Hmm, you usually have pretty accurate takes on things so I’m going to take a second to reply to this.
When you respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter”, you’re saying in effect that Black Lives Don’t Matter and we can continue with the status quo, which is White Supremacy. The article you linked described White on White violence throughout America in the 19th century, which has nothing to do with the structural racism Blacks face in America (and Whites do not) but instead is used as a distraction to discourage change. Talib Kweli explains it pretty well:
ELLIOTT: You said, of course all lives matter. But until black lives matter, all lives won’t matter. Can you expound on that a little bit?
KWELI: Yeah, well, the problem with a lot of social movements for change is that people who are on the opposite side of this change, people who don’t get to experience why we’re even protesting in the first place, they start to feel guilty and they start to feel like their relationship to the situation is more important than the actual situation. So right now, police brutality has not gotten worse in this country, we just have cell phones with cameras on them, now. So now the things that hip-hop has been saying for years, the things that activists have been saying for years, are now videotaped. The fact that the police disproportionately brutalize communities of color, now we can not just show you the stats, or just yell it from the mountaintops or just say it in a song. Now we can show you the videotape. And so it’s clear that the police are doing this disproportionately to us. To young people of color, to black people. And so that’s the issue. When you make it about all lives matter, you’re making it about yourself. When you’re saying what about white people, you make it about yourself. When you say what about black-on-black violence, you’re somehow saying because you personally believe that black people are more prone to violence that somehow that means we don’t have the right to exist. That’s a very slippery slope. It’s very dangerous to think that– You know, first of all, black-on-black violence is a myth. All races kill each other more than other races. Do black people kill each other disproportionately more than other races? Yes. Because disproportionately we have higher unemployment. Disproportionately we’re forced into poverty. We have, we don’t get to be educated. We get denied jobs. We get denied good housing, good healthcare. And that creates crime. So yes, poor people are going to murder each other more than rich people are, definitely. But that comes from white supremacy. That comes from Jim Crow. That comes from the prison-industrial complex. If you don’t add a historical context or historical perspective to your discussion, then you’re being selfish, you’re being a coward, and you’re making it about your personal feelings.
But even if we don’t agree on this point, we do agree on a lot of other things that we both agitate for (like such hot takes as “Genocide is Bad”). Kweli also spoke to your point about how now more people are seeing the footage of what the Black community has been undergoing for hundreds of years, which is fascism (and never was Democracy) so the truth is undeniable for more and more non-Blacks.
You are probably already familiar with this but the history of the Black Panther Party is illustrative of this theme. The BPP “represent[ed] the greatest threat to internal security of the country” according to the director of the FBI. One of the more troubling aspects of the BPP was their Free Breakfast for School Children Program. In the J. Edgar Hoover quote above, “internal security” was being used euphemistically for… you guessed it, White Supremacy.
Lmao all lives matter ok
Huh. Really thought we were making progress …
No worries
Hmm, you usually have pretty accurate takes on things so I’m going to take a second to reply to this.
When you respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter”, you’re saying in effect that Black Lives Don’t Matter and we can continue with the status quo, which is White Supremacy. The article you linked described White on White violence throughout America in the 19th century, which has nothing to do with the structural racism Blacks face in America (and Whites do not) but instead is used as a distraction to discourage change. Talib Kweli explains it pretty well:
He goes on.
But even if we don’t agree on this point, we do agree on a lot of other things that we both agitate for (like such hot takes as “Genocide is Bad”). Kweli also spoke to your point about how now more people are seeing the footage of what the Black community has been undergoing for hundreds of years, which is fascism (and never was Democracy) so the truth is undeniable for more and more non-Blacks.
You are probably already familiar with this but the history of the Black Panther Party is illustrative of this theme. The BPP “represent[ed] the greatest threat to internal security of the country” according to the director of the FBI. One of the more troubling aspects of the BPP was their Free Breakfast for School Children Program. In the J. Edgar Hoover quote above, “internal security” was being used euphemistically for… you guessed it, White Supremacy.