Too

I wish, for the life of me (pun intended) that the original signs and placards of the current movement had said “Black Lives Matter Too” and that the movement was called Black Lives Matter Too. The amount of stumbling around on the meaning of this short phrase has caused a lot of unnecessary angst; the worst of this is that so many people are accused of racism when they are simply the victim of an expectation to make a secondary level of analysis that they are readily capable of making were they aware of the expectation.

For example, let’s say that I wanted to start a movement and I called it “Alcoholics Like Ice-Cream.” Most people would find the phrase lacking in power or gravity because they would immediately realize that all people like ice-cream: children, Eskimos, college students, criminals, and mountain climbers. Many wouldn’t as quickly realize that the phrase attaches to a special struggle wherein many alcoholics in early sobriety efforts become addicted to sweets as a kind of ‘replacement’ addiction. They might even think that alcoholics might be just trying to carve out a special status for themselves by saying that they like ice-cream more than others, and are therefore more special. This morning, in my AA meeting, someone mentioned how they had a candy bar the other day and immediately found themselves thinking ‘Where is my next candy bar coming from?’ This remark caught us all just the right way and we all laughed longer and deeper than most people would because we identify so strongly -more than most- with addiction dynamics because we are alcoholics.

Similarly, I’m guessing most blacks didn’t stumble over the meaning of the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter.’ But many of us, my white self included, did stumble, and just didn’t get it until someone said to us, or it eventually occurred to us, that what the signs mean is that black lives matter too, and that American society and justice mechanisms currently discount the lives of blacks compared to whites. Then the light came on, and of course I recognized the issue quite as much as any sentient being would be expected to and I now get that it is a great slogan for this movement-just a little unclear at first grammatically. Not unclear racially. It wasn’t racism that made me think ‘Wait…all lives matter’, it was grammar construction.

I would like to have have been enlightened enough to have ‘gotten’ it initially, and there is a special reason why I should have: I am a poet, and have long known that poems carry special power, and that the first layer of power in a poem, before you get to the interpretation of the words, is the simple fact that the words and thoughts in a poem are framed and presented in poetic format and therefore purport to carry poetic power. Thereafter, the poem may succeed or fail upon its merit, but the initial expectation is that there is going to be something special here that might want to be analyzed beyond face value. I approach, and indeed write, every poem with the expectation of a second level of analysis, and that a set of words arranged in a poem merit that. Therefore, since these three words -Black Lives Matter- were specifically ‘framed’, perhaps I should have asked myself why the emphasis is on black lives in the movement’s slogan when in fact it is obvious that all lives matter. Alas, I did not, and just knee-jerked to wonder how the movement’s organizers didn’t see that all lives matter. The super irony here is that the organizers not only saw that all lives matter, but that it is because all lives matter that attention must be drawn to the issue of black lives because they arguably don’t seem to matter as much as other lives in America as judged by police behavior, incarceration dynamics, and racism in its myriad forms in our culture.

I would like to rebut here the assumption that I’m blaming the victim by saying that there is a problem with the wording when I should be addressing racism itself. I also recognize that many people might be saying ‘All Lives Matter’ in a racist way, or that white privilege might be driving some of the indignation against the slogan. Interestingly, I can usually tell by the demeanor of the person the intent of their objection. But, in my experience, I think most people that said initially, or still say, ‘all lives matter,’ do so over this misunderstanding that I am so painfully exploring in this piece. And that is good news. I wish merely to illustrate an exacerbation that need not be added to an already difficult situation.

And there is more good news. Whether the grain of sand in the oyster is intentional or not, it does produce a pearl: the slogan is an irritant that caused me to have some long conversations about racism in America and I hope that such conversations continue everywhere. It matters.