I noticed the truck ahead of me in a Starbucks drive-thru. It’s rear windshield had all sorts of stickers, but three of them stood out:
All Lives Matter
(to the lower right)
Blue Lives Matter
(to the lower left)
White Lives Matter
(to the upper right)
My very first thought was
Isn’t something missing? If you’re going to list all the different lives that matter, there is one which really feels like it should be there. It’s almost like you didn’t put it there on purpose…
But I wasn’t surprised by its absence. I could be sure the owner of the truck wasn’t going for that kind of logical consistency.
Consistent
If the slogan “All Lives Matter” is offered as honest, then the other two can’t be on the windshield.
Its very point is to reject the individual appeal that black lives matter. By declaring all lives matter, one denies the lifting up of any kind of life in particular.
But if it’s retaliatory…
Then it makes complete sense. And we all know this is its purpose.
The slogan is not really intended to rally the community to greater unity. It doesn’t serve as a unifying rallying cry to lift up all the lives so we can all truly matter to one another.
It isn’t promoting anti-racism training or wrestling with mass incarceration. Nor does it try to reduce the differences in drug sentencing for crack and powder cocaine. There is nothing proactively popular in this appeal.
It’s an argument in response. Which means it isn’t the principal argument. It doesn’t take priority.
The bigger argument is cultural and oppositional. The purpose is to be reactionary to the elevation of black lives.
So all lives can be one argument. Another can be Police. And a third can be “defense” of the dominant race. You are offering your team and I’ll offer up mine.
Each slogan completes the same sentence.
YOU want black lives to matter, I want all lives to matter more.
and
YOU want black lives to matter, I want police lives to matter more.
and
YOU want black lives to matter, I want white lives to matter more.
The logical inconsistency of putting these particular arguments together is plain outside of this one worldview. Retaliation on behalf of team “whites” is the only way these three work together. Even chance wouldn’t make them spontaneously appear on one car.
But they knew that when they put the stickers on in the first place.
These arguments for equality aren’t real. And they never were. These are political statements in direct opposition to the actualcall for equality.
The Dishonest Argument
The point of the dishonest argument isn’t always to win. Sometimes the real point is to not lose. Because not losing keeps the conflict going. And it lets the one side keep talking.
And with racism, there are two audiences and two messages.
The point is to speak so only some people hear the truth. For the rest, they can maintain plausible deniability.
They get to keep talking, spread their message. But don’t dare tell the truth about it. Don’t try to pin the R-word on them. They’re just in it for the LOLZ.
If we let the ones making these ridiculous arguments set the parameters, it leaves us a simple moral equation.
To some: I’m
If the message is not racist, then they’ve actually said nothing.
Are we truly to believe that your big political statement slapped on your car alongside other cultural indicators is to communicate nothing? A double negative which isn’t exactly the same as a positive?
The problem with these arguments is that they are either meaningless or carry the smallest amount of meaning we only let a few people know. But they are intended to strip the conversation of its purpose: to talk about the ways we make blacks feel like they don’t matter.
This isn’t just dishonest. It denies any of us the chance to be honest.
The Honest Argument
Racism isn’t defined by white hoods or excused by plausible deniability.
That would be literally the most useless definition (even if it is common). And they do it on purpose.
Don’t let them.
To make it more useful, we have to confront the truth. The real problem with racism isn’t racists. It’s allowing each other the opportunity to pretend we’re avoiding it.
For all lives to matter, it can’t be a rebuttal. Or an excuse. Or a change of subject.
Either we are saying something or we are not. You don’t get to proclaim something you know most of us think is racist and act like it’s nothing. And you don’t get to pretend like racists don’t use the phrase to be racist.
As Andrew Gillum said about his gubernatorial opponent,
“Now, I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist, I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.”
All Lives Matter. Blue Lives Matter. White Lives Matter. These are nothing arguments unless they’re racist. They are fundamentally dishonest and intentionally misleading.
And too often we allow them. Out of fear and decency. Out of some archaic version of civility that racists exploit.
It’s time to stop pretending the fake is more important than the real. That not not saying something is any different from saying it.
There is no plausible deniability because those stickers didn’t stick themselves. And none of them existed before young black women on Twitter made a hashtag to speak up, saying Black Lives Matter.
Every rebuttal to that phrase is either delusion or intention. But neither plausibly denies the racism growing from these roots.
If you don’t dare call this person a racist, I’d understand. But stop pretending like they’re avoiding racism. Not naming the racism in our communities means that you’re trying to avoid it too.