When I first heard the phrase “All Lives Matter” I was unable to understand why it was wrong. I have since grown as a person and gotten a lot smarter, and so I will explain exactly how and why I was wrong and hopefully illuminate someone else as well.
The phrase “all lives matter” is frustratingly noncontentious. Upon a cursory glance, it is utterly acceptable. But under this seemingly innocuous statement hides an affirmation of racism and a minimization of black issues.
On a basic level, the phrase “all lives matter” barely differs from “black lives matter.” It seems to speak to the same issue of the sanctity of human life. By comparison, ALM seems to be more inclusive than BLM, and thus more justified. “What’s so special about black lives?” the observer asks. “Why can they not simply find themselves included among ‘all’ and be thus fought for?”
This ignores two critical points: that the “all” of ALM does not actually include black lives, and that the sanctity of all life and the sanctity of black life are two very different issues.
When ALM proponents use the word “all,” they rely on the hidden language of the norm. When we imagine all lives, we imagine the sanctity of the life of the everyman, the normal man, who is indeed a man, white, and probably working a middle class job in his mid-thirties and coming home to his moderately loving wife, two children (a boy and a girl) and an alright dinner prepared for him. He watches sports then heads to bed. If this was not so to at least some extent, we would have to imagine animals and insects among the “all” of all lives. This normal man has had no serious run-ins with the law because the law never came after him. We do not imagine Trevon Martin, George Floyd or Rayshard Brooks.
So, when we seek the sanctity of the life of this “all,” we seek it for this normal man and not for black men and women. Even if this is not what you imagine, know that this is what is in the imagination of those who hold the signs that say “all lives matter,” and march under that slogan. “All lives” can never mean black lives as long as white is normal and black is black in our cultural imagination.
Second, the sanctity of all life and the sanctity of black life are almost entirely different issues.
The sanctity of all lives centers around the issue of human rights and the responsibility to provide aid, a conversation that centers around missions like the UN. It is based on the belief that humans have a right to live with dignity and safety from extreme want, and that those better off have a duty to provide tangible help. It is a future-dream with clear evils we must face: terrorism, hunger, poverty, and so forth, and these evils sit far removed from our current situation.
The sanctity of black life is the issue of black humanity and racism. It centers around questions so internal to our society and our selves that we can scarcely even see them: implicit biases and conceptions that shape our views of the world. We have learned behaviors: the disparagement of black beauty and personhood, the implicit bias towards black faces as criminal faces, the expectation of and desensitization to black poverty and police violence. We have learned these racisms so deeply we are not even always aware. We apply them without thinking and so the ability of black Americans to be fully persons becomes disparaged. And all of it goes back to racism and slavery and the subsequent centuries of trauma that our society has laid upon black souls and bodies. This all has been a concerted effort to break down the very humanity of the black race in our cultural imagination. And it is this breaking down that has allowed police for so long to wage war on black bodies in our streets. Black Lives Matter is about standing up to this deep internal evil of our society and confronting it so as to create from within a transformation. It is a movement focused on creating a now where the disparagement of black humanity is ended, and they are finally given the basic rights that have been given so freely to white Americans.
Black lives Matter is focused on the issue of equality and systemic racism within our society and how we may overcome it. All lives matter, even if taken generously to refer to human rights, is focused on issues of great import that affect us all—poverty, hunger, terrorism, violence against civilians, etc.— and how we can destroy these evils from without. One asks us to address a specific problem and change our society, another asks us to work towards a better future for all by solving problems outside our society that we can clearly understand.
ALM and BLM are, thus, not even compatible issues that we may put in the same conversation. But the straightforward nature of the former allows it to cloak racist views. It makes those who believe in the sanctity of the “everyman” able to pretend they have a more general concern. By contrast, this makes it appear that the specific concern of BLM is somehow too specific. It attempts to transform “Black Lives Matter Too” into “Black Lives Matter Only.” In this way, it pushes racist views into the mainstream and attempts to push what should be the mainstream view that black lives matter (and they must, if all lives matter) into the periphery. In doing so, it takes advantage of the racism we have all learned so deeply as to make it nearly invisible. ALM takes this implicit racism and combines it with an ignorance of black issues and a bias towards mainstream ideas we already think we have accepted (such as the value of all life) to create the illusion of an acceptable idea behind the slogan “All lives matter.” This is, however, not the case, and ALM is instead a mixture of racism and ignorance that puts white lives first while paying no homage to the issues of civil rights that are actually important.
For the perspective I know many white Americans like myself often lack, I will recommend some reading: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates for social and personal perspective, and The Case For Reparations also by Ta-Nehisi Coates for historical perspective. His lucid and deeply informed writings bring to life things that would otherwise not be visible to those of us on the outside of the struggle of black Americans.
