but not all) Christians oppose homosexuality because they feel compelled by their religion to do so in much the same way that Muslims can’t eat pork. Many Christian bakers are not baking gay-wedding cakes with much the same type of motivation as Muslims who won’t eat pork. I think this is something many LGBT supporters don’t understand; they think that mere legal threats or criticism can persuade Christian bakers to change their mind. They do not understand the intensity behind the conviction. You won’t get a Muslim to eat a ham sandwich by criticizing or threatening to sue him if he doesn’t and you won’t convince an anti-gay-marriage Christian baker to bake a gay wedding cake that way either.
(Before someone says “eating pork and baking gay wedding cakes are different” - what I am saying is, they are both based in the same motive - “I cannot do what my religion prohibits.” And before someone says “But other Christians don’t have a problem with gay cakes” - they might not, but others do, and those who do, have very strong convictions.)
They couldn’t: it was a two person job. They could have dove in with a life jacket but that would be putting their own lives at risk, which is an understandable if not 100% optimal choice.
I think what happens here is that the person yells at the whole crowd of onlookers, asking why none of them helped. The person who thought about helping, but didn’t actually do anything useful takes it personally and gets shitty with the guy that almost drowned.
If the humanitarian umbrella already is there for most of us, but people of color disproportionately find themselves out in the rain, what’s the point of talking about the need for the umbrella?
I guess now’s not the time for me to continue with “well what if there were another group of people who also aren’t being saved by a ship but they’re in the middle of a rather large lake so some of them can swim to shore.”
