Social Justice Warlock: The problem with #alllivesmatter.

by Charl Landsberg

It’s become the nearly universal reaction of the powerful, when faced with the suffering of the marginalised to immediately quip, “Yes, but I have bad days too.” Although hashtags like #blacklivesmatter, #womenslivesmatter, #translivesmatter predate 2013, it was the rise of Black Lives Matter as a political and activist movement in 2013 that really brought this conversation to the forefront. George Zimmerman was just acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin which sparked mass outcry, protests, and rallies from African American people. Over the next three years there has been further outcry over the systemic anti-black policies in place in the US especially with regards to how the police abuse black people. These discussion have centred around the murders of many black folk including Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray and many more.

Julia Craven wrote in 2015, “A black person is killed extrajudicially every 28 hrs, and Black men between ages 19 and 25 are the group most at risk to be gunned down by police. Based on data from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, young Blacks are 4.5 times more likely to be killed by police than any other age or racial group.” [1]

Transgender people have faced incredible violence as well with the murder of transgender people reaching an (at least visibly) all time high in 2014/2015. There was similar outcry coinciding with the suicide of Leelah Alcorn in December 2014. Transgender people now face mass opposition by Christian, conservative, and specifically anti-trans politicians creating laws to bar transgender people from public bathrooms. Even the KKK have started distributing fliers against transgender people quoting the bible. [2]

The point is that when marginalised people speak out against the abuse they face, the attempt of privileged people to shut them down crying “all lives matter” is understood as ironic. “All lives matter” is the deliberate attempt at ignoring the difference between privileged people and marginalised people. Julia Craven writes again, “Saying “all lives matter” causes erasure of the differing disparities each group faces. Saying “all lives matter” is nothing more than you centering and inserting yourself within a very emotional and personal situation without any empathy or respect.” [1]

The best counter argument I have ever read against “all lives matter” comes from a Reddit user called GeekAesthete [3]:

[click for larger image]

Imagine that you're sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don't get any. So you say "I should get my fair share." And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, "everyone should get their fair share." Now, that's a wonderful sentiment -- indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad's smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn't solve the problem that you still haven't gotten any!
The problem is that the statement "I should get my fair share" had an implicit "too" at the end: "I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else." But your dad's response treated your statement as though you meant "only I should get my fair share", which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that "everyone should get their fair share," while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out.
That's the situation of the "black lives matter" movement. Culture, laws, the arts, religion, and everyone else repeatedly suggest that all lives should matter. Clearly, that message already abounds in our society.
The problem is that, in practice, the world doesn't work the way. You see the film Nightcrawler? You know the part where Renee Russo tells Jake Gyllenhal that she doesn't want footage of a black or latino person dying, she wants news stories about affluent white people being killed? That's not made up out of whole cloth -- there is a news bias toward stories that the majority of the audience (who are white) can identify with. So when a young black man gets killed (prior to the recent police shootings), it's generally not considered "news", while a middle-aged white woman being killed is treated as news. And to a large degree, that is accurate -- young black men are killed in significantly disproportionate numbers, which is why we don't treat it as anything new. But the result is that, societally, we don't pay as much attention to certain people's deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don't treat all lives as though they matter equally.
Just like asking dad for your fair share, the phrase "black lives matter" also has an implicit "too" at the end: it's saying that black lives should also matter. But responding to this by saying "all lives matter" is willfully going back to ignoring the problem. It's a way of dismissing the statement by falsely suggesting that it means "only black lives matter," when that is obviously not the case. And so saying "all lives matter" as a direct response to "black lives matter" is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.
TL;DR: The phrase "Black lives matter" carries an implicit "too" at the end; it's saying that black lives should also matter. Saying "all lives matter" is dismissing the very problems that the phrase is trying to draw attention to.

Arthur Chu fantastically sums up the phenomenon of “all lives matter” when he says, “WTF is the impulse behind changing #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter. Do you crash strangers’ funerals shouting I TOO HAVE FELT LOSS?” [4]

Each time privileged people step into a conversation about the suffering of marginalised people and dismiss marginalised people's suffering out of hand they are doing real damage. They are trying to turn the suffering of marginalised people into something abstract and trying to make marginalised people's issues seem less important than what they really are. I leave you with a small comic I drew which was inspired by GeekAesthete's post.