Why ‘all lives matter’ (dis)misses the point

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/07/2020 (1897 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IF your lifelong intimate partner came to you in obvious emotional pain and asked, “Do you love me?” to reply “I love everyone” could well be true, but it would also be cruel, and excruciating.

“Black Lives Matter” (BLM) began as a hashtag in 2013 and exploded into a global social movement, one that abhorrent recent events have returned to the headlines. It has been opposed constantly by the assertion that “all lives matter.” On “Juneteenth” (June 19) last month, the commemoration of the end of slavery in America, white evangelical U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence, when requested directly three times by three black pastors, refused each time to speak the words “Black lives matter,” maintaining instead that “all lives matter.”

Not so ironically, the BLM movement now embraces more lives, including those of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of colour) and LGBTTQ+ people.

The “all lives matter” rebuttal is a brazen faux cry foul, in that it implies all lives are equally at risk, when they demonstrably are not. Hence its offence. It ignores, or worse, denies the disrespected and disadvantaged life experience of BIPOC, and silences their voices. It keeps white supremacy intact, white privilege invisible, and systemic racism in place.

While “all lives matter” is held true in principle, it is not true in practice. It remains true only in philosophical abstraction, not applicable in everyday life.

Part of the problem is the concision of slogans that characteristically attempt to say as much as possible as powerfully as possible in as few words as possible, relying on their context to render the intended interpretation. Clearly, the implication here is not that only Black lives matter, nor that Black lives matter more, but rather that Black lives matter, too.

That should be obvious in our cultural context, in which all lives have yet to matter equally. To miss, or worse, dismiss that reality by generalizing to “all lives matter” does indeed suggest something more sinister at work, and the need for a slogan that is all about focus, not exclusion. To focus on something that matters is not to say that nothing else does. In Time editor Jeffrey Kulger’s analogy, “If I say ‘Save the whales,’ it does not mean ‘Screw the eagles.’”

This, said Judith Butler of the University of California, Berkeley, “is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered… It is true that all lives matter, 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.”

Or, as the placard of one protester explained, “Yes, all lives matter, but we’re focused on the Black ones right now, OK? Because it is very apparent that our judicial system doesn’t know that. To us, if you can’t see why we’re exclaiming that Black lives matter, you’re part of the problem.”

“Baby on Board” window signs on vehicles are not countered by “Adult on Board” decals. Cancer Awareness events are not contested by All Diseases Matter symposia. Fire trucks arriving at a house ablaze are not confronted by neighbours insisting that all houses matter. So something else, something deeper, must be driving “all lives matter” to “correct” Black Lives Matter.

Thus, the debate about which slogan is implicitly racist. Those claiming colour-blindness as their virtue — the white privilege of being able to ignore race — insist that “only racists see race,” thereby accusing BLM of being inherently racist. However, colour-blindness in a societal context in which colour does empirically make a drastic difference, in which some lives do matter more than others, is far more logically and likely to be racist, either unintentionally, or worse, intentionally.

As Carla Shedd of Columbia University put it, the intent of “all lives matter” may be a “shared humanity,” but its essence is actually the opposite, because it “erases the vulnerability and dehumanization of Black people.”

“All lives matter” traces back to one particular conception of generic humanity forged by white European Enlightenment elites, which paradoxically functions as the foundation of white supremacy. Their moral duty, “the white man’s burden,” was then to “civilize” the non-white world. What ensued was one of the most tragic chapters of human history: the age of colonialism.

BLM now pleads for an actual generic humanity, an actual practice of all lives mattering equally, by focusing on those who do not yet.

As in all forms of social inequality in which the privileged patronize the disprivileged, such as gender, the insight of Indigenous Australian activist Lilla Watson is profoundly instructive, and hopeful: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

Dennis Hiebert is a professor of sociology at Providence University College, Manitoba.