I have been meaning to write a sort of “introduction to” #BlackLivesMatter, #AllLivesMatter, and #BlueLivesMatter for some time now. I think the reality of my blog audience at the moment is that you’re coming to me from the left; I’m not aware of a whole lot of cop readers right now (that’s why my posts have been mostly addressing civilians). So I’m going to make an assumption here: I’m going to assume you already have some familiarity with #BlackLivesMatter, and why that hashtag and the conversation around it are important. You probably find the responding #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter a little more foreign, or possibly even offensive. So while this post will walk through all three statements, my end goal is to explain #BlueLivesMatter to people who don’t get it.
First, a brief word about All Lives Matter: It’s a phrase I don’t really have a lot of patience for, because it twists what is meant by Black Lives Matter.
People are chanting Black Lives Matter because there is societal messaging that they don’t. Black people are more likely to be denied a loan or a job. They are more likely to have noxious facilities like incinerators placed in their neighborhoods, even after adjusting for income differences (that is, a poor black neighborhood is more likely to get one than an equally poor white neighborhood). They are more likely to be portrayed or seen as “thugs” or “gangsters” when they engage in criminal activity (making it about the race, whereas with white criminals it is about the individual). They are more likely to be stopped by the police, after which they are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, tased, pepper sprayed, and/or struck with a baton. As a whole, they are more likely to be shot by the police. They are more likely to be convicted of crimes and get harsher sentences. People call them lazy or accuse them of being “welfare queens” without even realizing their comments are being informed by racist stereotypes. People avoid eye contact or cross to the other side of the street because of ingrained fear.
All of this is fact, demonstrable by statistics. So given all this, of course black lives are valued less by our society than white lives. That doesn’t mean any given individual thinks white people matter more than black people; but our actions as a whole show that in comparison, black lives don’t matter.
So Black Lives Matter isn’t a black power movement; it’s calling out that we have de-valued black lives. Saying “All Lives Matter” is a response to something that isn’t being said, which is “black lives matter more.” It’s like if someone broke their arm and cried, “Ow, my arm,” and you responded, “All bones matter.” Wouldn’t that be ridiculous?
Frankly I consider All Lives Matter racist. It’s bullying. It’s refusing to even hear the claim that is being made by Black Lives Matter, refusing to acknowledge the truth and anguish behind those words. I have no defense of it, no “look at it from this perspective…” No. Just don’t say it.
On to Blue Lives Matter. There is an extent to which, understood in the context of or as a response to Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter misses the point. Because there is no societal messaging that police officers’ lives don’t matter.
There are individuals who murder police officers just for wearing the uniform. There are baristas who refuse to serve cops. There are YouTube commenters saying kill all the pigs. But at the end of the day, we imprison (or kill) the killers and lower our flags for the fallen officers. The baristas get fired. And the YouTube trolls… well, they probably seldom emerge from their caves.
As a whole, society highly values the police. Our word is trusted in court. Our meals are often paid for by citizens. These days hardly a shift goes by where I’m not getting words of support from a stranger, just for wearing the badge. When one of us is killed, the whole community is in mourning.
But.
We are a tight-knit community, and we reel when one of our own is killed. You may hear claims of a “war on cops” from some sources and a counter that line of duty deaths are down from others. And line of duty deaths are down. But as of this writing, law enforcement deaths by gunfire are up 57% this year over last. And 2015 wasn’t exceptionally low.
You may know the names Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Terence Crutcher, and Keith Scott—all black men shot and killed by the police in high-profile incidents.
But do you know the names Kenneth Steil, Steve Owen, Blake Curtis Snyder, Lesley Zerebny, and Jose Gilbert Vega? I guarantee any police officer will probably recognize at least some of those names. They were the last five police officers killed by gunfire in the United States, all within the last month. Most were not the sort of high-profile incidents that will make national news and get your attention; but we read websites and blogs that feature all of these deaths. We know when we lose a brother or sister anywhere in the country, and we mourn.
We may not know what it is to be oppressed. But we know what it is to be a little bit under siege. And we definitely know what it is to see yet another news story of yet another life lost right when we felt like we couldn’t take any more of it. We feel a grief not entirely unlike the grief of those chanting Black Lives Matter.
There is no powerful messaging saying blue lives don’t matter, and so as a subversive claim parallel to Black Lives Matter it fails the test. But as the cry of a community saying we, too, know pain and grief, it too comes from a place of profound truth.
So if you see a bumper sticker saying All Lives Matter, please, roll your eyes. But next time you see #BlueLivesMatter, just remember: that person has felt the assault of story after story of his own people being killed. And if he’s been around long enough, he probably knows some of them.