It’s too easy to say “ALL lives matter,” because that’s not the real question being asked — either here or anywhere else. A tougher, but more honest, question might be, “Whose lives matter more?” Or even tougher, and even more honest, “Who’s lives don’t matter as much?”
Because when you come right down to it, these are the questions that the people of the “Black Lives Matter” movement are asking.
Black lives matter, blue lives matter, white lives matter, brown lives matter, yellow lives matter, and everybody matters.
But how much? How much do we value each? Each race? Each ethnic culture and all the struggles that any of these groups have endured to get to where they are?
Do we appreciate them equally? Do we understand, for example, what the term “white privilege” actually means? Since that phrase began being bandied about — and reinforced during the protests that sprung out from the death of George Floyd — I’ve probably heard the same things you have.
“I was never privileged. I had to work for what I got. Nobody gave me anything.”
No. Nobody did. But nobody worked to take it away from you either, right? You didn’t have anyone standing in your way. You could be uncertain about a lot of things when you looked for jobs, or housing, or just a break. But you could be fairly certain you’d ultimately be judged solely on whether you were qualified for the position, or a mortgage.
That, boys and girls, is white privilege. It’s the assumption that you’re able to go into any situation and be treated fairly.
However, if you’re a person of color, that is one assumption you cannot afford to make.
I don’t think anyone but the worst, most unreconstructed racist really thinks that Black lives don’t matter. It’s just that to some people, after all this time, and after all the progress we have made, Black lives don’t matter as much. The expression you hear a lot today is “systemic racism,” and to me that means, more than anything else, that we’re still largely unaware of our own attitudes and how they pertain to race. I never thought much about white privilege, and how I took advantage of it, because I was never confronted with the disparity.
I think Floyd’s death caused such intense outrage because it wasn’t an act of 21st century unspoken racism. It was a throwback to the previous century when incidents such as this were far more common and, sadly, far more easily accepted in some places. The late John Lewis suffered tremendously for the cause of equal rights, and he was not the only one who did. But he’s a symbol for all of society’s depravity in the fight for true justice. How do you suppose people such as Lewis felt upon hearing about George Floyd?
And of course, once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s out. And what we’re left with is what we’re experiencing now in our cities.
I don’t know the answer. But I think we’re in the middle of a national reckoning on race, and that sooner or later, we are going to have to come to grips with how we treated people of color throughout our history. If we don’t, I’m afraid we’ll be confronted with it each time an obviously racist incident occurs — and each time more aggressively.
