Why not “All Lives Matter” ?
When people say this, they assume the movement is somehow reductive or aggressive; that it is trying to take something away from anyone else – that is the part you’ll have to refute. Analogies often shared on social media such as these are helpful here:
“Would you go to a cancer walk and say ‘All Diseases Matter’?”
“On 9/11, would you say ‘All Buildings Matter’?”
While all lives do matter, we say “Black Lives Matter” because their lives can often matter less in the eyes of justice system structures, from police to courts.
We see constant examples of Black people getting maimed and killed by those who are sworn to protect their communities, to the point we can call it a pattern in certain cities, and there is more and more data every day to back it up.
We also see trends of white people weaponizing the police against black people doing every day things like having a barbecue, being in a park, or using their own recreational facilities where they live. One must concede that there aren’t examples of black people using the biases of a system that way against white people.
But the rioters and the looters!
No organization around Black Lives Matter actually condones rioting and looting, and the peaceful protesters outnumber the rioters/looters 1,000:1 or more. There is little overlap between the two groups, and you can use this logical sequence:
If all the peaceful protesters are forced to go home or rounded up during curfew, and all of the looting happens after that, then how can they be the same group of people?
Another point to make is that in cities where the cops didn’t show in riot gear with weapons expecting a riot, there weren’t any riots. No riot cops, no riots. Riots don’t start with provocation, and treating peaceful citizens like the enemy is provocation.
It is helpful to note that there is substantial evidence from the FBI and other government agencies that the looters are actually white supremacist groups looking to cause chaos, and undermine the message. Remind them that if they do not believe the FBI, there is no more reliable intelligence source regarding this than the central federal investigative body for the entire United States. An examination of all existing Justice Department cases on protesters (which is public information) also found that there is no evidence of Antifa planning, although there was evidence of white-supremacist tampering.
Regardless of the relatively small amount of destruction, if we ignore the greater message, this will inevitably happen again.
If anyone tries to invoke MLK, read them this quote by him from 1966 and ask if it seems familiar or relevant:
“Let me say as I’ve always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. … But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.”
They should protest more peacefully!
Colin Kaepernick peacefully protested for years about police and suburban America verbally spat on him and the league blackballed him. LeBron James tried to discuss police violence and he was told to “shut up and dribble“. Black Lives Matter and related organizations have never stopped holding smaller protests all across the nation.
The nation ignored them at best, and mocked them or threatened them at worst.
Now, after a seemingly endless series of tragic examples, we’re witnessing a breaking point of anger, sadness, and frustration from people of every age and race across the nation, and that’s why the protests have been so volatile.
White people are police brutality victims too!
Yes, but there is no pattern of brutality measurable for white people. Rather than bicker about that, the main point to get across here is that all the reforms pushed by the BLM movement, from body cams, to demilitarization, to better training – would equally help white communities as well.
There is nothing that the BLM movement asks for that would take anything away from any communities, white or otherwise, and would fix critical holes in impoverished ones.
People online love to throw this chart around:
However, this obscures the fact that there are far more white people in the US than black people – this chart in fact proves the point that Black people are disproportionately killed by police; black people are 12.5 percent of the population, yet nearly 35 percent of the deaths. Meanwhile, white people are 75 percent of the population and less than half of the deaths. Those percentages would be equal if the killing was proportional.
Lastly, to prove that BLM is not exclusionary, consider that Black Lives Matter organizations are the only ones that give white victims of police brutality a voice too, like Daniel Shaver. “All Lives Matter” is nothing more than an empty platitude…”they” have never come together to raise money or awareness for anything. Not once for any life.
Aren’t black communities more likely to do and sell drugs?
No. The resounding answer is no. By every academically dependable study, drug use and sales among black people and white people are about equal, but black people are 2.7 times more likely to be arrested than any other race for it. Unfair, right? These are the things that BLM activists fight against.
Research from the University of Michigan and the United States Sentencing Commission (and lots more) found that once arrested, black men will face far harsher sentencing than their white counterparts, even when controlling for things like criminal history.
People often think of a criminal going through the system in a vacuum, but a decades long jail sentence for a petty drug offence doesn’t just ruin one life; it takes away a father or mother and breaks down family stability, creating a cycle of disfunction as this plays out over millions of occasions around the country, and the result is that whole communities are disrupted and unable to thrive.
If at this point, they don’t agree that things are super unfair, they are no longer arguing in good faith.
Why can we say “Black Power” but not “White Power”?
Black Power is a term that is again, meant to achieve equal rights for one group, rather than take anything away from another group. It is to achieve equality, not superiority. Once black communities and individuals are seen equal in the eyes of state structures from police, to courts, to education, to the job market, the necessity of the call will lessen.
White Power, on the other hand, is not and has not ever been used to gain lacking rights for white people, because whiteness is not an obstacle in American society. Instead, the term has always been used to justify White Supremacy – and as a way to take away rights from other people solely based on their skin, like voting rights, access to schools, and the right and safety to start businesses.
Until civil rights activists start saying things like “We want to take ______ away from white communities!” you have nothing to fear from the concept of Black Power.
It’s just Liberals making problems up to complain about!
Not only did all 50 States hold protests, but also every single continent but Antartica. Thousands filled the streets in Germany, France, New Zealand, Japan, and more.
Furthermore, international organizations like Amnesty International have warned of likely human rights abuses stemming from the police crushing peaceful protests with riot gear and violent weapons.
If they still believe it is solely a liberal issue, perhaps they should review what exactly “liberal” means in their eyes. It appears the entire planet can recognize clear and fixable issues with U.S. policing that much of right-wing America refuses to accept.
It’s not a race issue, it’s a class issue.
They’re correct in that it is a class issue, but they ignore the fact that in all of American history, race has been inseparably connected to class.
When you consider that the Segregation Era only began ending in 1968, a time when policy was created specifically to keep black people in the lower class (including refusing them housing in entire towns, or entire job positions)…
And that before that was the post-Slavery Reconstruction Era…
And before that was three full centuries of pure, brutal, humans-sold-as-property slavery…
When exactly did black communities have any time or path to separate themselves from a lower class existence? Even today, we see policy remnants that unequitably damage black communities and impede their progress, and those are the things that Black Lives Matter activists are trying to fix. (See History for a fuller explanation)
