The #AllLivesMatter campaign is a naively generous, feelgood, and utterly misguided retort to the nationwide black liberation movement that uses the slogan #BlackLivesMatter.
We argue that this defensive response is rooted in the normative lens of whiteness and the widespread nature of anti-black racism in this country. We will focus on the black community descendant of enslaved Africans within the United States, as they are the largest and most directly affected people domestically.
Black Americans were translocated not as people, but as chattel cargo. Their humanity, culture, and sense of dignity were stripped from them and they were reduced to objects.To justify slavery, 18th and 19th century Social Darwinist arguments within religion, science, and the humanities were fabricated to claim that black people were intellectually inferior, and their bodies were optimized for brutal labor like those of animals.
In the 21st century, we falsely believe that civil rights, affirmative action, and public shunning of explicit racism have returned black bodies to full human status.
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Unfortunately, those early Social Darwinist arguments, combined with stereotypes of black people, continue to produce an anti-black cultural psyche. It is not a surprise that implicit association tests conducted by Goff et al. in 2008 found that Americans strongly associate black people with apes.
The racial profiling, disproportionate incarceration rates, and murder of unarmed black people, along with the crude response to protests addressing such issues by the media and public, all make sense in this twisted white-written narrative through which we view black people as animals that are undeserving of dignity or life.
We have been raised in a so-called “progressive era,” whereby colorblindness and diversity are prioritized. The incessant fear of speaking about race produces a culture in which white people are allowed to pretend that racism has been abolished and enables them to negate the existence of white privilege.
Color-blindness is effective in both discrediting black activism and maintaining white supremacy. That is why #BlackLivesMatter is so jarring and threatening—it clearly argues that the lives of black people are treated as insignificant and disposable, and white people are allowed to murder or otherwise disenfranchise them for any reason whatsoever due to their privileged status.
In order to deny a racialized reality, people conjured up #AllLivesMatter, claiming that it is more “humanistic.”But the fact of the matter is, firefighters do not focus their efforts on houses that are not on fire. They focus on houses that are on fire.
In this same vein, activists are not focusing on white people, because they are not historically and presently marginalized. The lives of white people have always mattered.
To truly see black liberation, we need to acknowledge the historical context through which black people were denied their humanity and the antiblack narrative rooted in this country.
We need to acknowledge the empirical and statistical evidence of disproportionate brutality towards black people. We need to let black voices speak and be recognized.
Finally, we must refrain from reaffirming racist tendencies of entitlement and race-denial embodied in #AllLivesMatter.
