South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott has shown that, sadly, he's no exception to the Republican tendency toward unabashedly missing the point. During a September 3 CNN interview, he responded in knee-jerk fashion when asked about Black Lives Matter. His predictable response? "All Lives Matter." When asked what he thought of people who would object to and be offended by his response, he basically stated that's their problem.
CNN Host: You said "All Lives Matter." People who associate with Black Lives Matter hear that as an oppositional statement—to them—they hear that there's no acknowledgement that Black Lives Matter, as something that is rebuffing their slogan. What is your reaction to that, if it's something that causes offense to people who are part of the movement?
Scott: Well, I will tell you that if it causes offense I say that All Lives Matter. Black Lives, white Lives, police officers, jurists, all of us, politicians . . . if "all of our lives matter" is offensive to someone, that's their issue not mine, frankly.
At the end of the day what we have to do in this country, and I think we've seen it in the last couple of years is a regression in race relations, is to find common ground on issues and to look into the future together. To face our challenges, from hiccups, to potholes, to walls, and make sure that either working to fill them or remove them. When that happens our country is better.
If anyone is offended by the fact that I think that all lives matter, whether they're black or white, brown or yellow, that is something the people have to look into their own hearts and figure out why that is.
If in fact we're saying that the country has a provocative history on race, I affirm that, there's no doubt about that, but for us to move forward it is truly together.
Let's examine below why what Sen. Scott has said here is not only deeply offensive, but also completely and totally useless at helping to accomplish exactly what he professes to aspire to.
Sen. Scott says we need to "come together," but that isn't possible if we can't even agree on what the problem is. If we can't even come to a common agreement that the problem is absolutely intolerable, we can't gain any traction to have that problem properly addressed.
It turns the center of the issue into a wan, meaningless, irrelevant platitude.
"All Lives Matter."
Okay, so what do we do exactly to protect ALL LIVES? What's our first step in that direction? To his credit, Sen. Scott has sponsored legislation requiring body cams for police, and that's nice. It happens to be item No. 1 on the agenda for Black Lives Matter, but there are nine other items on that list, and the senator doesn't appear to be making a move on any of them.
And therein lies the problem.
Cameras on officers are not the be-all, end-all solution. Police departments have already shown a tendency to selectively hide this kind of footage when it's embarrassing or compromising. Some officers have conveniently lost their footage, or simply not turned their cameras on.
When citizens or surveillance video capture the actual events, they show that many officers have a habit of lying about what actually occurred.
When you say "All Lives Matter" in response to the focused concerns of Black Lives Matter over a consistent, pervasive, nationwide pattern of police bias and violence against black people, you show that you are in complete denial of the reality.
For some it may simply be a case of naiveté, as I believe it is with Sen. Scott. For others, it's a deliberate strategy of denial and obfuscation.
Documentation from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that police target black people for stops, searches, and arrests twice as often as white people. Statistics also show that they are on the receiving end of various uses of force, from physical assault with fist and batons to getting pepper sprayed three times more often. And resources such as the Guardian document that unarmed black men are killed by police twice as often as non-black men.
If you don't see that as a problem you're either willfully ignorantly, not paying attention—or you
want it to be that way.
The targeting of black people by police is so bad that even off-duty black police officers have confirmed that they've been profiled, harassed and assaulted too.
From Reuters:
The officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping. The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had had guns pulled on them.
Desmond Blaize, who retired two years ago as a sergeant in the 41st Precinct in the Bronx, said he once got stopped while taking a jog through Brooklyn’s upmarket Prospect Park. “I had my ID on me so it didn’t escalate,” said Blaize, who has sued the department alleging he was racially harassed on the job. “But what’s suspicious about a jogger? In jogging clothes?”
An even larger problem is that when an officer comes forward to document abuse, that officer is far more likely to suffer retaliatory abuse, threats, and harassment by his fellow officers than to have those concerns addressed, as we've seen with the case of
former Baltimore Police Detective Joe Crystal:
"Being a cop was all I ever wanted to do,” he says. “A dream come true.”
But that dream turned into a nightmare four years ago when his brothers in blue turned on him—bombarding him with taunts and threats, refusing to come to his aid during drug busts, and even leaving a dead rat on his windshield.
His crime? He reported a case of police brutality.
Crystal drew the ire of his department after coming forward to report the 2011 beating of a drug suspect by a fellow officer. Crystal’s subsequent trial testimony helped secure convictions against the cop who carried out the beating and the sergeant who helped facilitate it.
Crystal says the pattern of abuse that followed led him to resign from the job he loved.
The fact is that where police are concerned,
All Lives Don't Matter. Right now we're seeing great outrage at the loss of a handful of officers due to a variety of circumstances, and those losses are indeed tragic. But the actual rate of officers murdered in the line of duty
is going down.
So when you say, "Police Lives Matter," well, sure they do—but in practical terms that issue is getting better, not worse.
And when you say, "White Lives Matter," it's a bit redundant because much of our entire society seems to repeat that refrain.
When you say, "Black Lives Matter," it points out something that isn't automatically assumed—which is exactly why some people get incredibly upset when you dare to say it, to the point of threatening violence against peaceful protestors. Over 40 percent of homicides involving black victims go unsolved, with not a single suspect even identified. A study from the University of Illinois shows that people are generally more likely to shoot a black suspect, even when they're unarmed, than a white suspect:
According to a new report from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, racial bias can affect the likelihood of people pulling the trigger of a gun—even if shooters don't realize they were biased to begin with. Researchers found that, in studies conducted over the past decade, participants were more likely to shoot targets depicting black people than those depicting white people.
...
The meta-analysis showed that the participants were quicker to shoot when an armed person was black, slower to choose not to shoot when an unarmed person was black, and more trigger-happy toward black targets in general.
That's an issue that "All Lives Matter" fails to address, and more importantly, fails to fix.
So yeah, I've looked inside myself as Sen. Scott advised—deeply—and I'm offended by that.