{"id":9648,"date":"2015-07-20T09:30:49","date_gmt":"2015-07-20T16:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/?p=9648"},"modified":"2019-12-24T07:27:34","modified_gmt":"2019-12-24T15:27:34","slug":"black-lives-matter-vs-all-lives-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2015\/07\/20\/black-lives-matter-vs-all-lives-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Black Lives Matter&#8217; vs. &#8216;All Lives Matter&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:2808,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.reddit.com\\\/r\\\/explainlikeimfive\\\/comments\\\/3du1qm\\\/eli5_why_is_it_so_controversial_when_someone_says&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20260107070839\\\/https:\\\/\\\/www.reddit.com\\\/r\\\/explainlikeimfive\\\/comments\\\/3du1qm\\\/eli5_why_is_it_so_controversial_when_someone_says\\\/&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-05 16:15:09&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-27 08:58:46&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-03 12:49:21&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-12 11:37:22&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-12 11:37:22&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<blockquote><p>\n  Imagine that you&#8217;re sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don&#8217;t get any. So you say &#8220;I should get my fair share.&#8221; And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, &#8220;<em>everyone<\/em> should get their fair share.&#8221; Now, that&#8217;s a wonderful sentiment &#8212; indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share <em>also<\/em>. However, dad&#8217;s smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn&#8217;t solve the problem that you still haven&#8217;t gotten any!<\/p>\n<p>  The problem is that the statement &#8220;I should get my fair share&#8221; had an implicit &#8220;too&#8221; at the end: &#8220;I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else.&#8221; But your dad&#8217;s response treated your statement as though you meant &#8220;<em>only<\/em> I should get my fair share&#8221;, which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that &#8220;everyone should get their fair share,&#8221; while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out.<\/p>\n<p>  That&#8217;s the situation of the &#8220;black lives matter&#8221; movement. Culture, laws, the arts, religion, and everyone else repeatedly suggest that all lives should matter. Clearly, that message already abounds in our society.<\/p>\n<p>  The problem is that, in practice, the world doesn&#8217;t work the way. You see the film Nightcrawler? You know the part where Renee Russo tells Jake Gyllenhal that she doesn&#8217;t want footage of a black or latino person dying, she wants news stories about affluent white people being killed? That&#8217;s not made up out of whole cloth &#8212; there is a news bias toward stories that the majority of the audience (who are white) can identify with. So when a young black man gets killed (prior to the recent police shootings), it&#8217;s generally not considered &#8220;news&#8221;, while a middle-aged white woman being killed <em>is<\/em> treated as news. And to a large degree, that is accurate &#8212; young black men are killed in significantly disproportionate numbers, which is why we don&#8217;t treat it as anything new. But the result is that, societally, we don&#8217;t pay as much attention to certain people&#8217;s deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we <em>don&#8217;t<\/em> treat all lives as though they matter equally.<\/p>\n<p>  Just like asking dad for your fair share, the phrase &#8220;black lives matter&#8221; also has an implicit &#8220;too&#8221; at the end: it&#8217;s saying that black lives should <em>also<\/em> matter. But responding to this by saying &#8220;<em>all<\/em> lives matter&#8221; is willfully going back to ignoring the problem. It&#8217;s a way of dismissing the statement by falsely suggesting that it means &#8220;<em>only<\/em> black lives matter,&#8221; when that is obviously not the case. And so saying &#8220;all lives matter&#8221; <em>as a direct response<\/em> to &#8220;black lives matter&#8221; is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.<\/p>\n<p>  TL;DR: The phrase &#8220;Black lives matter&#8221; carries an implicit &#8220;too&#8221; at the end; it&#8217;s saying that black lives should also matter. Saying &#8220;all lives matter&#8221; is dismissing the very problems that the phrase is trying to draw attention to.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8212;\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/explainlikeimfive\/comments\/3du1qm\/eli5_why_is_it_so_controversial_when_someone_says\/\">GeekAesthete<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TL;DR: The phrase &#8216;Black lives matter&#8217; carries an implicit &#8216;too&#8217; at the end; it&#8217;s saying that black lives should also matter. Saying &#8216;all lives matter&#8217; is dismissing the very problems that the phrase is trying to draw attention to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2042],"tags":[2830,14],"class_list":["post-9648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-politics","tag-black-lives-matter","tag-politics","post_format-post-format-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}