Evan shared this on Facebook.
Paul (good guy)I am not sure why blue lives matter and black lives matter are mutually exclusive. Honestly this tweet is the sort of thinking that makes me so leary of the black lives matter movement overall. At best , it seems callous in the wake of the tragedy in dallas. At the worst, it seems like an outright endorsement of what happened there- to police officers who were essentially protecting the rights of the peaceful black lives matter protesters. Being a police officer may be a choice, and some do that job very, very poorly. But it would seem to me that the animosity between police departments and the african american community is a two way street, and making light of police deaths in the line of duty only serves to add to this mutual animosity rather than promoting healing.
Evan (lay Vincentian): Thanks for commenting, Paul. Hijacking another group's slogan and modifying in an attempt to redirect or redefine the conversation is a silencing tactic, but that's not the only reason why "blue lives matter" is offensive. To understand the reasons why "blue lives matter" is a harmful statement, it's important to understand the context in which Black Lives Matter arose.
Ours is a country with a centuries-old history of vile, barbaric institutions like slavery, Jim Crow, lynch mobs, the Ku Klux Klan, you name it. White slaveowners founded this country on the words 'all men are created equal' and then they and their descendants spent the next few hundred years demonstrating to black people that they were not included in this promise, and that their bodies and their lives literally did not matter. You can see this hundreds of years ago in slave patrols were sent out to shoot escaped slaves on sight (and if you think there were penalties for shooting the wrong person, guess again.) You can see this in 2012, when a jury in Florida ruled that a white man's fear is legitimate grounds for him destroying a black body. You can see this in 2016, when a police officer can kill a black man on camera and be sent home on administrative leave to continue collecting paychecks until the state almost invariably decides not to prosecute.
The experience of being black in America is inextricable from this reality. It affects all black people, regardless of other social or economic status. This is why it is so important to say that black lives matter - because our system, our state, and our society continually say the opposite by their deeds and words.
Contrast this with the experience of being a police officer in America. Far from the systemic oppression that black people face, police are honored in our society. Yes, police work is sometimes dangerous, but never in that danger do police feel that it would be irrelevant if they were killed in the line of duty, that their murder would go unsolved, unpunished, un-cared-about. Has there been a single case in American history where a police officer has been killed and the killing was ruled by a court to be justifiable self-defense? Has there been a single time where we have known the identity of the killer of a police officer and the state declined to prosecute? When has the system ever denied justice to a slain police officer? A man murdered five police officers in Dallas, and the state blew him up with a bomb-carrying drone. Police officers murdered Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and the state decided to send the killers home on paid vacation.
We say that black lives matter because the actions of our police forces and justice system make clear that they don't. But those same systems often provide extraordinary legal protections to police officers who shoot civilians on the job, including the right to review evidence, discipline through department review boards rather than courts, public anonymity, very short statues of limitations on crimes, and more. To say that "blue lives matter" is to draw an inaccurate and offensive parallel with the Black Lives Matter movement, suggesting that the system is rigged against police officers, and that's simply not true.
Paul (good guy): Thanks for your thoughtful reply! I take your point and share your concern about how often excessive (even lethal) use of force by police recieves no punishment. But in a world of hyperinstant formations of slogan's and social movements I am not sure I can completely agree that borrowing and modifying another groups slogan (which seems to me a common place practice) is de facto offensive.or a silencing tactic. It seems to me to be pretty common and accepted within the routine of internet discourse. Also (moving away somewhat from the specifics of this tweet) while I do not dispute that there may be racial components to many of these incidents, I have also seen plenty of mentally ill individuals of all races dragged into my ER after having been tazed multiple times and handcuffed, and there are plenty of examples of lethal use of force against the mentally ill as well. The bigger (and more politically actionable issue) to me seems to be police brutality and militarization overall. And frankly this seems less likely to see any significant change when the debate is framed almost exclusively in racial terms that (to my limited understanding) seem to move it from the realm of practical debate about police policy, procedure and oversight to the tinderbox that is racial politics in america. I am not denying that the Black Lives Matter movement has a legitimate cause for their outcry or anger. The tweet just seems poorly timed and again, easily mis(or correctly) interpreted as a defense of violence against police. And as an aside, i confess it is hard for me (and probably many others) to remain entirely sympathetic to a movement whose protests often end up involving obstruction of interstates and large scale property destruction often within the very communities they claim to advocate for, not to mention spilling over into violence toward persons with what appears to be some degree of frequency. The violence that they are protesting may be legitimate, but events like Dallas, and the vandalism and disorder that seems to accompany many such protests to me only seems to worsen the situation and make racial reconciliation that much further out of reach.
Evan (lay Vincentian): Thanks again for responding. To answer your points, I think it's important to understand the difference between the black experience and the white experience in this country.
Black people are nine times more likely to be shot to death by the police. Black people are more likely to be stopped and frisked on the street. Black people are more likely to be pulled over for trivial offenses like a broken taillight or failure to signal for a turn, and more likely to be subjected to a search during those stops. Black people are more likely to be jailed for nonviolent drug crimes. There's mountains of statistics on all of this, and the net result of all this terrorism is that black people frequently fear the police, and with very good cause. As a white man in your thirties, it's extremely likely that you have never had a negative interaction with the police. How many black men in their thirties can say that?
It's also important to understand the consequences of an encounter with the police. It is not merely an inconvenience; it can have life-or-death ramifications. I heard a true anecdote recently about a single black mom who was falsely accused of drug crimes by the police. Her bail was set at $70,000, a ludicrous sum for a woman living on food stamps. She spent a month in jail, away from her four children, helpless. The overworked public defender urged her to take a plea deal, to plead guilty to a crime she didn't commit, so that she would be able to be with her kids again and avoid jail. She did. But now, as a convicted felon, she was ineligible for food stamps. She was ineligible for the public housing in which she lived. She became homeless, and the state took her kids away, since she was no longer able to care for them. So when I say that black people are more likely to be arrested for nonviolent drug crimes, that's not just a hypothetical inconvenience for those people. That's lives being destroyed. That's families being torn apart. That's the state, and its drug-war prosecutors, saying that black lives don't matter.
Yes, white people are also victimized by the police but the problem that BLM is protesting is that this happens *disproportionately frequently* to black people. And when white people say "the problem is police behavior in general" they're denying that racism exists. They're denying that black people have any struggles that white people don't. They're denying the very experience of being black in this country.
Black people suffer at the hands of police far, far, far, *far* more than white people. This is not trivia. It has a constant deleterious effect on the lives of black people. It can't be dismissed as irrelevant, unimportant, or insignificant.
To your point about disruptiveness of protests: the disruption is part of the point. It's not a new tactic, either. The sit-ins at lunch counters were intended to disrupt those spaces. Martin Luther King and his allies shut down a highway in Selma during their famous march. The Montgomery bus boycott disrupted the economic viability of the bus system in that city. All were effective.
White people who invisibly benefit from racist systems often have very little reason to even think about the existence of those systems, let alone oppose them, unless they are forced to. Disruptive protests force our attention. To say that protests must be non-disruptive is to tell the protestors that their message only matters to us insofar that it does not inconvenience us in the slightest. If I were to get upset at BLM for shutting down a highway, that would be saying that the cause of racial justice is less important to me than getting to work on time. What would that say about me?
I read recently that privilege means being able to say that something that's not a problem to you personally isn't a problem. Racism is a major problem in this country, as is police racism specifically. As white people - as the unwilling beneficiaries of a racist system - it falls on us to not be silent about that racism, to not be complicit in that racism, to do whatever we can to dismantle that racism.
