I want white, law-abiding Americans to imagine what it feels like to be a black man; to worry that, as you drive home from work, pop out to the grocery store to buy some milk, or go for a jog in your own neighbourhood, you will be engaged by a police officer on the flimsiest grounds and wind up dead from the encounter.
It is true, all lives matter, equally. Nobody should argue that. I am not arguing that. Except, the countless black men and women killed or maimed in instances of police brutality attest to the fact that, in the eyes of the law, black lives do not matter.
Every day in America laws affirming the equal rights of citizens to justice hang like a sword of Damocles over the lives of black people. To suggest “black lives matter” is not to denigrate the lives of others, it is to decry the unpunished murders of black lives by police officers. It is to denounce the truth of how the application of law unfolds in America’s streets; as if the lives of blacks were the subject of an implied, undeclared Constitutional notwithstanding clause by police forces, District Attorneys, and Judges across the land.
In a society grounded in black slavery and white supremacy, the law is a constant threat to black existence. For white citizens, institutions of justice work day by day to protect and secure their rights and freedoms against capricious infringement by powerful authorities and elites. Meanwhile, the same justice system empowers officials and elites to exclude, harass, exploit, and brutalize black Americans. In a nation where ingrained racism shapes the collective conscience, the law is neither fair nor impartial, but a weapon purpose-built to impugn the lives of blacks who cross its path.
Authorities so empowered and equipped with badges and guns are dispatched to black communities to enforce the system’s primary ethos: marginalizing the existence of blacks in American society, particularly those who do not directly serve the nation’s primary aim of wealth-creation for the white majority. The racists among the ranks of enforcers are secure in their belief that their powers under the law extend them license to prey upon and denigrate the black citizens they are supposed to protect and serve.
Those who derisively retort “all lives matter” at the very idea of “Black Lives Matter” perpetuate the disease of cultural amnesia about an all too familiar reality in America: the everyday, mundane repudiation of the lives of blacks in the laws of the land.
American history is littered with instances that clearly demonstrate how the culture believes some lives are disposable; primarily for the benefit of its white economic and cultural elites. Most Americans are completely ignorant about how their nation’s transformation from an upstart British colony to the political and economic powerhouse it is today was absolutely dependent on two heinous political acts grounded in white supremacy.
First, US settlers had to exterminate the millions of indigenous peoples who occupied the land long before Columbus “discovered” America. Having pilfered the land from Native Americans, the economy then became reliant upon the free, forced labour of black slaves from Africa to generate the massive economic returns from the stolen land. Such morally repugnant foundations of America’s economic wealth are evident even in modern times, where the habit of crass exploitation and legal graft are conspicuous, widespread business practices lauded by elites as essential to Corporate America’s ability to continue its extraordinary wealth-generating capacity.
Such insidious rationales incentivize the marginalization of blacks, and keeps blacks, low-skilled immigrants, and economically-disenfranchised whites in a perpetual state of working poverty. In effect, the legions of these low-wage earners are the closest thing to slavery that would be tolerable in modern times. Given the billions in profits generated by their labour, the growing numbers of working poor in America – a staggering proportion of them black – is an absolute, moral disgrace.
Throughout its history, America’s black lives have been used and abused like chattel for the nation’s white benefactors. Blacks have been segregated, criminalized, and incarcerated by a society unwilling to accept their equality. Still, more than a century and a half after the abolition of slavery, American institutions devise countless ways to marginalize blacks and perpetuate an unstated policy of white supremacy.
In modern times, especially since the civil rights movement, the justice system has been the most brutal, conspicuous noose around the necks of America’s blacks. It has disproportionately criminalized and punished acts of economic desperation that go hand in hand with black poverty and disenfranchisement. In every election, Republicans introduce voter laws and engage in gerrymandering to disqualify and disenfranchise black voters.
