"What's Wrong With 'All Lives Matter'?"

Dear Friends,

Today I read an interview in The New York Times by George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Duquesne University, with Judith Butler, a philosopher and professor in the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley, entitled "What's Wrong With 'All Lives Matter'?" (here).  I wish everyone would read it.

Ms. Butler discusses the implications of and background behind the racism that makes the phrase "Black Lives Matter" so important.  While the phrase is obviously true, we have never realised that fact in American life.  She demonstrates in many ways how we have failed to realise that truth.  While the phrase "All Lives Matters" is equally true, it is critical that we focus on those lives that we have treated as not having validity and worth, e.g. the lives of black people in the United States.  Ms. Butler posits that since the society, among other ways through police violence against blacks, demonstrates over and over again that black lives to do not matter, it is becoming or perhaps remaining the norm.  She also posits that by protesting and publicly grieving the lost lives of blacks, we are speaking against the white power system that has for so long made clear that black lives do not matter.

I would like to reprint the entire interview but it is quite long.  Here is one of the best paragraphs:

Whiteness is less a property of skin than a social power reproducing its dominance in both explicit and implicit ways. When whiteness is a practice of superiority over minorities, it monopolizes the power of destroying or demeaning bodies of color. The legal system is engaged in reproducing whiteness when it decides that the black person can and will be punished more severely than the white person who commits the same infraction, when that same differential is at work in the question, who can and will be detained? And who can and will be sent to prison with a life sentence or the death penalty? Angela Davis has shown the disproportionate number of Americans of color (black and Latino) detained, imprisoned and on death row. This has become a “norm” that effectively says “black lives do not matter,” one that is built up over time, through daily practices, modes of address, through the organization of schools, work, prison, law and media. Those are all ways that the conceit of white superiority is constructed.

The interview ends with these three paragraphs by Ms. Butler:

Whiteness is not an abstraction; its claim to dominance is fortified through daily acts which may not seem racist at all precisely because they are considered “normal.” But just as certain kinds of violence and inequality get established as “normal” through the proceedings that exonerate police of the lethal use of force against unarmed black people, so whiteness, or rather its claim to privilege, can be disestablished over time. This is why there must be a collective reflection on, and opposition to, the way whiteness takes hold of our ideas about whose lives matter. The norm of whiteness that supports both violence and inequality insinuates itself into the normal and the obvious. Understood as the sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit power to define the boundaries of kinship, community and nation, whiteness inflects all those frameworks within which certain lives are made to matter less than others.

It is always possible to do whiteness otherwise, to engage in a sustained and collective practice to question how racial differentiation enters into our daily evaluations of which lives deserve to be supported, to flourish, and which do not. But it is probably an error, in my view, for white people to become paralyzed with guilt and self-scrutiny. The point is rather to consider those ways of valuing and devaluing life that govern our own thinking and acting, understanding the social and historical reach of those ways of valuing. It is probably important and satisfying as well to let one’s whiteness recede by joining in acts of solidarity with all those who oppose racism. There are ways of fading out whiteness, withdrawing its implicit and explicit claim to racial privilege. 

Demonstrations have the potential to embody forms of equality that we want to see realized in the world more broadly. Working against those practices and institutions that refuse to recognize and mark the powers of state racism in particular, assemblies gather to mourn and resist the deadly consequences of such powers. When people engage in concerted actions across racial lines to build communities based on equality, to defend the rights of those who are disproportionately imperiled to have a chance to live without the fear of dying quite suddenly at the hands of the police. There are many ways to do this, in the street, the office, the home, and in the media. Only through such an ever-growing cross-racial struggle against racism can we begin to achieve a sense of all the lives that really do matter.

For me these last paragraphs provide a way for me and I hope others to work to make sure that "Black Lives Matter" and also the lives of all of those that are seen as "other" matter.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal