5 ms·

That's an unfortunate reaction to what should have been a teachable moment. You're not wrong, in so far as all lives truly do matter. The statement "Black lives

by zrail 6y ago

That's an unfortunate reaction to what should have been a teachable moment. You're not wrong, in so far as all lives truly do matter. The statement "Black lives matter" seems to have an implicit "more than yours" tacked on in a lot of people's heads, and that's what seems to grate. It's not that Black lives matter _more_, it's that systemic institutionalized racism dating back to the origins of the US make it so that Black lives matter _less_ than white lives when dealing with organs of power.

StavrosK 6y ago
> It's not that Black lives matter _more_, it's that systemic institutionalized racism dating back to the origins of the US make it so that Black lives matter _less_ than white lives when dealing with organs of power. This is definitely true, I'm just puzzled as to why you'd focus efforts on solving a subset of the problem rather than the whole problem. Wouldn't that lead to fragmented movements of "<race> lives matter" rather than one single effort?
- pjc50 6y ago
  To the extent that the problem can be solved, the solution isn't going to be race-specific! There's no subsetting going on here. The people complaining are black. They want their lives to matter. If you can't campaign for that without there being something in it for you as well .. why not?
- zrail 6y ago
  Black Lives Matter is, among many other things, a hook to draw attention to systemic institutionalized racism from white voters who haven't ever questioned their privilege (the teachable kind, not the kind PG is talking about). The legislative programs that people are advancing in the wake of this attention do indeed focus on solving the problem for everyone, not just Black people. For example, Colorado recently passed a police reform bill that does a lot of beneficial things, none of them specifically targeted at the Black community[1]. [1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/colorado-passes-sweeping-police-reform-bill/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/colorado-passes-sweeping-police...
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    > Black Lives Matter is, among many other things, a hook to draw attention to systemic institutionalize racism from white voters who haven't ever questioned their privilege (the teachable kind, not the kind PG is talking about). Ahh, okay, that makes more sense, thanks. I wasn't aware of that.
    - faitswulff 6y ago
      It's not just a hook - black people are oftentimes the testing grounds for unjust programs that expand in scope to engulf other peoples (e.g. the prison industrial complex). The full tag line should be "All lives will matter when Black Lives Matter" because they are at the intersections of so many institutional inequities.
      - zrail 6y ago
        Yes, that's a really good point. Thanks for expanding.
      - StavrosK 6y ago
        Jeez, that's terrible. Thanks for the context.
        pjc50 6y ago
        Something I've said for a while is that many "conspiracy theories" are distorted, garbled versions of "what if the US did to white people things that it has done to black people". Unethical medical experiments? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment The ""FEMA camps"" meme? Hurricane Katrina response.
- dsr_ 6y ago
  Yes, and also you're wrong. The efforts that will solve this problem for Black people will solve the problem for everyone else, too, or else it's not an acceptable solution. People are focusing on Black Lives Matter as a rallying cry because the police system is expressing its terrifying lawlessness through overtly racist terror-inducing acts. The problem won't go away without massive reform to the system. And asking "what about these other people?" in the general context is not useful; asking "what about these other people in the specific context of 'will this proposed solution work for these other people, too?'" is very useful.
- crdrost 6y ago
