How did we end up Fighting over which Words Best Say that our Lives Matter?
"They hurt what they don't understand... ... Got him on the run Go and grab your gun 'cause he's an Alien Alien Alien Boy. ...Got no rights, no rights at all..."
James Chasse
Everyone should watch this. Though I enjoyed learning about such a creative artist in the beginning, this soul’s death in police custody was painfully sickening and I’ll never need to see that part again in my life to remember its importance. I’m not posting to criticize “the police” specifically, but rather to point out how easy it is for horrific cruelty — and a callous attutude towards the doing of pure evil around you — to become a cultural norm. Blind faith in authority amplifies the potential for atrocity as we can see when the officers in power here stand around laughing about their escapades while another human being lies screaming and dying on the floor in their station. These officers here had a history of using unecessary brutal force. They used the already malevolent ”war on drugs” to lie about force that wouldn’t have been justified even if drug crimes were present.
I can perhaps understand better the reactions of the founders of BLM who felt their rage heightened by the realization that it was statistically more likely to find some of the people currently labeled as members of specific groups — non-white or mentally ill, for example — as victims than others. To see a victim of outrageous abuse and know that society sees you as sharing their label can make an incident more painful. Nonetheless, the horror is that it’s happening to ANYONE. This explains, to me, my initial embrace of “all lives matter”. I can now see that some of the other people using that phrase were not using it the same way I was. As time passes, it seems as if the leaders most involved in Black Lives Matter also see the ways that compassion transcends racism. While the racism involved in many cases of police violence is one horrendous shame for our entire culture, the very existence of such casual viciousness is the definitive threat to all goodness and life on this planet.
BLM has been aiming to extend its work to include all sorts of dis-empowered groups — disabled, trans-gendered, immigrants, sexual orientation, etc. — in their advocacy work. Academics are making up new words and publishing long articles on “intersectionality” and “decolonization” (the new verb to replace “diversify” since “diversity” can too easily be confused with actual diversity of ideas rather than one dogmatic political agenda (?!?)). These efforts may be admirable. Maybe those involved know something I don’t. It IS always important to look out for the weak and most vulnerable among us. But wouldn’t brutality be a shame even if it were inflicted upon a person accustomed to great privilege? In the moment of authority-inflicted violence, ANY victim clearly doesn’t have any good luck or power, no matter how much they may have known in the past.