In its failure to provide justice for the criminal conduct of police in their encounters with blacks, parallel justice systems have evolved: one for whites, which operates in accordance with constitutional guarantees and proportionality, and one for blacks where police act with impunity in monitoring, harassing, investigating and, as a matter of routine practice, infringing and violating the Constitutional rights of blacks. District Attorneys routinely lay felony charges and courts impose harsher punishments against blacks convicted of the same crimes committed by whites. The whole system of American justice is unfairly rigged to deny the rights and privileges of full citizenship to the nation’s blacks.
The failure of the justice system to punish instances of extrajudicial police brutality and murder of blacks has fomented authoritarian police cultures plagued with members who feel unrestrained in the excess they are entitled to use in pacifying the black communities they patrol. Thanks to “the law” countless numbers of America’s black men have been murdered in encounters instigated by racist police officers on the flimsiest legal grounds; by cops whose ideas about the threat a black man poses escalate like the hair triggers on the guns they too often use to squeeze the life out of the black, male suspects they incite.
No, not all lives matter. The lives of rich, white, corporate, privileged interests matter. The politicians and the powerful establishment are quick to respond to their needs with decisive political action. The criminal deeds of the rich – financial frauds, Ponzi schemes, tax evasion, economic graft and corruption – go mostly unpunished. Their concerns are top of the legislative agenda. The rest of the lives in America are left to fend for themselves. If those among the thrown-away lives happen to be black males, they will spend a lifetime being arbitrarily subjected to random interrogations by police, frisked and detained in front of their children and, worst of all, imprisoned or murdered for crimes borne of economic desperation.
Those who say “all lives matter” are denying all the reasons a person might lay claim to a legitimate grievance in these senseless killings of black men. It is a sweeping dismissal of the legacy of slavery, racism, and intolerance that built America and which today still rots away its moral fabric. The fact serious people are saying “all lives matter” despite the senseless killings that gave life to the “black lives matter” movement is the most clear-cut indicator that America still has not breached the racial divide.
To say black lives matter isn’t to suggest all other lives don’t matter. White Americans already know their lives matter because they can go to the store or go for a run in their neighborhood assured they won’t be stopped by a cop and killed for flinching. So stop the dog whistling. Let blacks, for once, air their grievances about injustice without shutting them down more than the justice system already does.
I am deeply disturbed by what I see transpiring on America’s streets and outraged by the sheer lack of moral leadership in response to these injustices. I have to confess, my horror is as much existential as it is ethical. These events are a stark reminder that my black-ness, which has intermittently been the object of mild racism here in Canada, could be the undoing of my existence should I choose to visit the United States. Until recently, I’ve been able to live in a state of relative denial about how my black-ness is of any social consequence.
Thanks to what I see in America on a regular basis, I am constantly reminded that my black-ness could get me killed. By a racist cop. What the fuck, America?
It makes me angry and it makes me frightened. It is a fear no law-abiding white person in America has to countenance, at least in relation to officers mandated to protect their communities. Given this reality, when it is said “black lives matter”, shut the fuck up and listen. Stop acting as if the facts do not clearly show how much more likely are black men to feel the sharpest, most brutal edge of American justice.
I am not anti-cop and I am tired of this dichotomy being thrown at those who express their desire for justice in these instances. Criticism of the thing does not imply a desire to negate the thing. The fact this constantly comes up in American discourse is an attempt to stifle the constructive dialogue that must begin to reform all the institutions of justice responsible for this despicable reality. It suppresses the voices of victims, ignores practical ideas to move forward, and discourages novel approaches to foster change for the better.
In my career in law enforcement, I have worked with countless police officers in an investigative capacity. I know police officers suit up every day and willingly plunge head first into harm’s way. It is no trivial matter to say that most cops are good. Their choice of career is a noble one. Depending on where they work, they may have one of the most dangerous middle class jobs out there. Those who turn these tragic events into an opportunity to fuel hatred of the police community have no idea the scores of good men and women tarnished by such a broad brush.
But cops are also human. They are not incorruptible. No group of human beings is. Human beings as they are, there is a chance they arrive to the job with a host of biases and attitudes they have learned in their surroundings. Some of these may adversely impact how they perform their jobs in relation to the blacks they encounter. They don’t recruit white cops from Mars to patrol streets in black neighbourhoods.