  I hear what you're saying, but I think you misunderstand what the protesters are saying. “Black lives matter” is not just asserting that black lives are among the lives that matter. Like, it IS asserting this and that observation IS somewhat banal and that IS kind of the point. The banality of the statement is meant to invite you to think, “wait, why do we even have to say this?” which exposes a deeper meaning. That deeper meaning is more like “We occasionally get hunted and killed out in the streets like rabid dogs by the very institutions that are supposed to protect people from violence—and this can only be understood as the culmination of America’s vast history of trying to ignore and bury and forget about its racist history rather than talk about it and address it, to the point where that «we don’t wanna talk about it» inclination has metastasized into an active implication that our lives are valueless to the culture at large. And we cannot breathe this stifling choking smog of «oh well another black man was shot but let’s not put it in the news, they don’t matter enough for that» any more, as happens when death transitions from stories into statistics. Fuck that. We DO matter.” In turn the deeper meaning of “Blue lives matter” is “we respect our police enough to give them unconditional arbitration of who lives and who dies in cases where they feel their lives are at stake and sorry black people but we don't see a way for your needs to not die be satisfied without good honest police officers losing their lives because some of y’all shoot them—like, not the majority, I am sure most of you are good, but like when I think of inner city gang members shooting the police I think of black men stereotypically. Fix your gang problems first and then you won’t get shot by police.” You can see why that seems to have a kernel of truth but really came across as tone-deaf (see how it takes a statistical view rather than a story view?) and not understanding that most of these actual stories are about getting shot in the back while walking away or being strangled slowly while being totally immobilized and protesting that you are being strangled and could they please not do that, others involve very young innocent children being killed as collateral damage or worse. Meanwhile “all lives matter” is a similarly banal statement but it serves the function, when used as a response to “black lives matter,” of saying that “no, you know, I really like our racist history being buried, I liked it when we didn't talk about race. We should focus on the global human condition and forget the specific gruesome stories of what’s happening to folks of your race right now as just the smaller problem of what’s happening to you right now. But I find myself very worried that if I am sharing these black stories someone is going to get mad at me for not sharing the Mexican stories of police injustice and then the poor white stories of police injustice and, well, can’t we just go back to a time where we didn’t talk about the race problem that we were having?” The basic response to this I suppose is “we have been trying the ‘all lives matter’ approach for hundreds of years and we don’t seem to be improving, meanwhile cultures with similar race dynamics, like South Africa, are actually processing their difficulties over much shorter time scales, possibly because they are willing to talk about it and be frank. There is no reason to believe at this point that the mentality of ‘all lives matter’ leads to a better outcome for the black lives that are hemorrhaged today in such quantities that it becomes numb statistics rather than individual stories if we don’t make a point of getting outraged over every single damn death.”
disposekinetics 6y ago
I'll admit that the phrase "black lives matter" makes me nervous, but not because I feel like it implies other lives do not matter. I was taught to never single out a group based on race, and that it was supremely rude behavior. On a fairly irrational level the phrase makes me nervous because it goes against what I was taught was polite behavior.

