All Lives Don’t Matter, So We Can Stop Saying It
By Tasha K
Today I came across the full length video of the murder of George Floyd from a new body cam. Newly released footage shows a terrified Black man being approached by the cops with a gun pointed at him. He is pulled out of his car and murdered in broad daylight on the street. I watched the whole thing. Somehow I couldn’t look away, even though I knew how it would end.
There were shouts from the sidewalk to let him up; he seemed lifeless. At one point, a cop even pretended to check his pulse. I have yet to see a video of a white man or woman dying by the hands of the police and circulated for the world to see. I hope I never do. I don’t want to see any more videos of folx dying, I want the police to stop killing.
There are a couple of things I realized over the past year:
“All lives” don’t matter, so we can stop saying it. When “all lives matter” there is no need for a Black Lives Matter movement. When “all lives matter” there are no videos of Black folx dying from policing. And when “all lives matter” you would only know George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, or Breonna Taylor if you lived in their neighborhood. There would be no hashtags, no movement, no fight. The call for “all lives” to matter began as a rebuttal to the Black Lives Matter movement. This rallying cry not only gaslights perhaps the biggest movement ever, but it attempts to completely blot out the Black struggle entirely. So-called “color blindness” and whitewashing take this same track. If we so deeply want all lives to truly matter, we must support Black lives right now.
“Blue lives” are different. I have friends who are police officers and friends married to police officers. It’s important to note that “Blue” uniforms can be removed; Blackness cannot. This but another ill-conceived comparison that erases Black struggle. The criminal justice system—like many other systems in this country—is systematically racist. Law enforcement officers, whether racist or anti-racist, are enforcing a system built to destroy Black and brown lives. The lack of accountability for police officers killing Black folx barely exists. If there was accountability for taking the lives of unarmed Black folx, police officers would not be able to kill someone in the street and be home in time for dinner. If Black lives truly mattered, there would be accountability—including arrests, persecution, and sentencing—for all the murders on video we have seen, and the even ones we haven’t.
Many who say “All Lives Matter” also say “Blue Lives Matter.” They refuse to say Black Lives Matter. The only difference is the word Black. Many who can ignore the racism of our President or sit in a whitewashed church pew can’t promote Blackness because of their implicit (and explicit) racism. [For the sake of clarification: Black Lives Matter is bigger than just one organization with which you might not completely agree. It is an entire movement continuing to gain momentum similar to the Civil Rights movement in a fight for Black lives to matter in this country. They haven’t in our history, and they still do not to this day. The social systems and structures in the United States were built by white supremacy and racism, and have produced anti-blackness. This post is not a space for those systematic examples, but I am noting that anti-blackness is a huge piece of supremacist culture.]
I need someone to help me understand how “all lives” can matter while Black folx are terrorized and murdered on camera, blue lives get a paid vacation, and white lives consume it for their viewing pleasure. I struggle to see a situation where Jesus would be against any life mattering. I struggle to understand the disdain for Black life. And I struggle to understand how any person in the United States could actually think that “all lives matter” and are treated as such.
Racism continues to infest our country because we have not reckoned with our history individually and collectively.
I am hopeful that all lives, including mine, will do more than just matter. Until then #BlackLivesMatter.