As a white person who enjoys the advantages and privileges of the arbitrary but preferred skin tone in our culture, it has been painful, even excruciating, to watch, support, and occasionally participate in the Civil Rights movement since the 1960s. But here we are again, cities burning, angry people in the streets, and furious backlash from those who resist the facts of our present and past.
Recent protests have been filled with people of many hues and backgrounds, but I still hear and read white responses that either willfully ignore or block out current facts. One of the most common reactions borrows from the Constitution and the words of some of our most powerful Civil Rights leaders: “All lives matter. Black, White, Brown, Red, Yellow, Blue (police) lives matter. The Black Lives Matter movement shouldn’t make one color more important than another.”
Universal rights and opportunities for all has been the foundation of Civil Rights movements around the world for decades. Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela didn’t seek to subjugate or repress the whites who had done the same to blacks and browns for generations. Martin Luther King Jr. was not advocating lower standards or special privileges when he spoke of his children being judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
My understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement does not place black lives as more important than other colors, but instead strives to make them equally important. Anyone reading American history — from our earliest years to recent headlines — is overwhelmed with how often America and Americans have shown that Black (and other colors) Lives Don’t Matter.
Our beloved Constitution established the worth of each slave as 3/5 of that of whites for representation in Congress; The Trail of Tears and multiple broken treaties killed and displaced nearly the entire Native American population in the 19th century; the short period of Reconstruction after the Civil War was followed by the brutality of proud lynchings, white riots, and formal Jim Crow laws that kept a symbolic knee on the neck of blacks for nearly another century.
Even after the historic and heroic advances made during the 1960s (at the cost of beatings, killings, and intimidation), basic rights such as voting and equal opportunities for education and jobs are again under attack. “I can’t breathe” is both a literal plea for physical safety and a metaphor for black life in America where driving, jogging, hanging out, and even sleeping while black can turn deadly at the hands of the police and others with guns.
To me, relevant statistics are very hard to ignore or minimize. Blacks are three times more likely to be killed by police than whites; they account for 24% of those killed but only 12% of the population (https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/). Technology has brought several of these incidents into the public consciousness, but they aren’t new or surprising. In courts, Blacks are almost 10 times more likely to be sentenced to prison for drug offenses than white drug offenders, while 99% of all police killings result in no charges against the officers involved.
But Black Lives Matter means more than police killings, brutality, or unequal justice. As the pandemic has highlighted, black households and communities nearly always suffer at higher rates than others. The Economic Policy Institute recently noted that blacks “have historically suffered from higher unemployment rates, lower wages, lower incomes, and much less savings to fall back on, as well as significantly higher poverty rates than their white counterparts.”
Recently, in a moment of despair, I thought about the fact that peaceful protests against racism and inequality haven’t worked, and that violent protests and riots certainly haven’t either. But when the American people elected leaders whose goals have been creating a fair and equitable society, improvements have been made.
The Trump administration continues its myopic focus on the economy, racial divisions, and the top 1%, but if we elect a president and an overwhelming majority of representatives and senators with strong human values, I believe we can take steps forward towards something like a New Deal (a response to the Great Depression) and the Great Society (a response to the social unrest of the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War in the 1960s). Complex government programs worked to lift up those in our society who have suffered economically and socially in a culture systematically organized to keep them in their place–at the bottom.
Allen Woods is a freelance writer and author living in Greenfield. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.