Does Dallas Undo Black Lives Matter?

I couldn’t sleep last night. I’m not sure that anyone in Dallas could. I kept refreshing my feed, desperate for more information and sick with dread for what would happen tomorrow. And now it’s tomorrow and I can’t stop crying. This world seems so irrevocably broken. Love is better than hate, but hate seems to be winning. All this killing, all this death, and it doesn’t stop it just gets worse.

There is one thing that I feel like I have to make clear. Like I have to say even if nobody listens and it does no good. Whatever comes when we get more information, whatever the motive for these murders it does not undo the message of the people who gathered in peace last night. The acts of violence were the opposite of the protest, not of any like kind.

This is what kept me up, in addition to the unimaginable pain the families of the victims must be feeling, there was the fear that hate has once again usurped peace. I beg my friends this morning when we are all still reeling not to replace #Blacklivesmatter with #alllivesmatter. Not to present the protest as a protest ‘against police’.

The counter to ‘black lives matter’ is not ‘all lives matter’ because the movement is not purposing the importance of black lives as more valued than other lives. It is a movement to acknowledge the ways in which black lives are consistently undervalued in our culture with bloody and brutal repercussions. This is a culture that sees white, heterosexual, cisgender, men as the default and all other people as a deviation from the ‘normal’ human. Consequently deviations from the default are more disposable, more threatening, easier to dehumanize. We have to acknowledging that we have a pervasive and devastating perception bias that fuel structural violence in this country, and we don’t heal that wound by not treating it. Talk of unity at the expense of real social criticism only allows us to continue to bleed.

The protest was not ‘anti-police’ because you can be against violent acts of police officers without that becoming a blanket hatred of the rule of law. We have a culture without nuance that squeezes every issue into ill-fitting dichotomies. I can say that there are issues with the perceptions of threat level based on skin color, I can point out that there certainly seems to be a common thread in these police shooting where offices were escalating conflict rather than deescalating. I can say that and still believe that the officers who gave their lives in my city last night, deserve to be honored and remembered as heroes. Those ideas are not in opposition to each other. Healing wounds is not an attack on the body.

Here is what is in opposition, the dichotomy that I hold true in Dallas, in Orlando, in Istanbul, Paris, and Baghdad. Violence counters peace. Every violent act, no matter what the motivation, is an attack on peace and a direct opposition to it. The people who want justice for Dallas should consider carefully what that justice is. It is not more violence. The people who are lumping protesters in with murders add to hate at the expense of peace.

This is my hometown. This death has come to my door. I mourn for Dallas. I fear for our future. I want to believe that love will triumph, but hate is winning while we continue to fail to recognize the wounds it has inflicted on us.