Mandatory (a)Musings: The Coronacation Diaries, Episode 78

We Must Briefly Suspend the Travelogue for this Public Service Announcement:

But--

Oh, Karen. No.

If you are still insisting that "all lives matter," PLEASE stop talking for just a moment and listen. REALLY LISTEN. Don't cry. Just listen.

When Black and Brown people and their allies and accomplices pronounce that Black Lives Matter, they are pointing out that Black lives SHOULD matter; that Black lives matter TOO. The foundation of our country is built on the backs of Black lives. We enslaved them. We lynched them. We redlined their neighborhoods. We put our freeways right down the centers of their communities. We segregated them from our schools, from our drinking fountains, from our grocery stores. And, in 2020, our police murder them simply for sitting in a car, for sitting on a swingset, for selling a cigarette, for buying cigarettes with a fake $20. Black lives SHOULD matter, but they clearly still don't. And that is why we have to insist that Black Lives Matter.

When you "All Lives Matter" at them, you are purposefully, ignorantly missing the point. No one has EVER told you that white lives don't matter, not in their words and not in their actions. No one has murdered you for driving while white; no one has murdered you for jogging while white, buying a gun while white, or walking in the road while white. BLACK LIVES MATTER IS NOT ABOUT YOU, KAREN. It is, in fact, BECAUSE of you, because of your institutional racism, because of your implicit bias, because of your need to center every damn conversation around yourself.

Your insistence that you are just being nice and you are being attacked for being nice is precisely what is wrong with your argument. You aren't being nice when you are trying to overwrite the message that people of color are desperately trying to get you to hear. You are, instead, ignoring what they are saying. You are telling them they are wrong, selfish even, to want to be able to live in this country without being murdered by the police, because they aren't including you in their "lives matter" message. By attempting to usurp their message and center yourself in it, you are just continuing the long --mind-numbingly long-- history in our country of making everything all about the white people. Your self-righteous indignation that you "can't even post something nice!" is textbook white fragility, the inability to actually confront our own implicit biases and the benefits we receive because of racist infrastructure without crying big white women tears.

No one ever said that white lives didn't matter. But our country has proved time and time again that we don't value Black lives. And until we are willing to shut up and listen, and then act swiftly and forcefully to ensure that Black lives actually do matter, we can never --ever-- truly claim that all lives matter.