I know, I know, I’m a White guy, why am I writing about this? What do I know about it anyway? Judging from what folks on TV and politicians are saying, it seems I know more than some. As a therapist, a social worker, and someone who has heard what matters to his Black friends, I’m going to take a shot at it.
Black Lives Matter as a movement goes back to about 2013, after Trayvon Martin was killed. As you may recall, he was a Black unarmed 17-yr old in Florida who had a hoodie on and was shot and killed by a member of the neighborhood watch. His killer was later found not guilty.
More recently was the death of George Floyd, which is what sparked protests across America. A Black man killed during an arrest in Minneapolis, he was handcuffed face down in the street and the arresting officer kept his knee on George’s neck for eight uninterrupted minutes, despite George initially saying “I can’t breathe, don’t kill me.” Paramedics arrived to treat George, but the officer would not take his knee off George’s neck and he died. Per the report of professionals at the scene George did not have a pulse for the last three of those minutes, and nobody present made any attempt to revive him. The officer involved was clearly responsible for his death. The fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor later that year added more fuel to the movement. While not mentioned in the Black Lives Matter movement, a spiritual predecessor event was the videotaped police beating of Rodney King in 1991 which led to the LA riots.
UPDATE, 11/28/22: Most recently there was a mass shooting on May 14th in Buffalo, New York by Payton Gendron, who shot and killed 10 African Americans at a grocery store. Gendron, who pleaded guilty, admitted he carried out the racist assault hoping he would help preserve white power in the U.S.
What is Black Lives Matter? The movement is based on the premise that Black lives matter just as much as White lives, or any other ethnicity. Why do some folks say in response, “All lives matter”? First, notice that only Caucasian people are saying all lives matter, minorities do not say that. Both conservative and liberal political figures say this too, and they don’t get it. Minorities get it. What do they get? That for most of their lives, in the US, they are repeatedly told their lives don’t matter, at least not as much as Caucasians. They are told this in many different ways, and repeatedly.
Do you have a Black or minority friend? If so, ask them about it. I grew up in Eastern Washington, and there just aren’t a lot of Black people there. I used to think racism ended in the 1960s or 70s. In college I saw a documentary called The Color of Fear and it changed my mind. When I went to graduate school 45 minutes away from Detroit I began to have Black friends for the first time. I started hearing stories from them about what happens when they drive down the road and are pulled over for no legitimate reason. During that time I was asked by a very close friend if I would come with him to buy a car, because Black folks get treated differently at a car dealership than White folks. I was having experience after experience, teaching me what life is like in America for those that are not White. Racism is not an easy thing to hear about, it’s not an easy thing to think about. Discrimination is not a recent trend either, it has been around since before the US was formed. To understand the present, we need the context of the past.
Slavery was around in the US before the Constitution was drafted, and finally ended in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. Was that the end of discrimination? No, Jim Crow laws were enacted later that century. The purpose of Jim Crow was to enforce segregation, take away their right to vote (or make it very difficult), and institutionalize disadvantages for African Americans living in the South. These laws continued until 1965! Shall we talk about lynchings? Lynching was a somewhat common practice throughout the 20th century, and as recently as 1981 Black men in this country were still being chased by gangs and hung to death. In 2017 a Missouri state representative suggested lynching all those who supported removing Confederate monuments.
In 1954 segregation of schools was declared unconstitutional but Black Americans still had to live with separate drinking fountains, restaurants, even bathrooms from Whites. It was because of this segregation in 1955 that Rosa Parks’ refusal to leave the ‘colored section’ for a white passenger because the ‘whites only’ was full is what invigorated the Civil Rights Movement, which went from approximately 1955-1968. It included such luminaries as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (both of whom were assassinated). The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally protected a Black person’s right to vote, coming 45 years after White women gained the right to vote in the US.
This was a great victory, but did not end racism in America. The Tuskegee Experiment went from 1932 to 1972, and involved hundreds of Black people, all poor sharecroppers who were promised free healthcare. When it began there was no treatment for syphilis, but when penicillin was discovered as a treatment in 1947 (the same year a Black man was first allowed to play professional baseball), the researchers intentionally only gave placebos to the participants for 25 more years, to see how bad syphilis could get. Men died, went blind or insane, and passed it on to their kids. This is a major reason why African Americans developed a mistrust of the medical system in America.
In 1979 there was a dispute in Houston to keep a landfill out of a Black neighborhood. This led to a study that found eight Southern states habitually located hazardous waste landfills in Black communities. More recently, from 1981 to 1997 the US Dept of Agriculture discriminated against tens of thousands of Black Americans by denying loans that were then given to White farmers in similar circumstances, which finally resulted in $2 billion worth of settlements after the fact.
I want to provide a brief cultural backdrop of American society. The US tends to conceptualize human pain and suffering as the result of the individual’s psychological makeup and choices, rather than the result of an unjust society. Nobody likes the idea of living in and potentially being part of an unjust society, and the US is very individualistic and capitalistic.
This stuff is not ancient history, it is still happening. Michelle Alexander’s seminal book The New Jim Crow is a worthwhile read, which discusses systemic forms of oppression of people of color. For example, Africans Americans and other minorities targeted unfairly? Are they killed by police at a rate higher than Caucasians? There are two pieces of evidence I can cite. First, a 2018 report by the independent, bipartisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found “consistent patterns of racial disparities in police use of force.” The study also found Black Americans are more likely to be unarmed than White Americans when killed. Second, a prominent national newspaper logged 2499 Whites killed by police for a rate of 13 per million, and 1301 Blacks for a rate of 31 deaths per million, almost triple (African Americans are less than 15% of the population), since it began tracking such data in 2015.
Many Black youth grow up in neighborhoods where multiple family and community members have been purposely neglected or victimized by some members of law enforcement, as well as the courts. I have never entered a store and been followed around by employees because I was White. I have never been pulled over while driving my car because I was White, or followed by the neighborhood watch because I was White. I’ve never been told to “go back to Africa” or had a boss say to the one Black employee, “Hey I got some lunch for us, and I know who wants the fried chicken!” (I witnessed this at my place of work in 2006). If I was a minority in this country, however, by the age of 30 the odds are some of these things would have happened to me.
Black Lives Matter is stating their lives matter as much as White lives do. It ought to be obvious, of course their lives matter just like Asian lives, Latino lives, Native American lives, etc. All lives matter equally in theory, but not in practice. History has shown this is not the case. I empathize and agree 100% with the overall mission of BLM, which is to “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.” I also support their right to peaceful protest guaranteed by the First Amendment, as should all Americans. As citizens we must do better to help root out racism.
However I don’t agree with all their aims, such as defunding police departments and parts of the BREATHE Act. I don’t think all African Americans support defunding the police either. The police force does far more good than harm, we need them and I support them, it is a mistake to defund law enforcement. I also disagree with the minority of BLM members who engage in destruction of property, or violent protesting. Protesters have no right to destroy, deface or steal property, or to undermine the government’s legitimate police powers. The Constitution and laws contain no invitation to revolution or anarchy. Two wrongs do not make a right.
To my mind there are significant similarities between the overall mission of Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement, both of which have been maligned by various groups. Women’s lives matter and they are entitled to be treated equally, to live without being victimized, harassed or abused. I think Black people want the same.