by zrail 6y ago

StavrosK 6y ago

> It's not that Black lives matter _more_, it's that systemic institutionalized racism dating back to the origins of the US make it so that Black lives matter _less_ than white lives when dealing with organs of power. This is definitely true, I'm just puzzled as to why you'd focus efforts on solving a subset of the problem rather than the whole problem. Wouldn't that lead to fragmented movements of "<race> lives matter" rather than one single effort?

pjc50 6y ago
To the extent that the problem can be solved, the solution isn't going to be race-specific! There's no subsetting going on here. The people complaining are black. They want their lives to matter. If you can't campaign for that without there being something in it for you as well .. why not?
zrail 6y ago
Black Lives Matter is, among many other things, a hook to draw attention to systemic institutionalized racism from white voters who haven't ever questioned their privilege (the teachable kind, not the kind PG is talking about). The legislative programs that people are advancing in the wake of this attention do indeed focus on solving the problem for everyone, not just Black people. For example, Colorado recently passed a police reform bill that does a lot of beneficial things, none of them specifically targeted at the Black community[1]. [1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/colorado-passes-sweeping-police-reform-bill/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/colorado-passes-sweeping-police...
- StavrosK 6y ago
  > Black Lives Matter is, among many other things, a hook to draw attention to systemic institutionalize racism from white voters who haven't ever questioned their privilege (the teachable kind, not the kind PG is talking about). Ahh, okay, that makes more sense, thanks. I wasn't aware of that.
  - faitswulff 6y ago
    It's not just a hook - black people are oftentimes the testing grounds for unjust programs that expand in scope to engulf other peoples (e.g. the prison industrial complex). The full tag line should be "All lives will matter when Black Lives Matter" because they are at the intersections of so many institutional inequities.
    - zrail 6y ago
      Yes, that's a really good point. Thanks for expanding.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      Jeez, that's terrible. Thanks for the context.
      - pjc50 6y ago
        Something I've said for a while is that many "conspiracy theories" are distorted, garbled versions of "what if the US did to white people things that it has done to black people". Unethical medical experiments? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment The ""FEMA camps"" meme? Hurricane Katrina response.
dsr_ 6y ago
Yes, and also you're wrong. The efforts that will solve this problem for Black people will solve the problem for everyone else, too, or else it's not an acceptable solution. People are focusing on Black Lives Matter as a rallying cry because the police system is expressing its terrifying lawlessness through overtly racist terror-inducing acts. The problem won't go away without massive reform to the system. And asking "what about these other people?" in the general context is not useful; asking "what about these other people in the specific context of 'will this proposed solution work for these other people, too?'" is very useful.
crdrost 6y ago
I hear what you're saying, but I think you misunderstand what the protesters are saying. “Black lives matter” is not just asserting that black lives are among the lives that matter. Like, it IS asserting this and that observation IS somewhat banal and that IS kind of the point. The banality of the statement is meant to invite you to think, “wait, why do we even have to say this?” which exposes a deeper meaning. That deeper meaning is more like “We occasionally get hunted and killed out in the streets like rabid dogs by the very institutions that are supposed to protect people from violence—and this can only be understood as the culmination of America’s vast history of trying to ignore and bury and forget about its racist history rather than talk about it and address it, to the point where that «we don’t wanna talk about it» inclination has metastasized into an active implication that our lives are valueless to the culture at large. And we cannot breathe this stifling choking smog of «oh well another black man was shot but let’s not put it in the news, they don’t matter enough for that» any more, as happens when death transitions from stories into statistics. Fuck that. We DO matter.” In turn the deeper meaning of “Blue lives matter” is “we respect our police enough to give them unconditional arbitration of who lives and who dies in cases where they feel their lives are at stake and sorry black people but we don't see a way for your needs to not die be satisfied without good honest police officers losing their lives because some of y’all shoot them—like, not the majority, I am sure most of you are good, but like when I think of inner city gang members shooting the police I think of black men stereotypically. Fix your gang problems first and then you won’t get shot by police.” You can see why that seems to have a kernel of truth but really came across as tone-deaf (see how it takes a statistical view rather than a story view?) and not understanding that most of these actual stories are about getting shot in the back while walking away or being strangled slowly while being totally immobilized and protesting that you are being strangled and could they please not do that, others involve very young innocent children being killed as collateral damage or worse. Meanwhile “all lives matter” is a similarly banal statement but it serves the function, when used as a response to “black lives matter,” of saying that “no, you know, I really like our racist history being buried, I liked it when we didn't talk about race. We should focus on the global human condition and forget the specific gruesome stories of what’s happening to folks of your race right now as just the smaller problem of what’s happening to you right now. But I find myself very worried that if I am sharing these black stories someone is going to get mad at me for not sharing the Mexican stories of police injustice and then the poor white stories of police injustice and, well, can’t we just go back to a time where we didn’t talk about the race problem that we were having?” The basic response to this I suppose is “we have been trying the ‘all lives matter’ approach for hundreds of years and we don’t seem to be improving, meanwhile cultures with similar race dynamics, like South Africa, are actually processing their difficulties over much shorter time scales, possibly because they are willing to talk about it and be frank. There is no reason to believe at this point that the mentality of ‘all lives matter’ leads to a better outcome for the black lives that are hemorrhaged today in such quantities that it becomes numb statistics rather than individual stories if we don’t make a point of getting outraged over every single damn death.”

disposekinetics 6y ago

I'll admit that the phrase "black lives matter" makes me nervous, but not because I feel like it implies other lives do not matter. I was taught to never single out a group based on race, and that it was supremely rude behavior. On a fairly irrational level the phrase makes me nervous because it goes against what I was taught was polite behavior.