I grew up in a white family, in an affluent suburb where there were only white people – basically the same kind of environment as most white cops in America. I know that it would be difficult for a white person to have been reared in this environment and come away with positive views of black men. They would have had to rely on culture to fill in the mental gaps left by their lack of actual experiences of who black men are. I didn’t come away with a positive image of what it is to be black from appealing to the culture, and I am a black man.
It is important to say that “black lives matter” in order to displace the thousands upon thousands of images, media, and other cultural and social products that combine to fuel a mental proclivity to believe they don’t. It is to acknowledge the legacy of racism that pervades American culture and society which effectively negates, cheapens, and marginalizes black existence. It is to recognize that police officers are just as likely as anyone else to possess their culture’s predilection for racial bias; to posit that this may affect their judgement. It is to acknowledge the obvious: that, in America’s racially-divisive social context, many white cops are bound to possess racial biases that affect how they engage black men in their jobs.
These terrible crimes are not rightly viewed as hate crimes as much as they are the most tragic consequence of America’s ingrained cultural racism, as reflected in the country’s law enforcers. Police officers, conditioned by America’s racist idea of blacks as any other citizen, are irresistibly compelled by that mindset to unlawfully engage black citizens for dubious reasons. Racism perverts the legal reasoning the Constitution requires an officer applies before engaging a black citizen as a suspect and resuming their investigations; it makes them perceive the black person’s assertion of their rights as threatening and non-compliant. Racism fuels an officers’ predilection to escalate their tactics in response to the unfolding situation, because racism fuels the idea the black man is displaying a thug’s disrespect for authority.
Ultimately, a combination of racism, fear, and a widespread police culture of brutal authoritarianism writes the final chapter in a story where a black man gets killed by a cop in a completely lawless encounter. A person who is being detained on unlawful grounds cannot reasonably be said to be resisting arrest. In every instance this salient fact is always ignored. The second a police officer precipitates a deadly encounter on completely spurious, unlawful grounds, anything that transpires thereafter is the onus of the officer to defend, not the dead victim.
The needless murder of black men by rogue cops tells the same old story; one that tragically adds to the volumes overflowing in the annals of America’s white supremacy. The prologue in each of these horrors is written by racism, the chapters unfold in a plot driven by countless injustices, and the epilogue returns the reader to a familiar refrain: the black victim somehow had it coming. White readers are left secure in their delusion that the political and justice systems work fairly, just as they were intended. Indeed. The racist Canon that has shaped and distorted American minds for centuries remains intact. Some time will pass, until the next sordid volume in the American debacle is written in another black man’s death.
Denial of all the social realities that underlie these incidents do the good cops and the citizens they serve no good. These scenarios are often predicated by the social ills that come with black poverty and disenfranchisement. It is terrible that police, citizens with badges and guns, are left to sweep up what is a much larger social problem in America. If politicians were really pro-cop, they would put an end to this recurring nightmare with legislative, social, and economic programs to eradicate black poverty and stop criminalizing black existence.
I am the first to say most social ills do not easily submit to a casting of the issue in black and white. Except when it comes to the justice system in America. In that case there is one justice system for whites, and another for blacks. When black and white are treated the same in the US justice system, we will be able to say without a whiff of smugness or disdain that all lives matter.
Since black lives are repeatedly and violently repudiated by the justice system, to assert Black Lives Matter is not tantamount to reverse-racism. To say “all lives matter” in response is to flatly dismiss the systematic injustices against blacks that must come to an end. It further instills the ethos of racism denial in America, another in a long list of cultural tropes upon which America’s shameful legacy of white supremacy has endured. Anyone who utters it betrays their own racism by affirming the routine, lawless indignities and murders suffered by blacks in the justice system as defensible. In so doing, they uphold a long-standing American tradition of burying black lives under a cacophony of white noise.
edmund k. saunders 
Such an excellent post – thank you.