I live with a conservative who argues against the Black Lives Matter movement. He likes to say "All Lives Matter' and 'Blue Lives Matter' and of course, the infamous argument that black on black crime takes more black lives than police do.
(That's a huge 'duh'. Just like white on white crime takes more white lives and all the way down the line. That's not an argument or a point. It's a smoke screen to avoid acknowledging racism.)
Anyway, so the same conservative is all up in arms about Isis and extreme Islam (oh those damned extremists on any kind) (especially those damned extreme liberals) yet point out the Isis on Islamic crime and killings and that's not a point at all.
So Black Lives Matter doesn't matter because in inner cities the crime (and poverty and lack of education) leads to the elusive unicorn of black on black crime. But extreme radical Islam killing their own doesn't prove that all Muslims/Islams shouldn't be allowed asylum in other countries where they might not be killed....
Why I'm not a conservative? I can't think in ridiculous.
There's a certain willful blindness when people say, "Black Lives Matter is racist" and such. Focus is not exclusionary. I saw a tweet on Karen Scott's timeline that said, more or less, "When we say, Save the rain forest we don't mean, Burn all the other forests to the ground! We mean, these forest are dying, these forests need help."
ReplyDeleteThis letter, by a law professor to his students, explains it really well. Here's a quote:
"Premise: There is an invisible 'only' in front of "Black Lives Matter"
Critique: There is a difference between focus and exclusion. If something matters, this doesn't imply that nothing else does. If I say, "Law Students Matter," it does not imply that my colleagues, friends and family do not. Here is something else that matters: context. The Black Lives Matter movement arose in a context of evidence that they don't. When people are receiving messages from the culture in which they live that their lives are less important than other lives, it's a cruel distortion of reality to scold them for not being inclusive enough.
...
There are some implicit words that precede "Black Lives Matter," and they go something like this:
Because of the brutalization and killing of black people at the hands of police, and the indifference of society in general, and the criminal justice system in particular, it is important that we say that...
...
Black Lives Matter is about focus, not exclusion. As a general matter, seeing the world and the people in it in mutually exclusive, either/or terms, impedes your own thought processes."
Jane Elliot was much reviled for her blue eyes/brown eyes teaching experiment, but when she says, (paraphrasing) "If you think there's no racism, no white privilege, and are willing to be treated exactly the way black people are treated every day, then stand up" and no one in the audience stands up, it tells you that they know very well how good they have it--they just think that other people (not white, not straight, not cis gendered, not male) shouldn't have it as good.
Sorry, don't get me started. I'm so angry at the ingrained racism and bigotry around me, and how they think it's okay to go back to spewing it openly, since Trump "tells it like it is."
Trump is a terror. There's a part of me that thinks "let America have him and then see how it shakes out" but then I wonder how any Germans said that about Hitler and we saw how that worked.
ReplyDeleteMy brother doesn't believe in white privilege. He says he's never experienced it. I don't know how to explain to him that he experiences it every day. He's treated differently every day because he's white. He's treated differently because he's a man.
Fox News and conservatives need racism to exist because they need the division in America. The minute we all agree that black lives matter is the day we agree all men are created equal and then the world will change. And that change is terrifying to them.
I never thought I would live to see the division this world is suffering with. I never dreamed I'd see America embrace racism instead of fight it. I never imagined that anyone in this world could see another human being killed for no reason at all except for being black and have people call it justified.