Some Clark County residents recently demonstrated in Ridgefield for police appreciation (Aug. 8, 2020), a version of Blue Lives Matter. Why now? Likely because others had recently demonstrated there for Black Lives Matter.
What are the messages of these groups? Why is Blue Lives Matter and even All Lives Matter offensive to Black people?
Black Lives Matter arose in 2013 from a comment by Alicia Garza after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin. Ms. Garza’s Facebook remark was a simple statement, “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter … Our lives matter.”
As described in the July 31 Clark County Listening Session (https://www.cvtv.org/) and many other sources, the U.S. has a long history of systemic racism.
In 1526, 500 Spaniards arrived in what is now South Carolina with 100 Black slaves (Loewen, “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” p.131.) It continues through the enslavement of Africans to build the huge economic wealth of the cotton industry enriching whites both South and North. It goes on to the Jim Crow era with the KKK and lynchings specifically designed to terrorize and suppress Black people. After World War II, the G.I. Bill did not provide for Black soldiers comparable educational or home mortgage benefits as for whites. In the 1970s and ’80s the U.S. created “law and order” with the war on drugs designed to criminalize drug use and create mass incarceration, disproportionately of Black people.
As a consequence, Black people in the U.S. today are denied many of the benefits of education, home ownership, well-paying jobs, justice, and the freedom to live the same quality of lives as most whites.
So when Opel Tometi, Patrisse Cullors, and Alicia Garza founded the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, it was a voice to acknowledge and address all these inequities and, in particular, violence and injustice against Black people. Note that the initiating event was not a police killing. Look online to learn more about the many dimensions of this movement.
When Black Lives Matter became a national movement, many whites who had benefited for centuries from historical white privilege, were uncomfortable. They retorted, “All Lives Matter!”
On its face that is a true statement. But, because of the context in which it is said, white people must realize that it is heard by Black people as the same old message that Black lives are not worthy of distinct attention.
Note, I am not referring to the existence of Black people who are or have been U.S. leaders, scientists, artists, film stars and so on, but that overall, everyday lives of the vast majority of Black people are not medically, educationally, occupationally, environmentally, judicially, or economically at the same level as those of most white people. And, further, they do not share the same safety in the public sphere as white people.
We have all seen the disproportionate number of incidents of police force against them, including loss of life. Most egregious locally is that in winter 2019 Vancouver police killed three persons, two of whom were people of color.
Similarly, Blue Lives Matter is another form of backlash. No one is suggesting that the lives of officers do not matter. Therefore there is no need to say Blue Lives Matter. What that slogan does do is diminish the message it is echoing. Clark County Sheriff Chuck Atkins recently recognized this idea and, although the meaning was not quite the same, he saw the misunderstanding and removed Thin Blue Line stickers from Sheriff’s department vehicles.
The recorded and publicly viewed death of George Floyd has put our country at a seminal moment. We have the opportunity to understand better our racist history and its living consequences. Now is an opportunity to focus on equity in multiple arenas and build a more fair society. Saying “Blue Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter” distracts from and diminishes this critical moment.
Rheta Rubenstein of Ridgefield is a professor emerita at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
