Enough is Enough: Black Lives Matter

We don’t want to talk about it. We have successfully tucked away our collective knowledge of how things were in the past. We feel that things have changed. We think that all people have equal opportunity and therefore the past is no longer relevant. We tell ourselves that it’s not good to divide people by race. We think that the civil rights leaders fought hard to be seen as equal and that we should all strive to be colorblind.  Now that so much progress has been made, why would the Black Lives Matter movement be asking us to throw the concept of color blindness out the window?

We are white and we work hard, so terms like “white privilege” put us on the defensive. We struggle to provide for our families and we have to watch every penny to make ends meet. Life is difficult and challenging for us, so where is this white privilege? We tell ourselves that we know that some people are born in to privilege, but simply the color of our skin does not give us any easy routes to success.

We want to say All Lives Matter because that is what we have been taught. It is what we feel to be intrinsically true. We think that saying Black Lives Matter means that other lives matter less. We are confused about what is OK to talk about and we fear being labeled racist so much that we avoid having conversations about race with anyone outside of our own white culture. Yet we don’t believe there is a white culture. We see our culture as normal.

 We want all lives to matter. 

We congratulated ourselves when Barack Obama was elected as our country’s first black president. The media rushed ahead and began talking about living in a post-racial America. This was wrongheaded and wishful thinking. We are so unaware of our white privilege that we think that electing a black President means that the dream has been fulfilled and that equality has been achieved. But the reality is that for many Americans of all colors, race does still matter.

Race matters to the black people who disproportionately live in poverty. It matters because our prisons are full of black men. It matters because a person of color is more likely to be sentenced to death. It matters because a broken taillight should not result in being murdered by a police officer.

Race matters to white people who cling to relics of the past, like the confederate flag. It matters to them because they fool themselves into believing in a golden age when things were better for everyone. It matters to them because they fear becoming the new victims of discrimination. They fear that a progressive society means that their way of life will be wiped away and that they will be forced to abandon their values and be ashamed of their heritage.

It matters to those who feel that we have gone too far in trying to correct the wrongs inflicted upon black people. It matters because they think that we have now leveled the playing field and that any further measures to improve the lives of people of color will lead to less opportunity for themselves. It matters because they think that maybe the pendulum has swung too far and that black people get unmerited opportunities.

As for myself, I will confess that I’m not always proud of how I have perceived people who are a different race from me.

What does our history tell us about the value we place on black lives? From 1619 to 1865 people of African descent were legally treated as chattel. Property to be owned and traded. After slaves were emancipated, for the next one-hundred years black people were treated as second class citizens. They could not own land, their voting rights were suppressed, they were lynched, and they were terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan. Blacks were viewed by the majority white culture as inferior. They were forced to use separate facilities. To use separate entrances to buildings. A black maid in a white household would have to use the toilet in the basement.

After 1965, Blacks had to fight to go to the same schools as whites. It was not until 1970 that the city I live in became the first in the south to fully integrate its school system after a Federal mandate was handed down from the courts.

And here we are forty-six years later and blacks are still the first to be suspected when something goes missing from an office. They are followed around by security when they enter stores. White people cross the street to avoid passing a black man on a sidewalk. They are disproportionately stopped by police whether walking or driving. And they are more likely to be killed in an interaction with police.

And what about respect? Are black people respected as equals in our society?  I have watched nearly every State of the Union Address during my adult life.  Regardless of party, the elected President has always been treated with respect during the speech by the members of Congress. During the first black President’s initial State of the Union address, Joe Wilson, a Congressman from South Carolina broke the normal decorum. He shouted out, “You Lie, You Lie.” What message did this send to African Americans about their place in this country?  

We say that all lives matter. But do our actions really demonstrate that? Have we made enough effort?  Clearly, we have historically not treated black people as if their lives mattered equally.

Have we really made enough progress to just keep saying all lives matter? People are in the streets asking us to show them through our actions that their lives matter as much as ours.

We must demonstrate that Black Lives Matter.