This is perhaps the biggest topic of public discourse at the moment (with the possible exception of COVID-19). So, I ought to write about it. It is also a subject with highly charged emotions, so that writing about it invites angry or highly critical responses. Please be gentle.

First, in the spirit of this blog, let’s acknowledge some truth on the other side of most of what i will be writing. Blacks (i’m going to use that term here instead of ‘African-Americans’ since the term is used in ‘Black Lives Matter’) have indeed come a long way in America since the 1950s. We have the Civil Rights Act, school desegregation, affirmative action, blacks on the Supreme Court and in many lower level judicial seats, blacks who are wealthy, blacks in all the professions, blacks and whites living together in integrated neighborhoods, and the first black president. There are plenty of white people who have seen hard times, pulled prison time, been murdered, gone hungry. Plenty of homeless people are white. There are many, many black people who are better off financially than the whites who are the poorest.

Now that we have acknowledged those things, let’s also acknowledge that all of those things merely describe black people catching up, partially, with white people in some ways. Nothing more.

Black Lives Matter arose at least in part from videotaped killings of black people by police. There was huge institutional resistance to doing anything about those killings, to bringing the cops to justice, always some excuse. It seemed like the loss of black life just did not matter to the people whose decisions matter. Hence, a movement arose to say clearly and loudly that black lives do matter.

Many people have trouble seeing how anyone could be against a movement that simply says Black Lives Matter. If you have a reason to be against the idea that Black Lives Matter, please write a comment below explaining, without insults or crude language, why.

But, don’t all lives matter? Of course they do.

Here are some reasons there is legitimacy to saying Black Lives Matter, instead of the just the obvious truth that all lives matter. These are not all the reasons.

• Slavery, in which people were kidnapped by force from their homes–men, women, and children–forced into the cargo holds of sailing ships where many died, transported to America where they were sold like cattle and were beaten, raped, and worked at the master’s pleasure. This went on for more than 300 years. For longer than there has been a USA.
• Jim Crow, in which black people were treated as inferior and prohibited from having schooling, homes, jobs, or peace like white people. These were not just racist practices by a few bad people. These were the laws. These laws were in force until 1965, well after many people living today were born.
• Murderous race riots by white people whenever black people were able to put together some money and power. The two with which i am familiar from reading are Wilmington NC and Tulsa OK. In these events, organized white supremacists overthrew duly elected governments that included black elected leaders, murdered black people, chased others out of town, burned down the offices of black-owned newspapers and other atrocities. Wikipedia has decent articles on these. For depth, i would recommend Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, edited by David Cecelski and Timothy Tyson.
• A long history of racial terrorism organizations in the United States. Some are well known, by name at least, like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). But there are many other. Wikipedia has articles on 62 different groups. These groups are not a thing of the past. They are alive and well.
• Membership by cops, including officers, in racist groups. The true depth of this cannot be known, because these groups attempt to keep membership secret. But this passage from justsecurity.com gives a bit of the flavor of it: “The Plain View Project, a database of public Facebook comments made by nearly 2,900 current and former police officers in eight cities, suggested that nearly 1 in 5 of the current officers identified in the study made public posts or comments that appear “to endorse violence, racism and bigotry,” as reported by Buzzfeed News and Injustice Watch in a study of the database. For example, there are 1269 identified problematic posts from active duty Philadelphia police officers on the site. Of the 1073 Philadelphia police officers identified by the Plain View Project, 327 of them posted public content endorsing violence, racism and bigotry. Of those 327, at least 64 hold leadership roles within the force, serving as corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, or inspectors.” https://www.justsecurity.org/70507/white-supremacist-infiltration-of-us-police-forces-fact-checking-national-security-advisor-obrien/ as of June 28, 2020.
• And, of course, the police killings of black people. Killing we never see of white people by the police.

So, does it not seem reasonable to want to shout “Black Lives Matter!” ? Even if you do not want to join in that movement, can you think of a good reason to oppose it?