Note: This is a substantial revision to a diary I posted last week. Almost no one saw it and I did a lot of work on it since, so I’m posting the revision today. It began as notes for myself as I face the prospect of the “Black Lives Matter” vs. “All Lives Matter” debates breaking out on my campus and in my classes. It’s gone beyond that and I want to share some of the ideas I’ve come up with for handling this.
Let’s start with the bottom line:
There is only one legitimate response to the claim “Black Lives Matter”
It is: Yes. They. Do.
Followed immediately by “how can we reform our institutions to reflect that?”
Any other response is bullshit.
In fact, any other response is essentially a dishonest act of negation because the very act of coming back with a counterclaim assumes a silent and invisible “No” at the start of the counterclaim.
Person A says “Black Lives Matter” and Person B responds “[No], All Lives Matter.” The “No” is rarely spoken because it is understood. It is in fact, the primary effect of any such counterstatement— to undermine the validity of the original claim.
Thus, any response which presumes to correct the claim with a more universal one (“All Lives Matter”) or replace it with a more “deserving” group (“Blue Lives Matter”), is racist rhetorical sophistry and whitesplaining at its worst.
So, White America, put down your blue pencil when it comes to the claim “Black Lives Matter.” There is no peer feedback requested, no editorial improvements invited. Listen and learn.
Further, those who respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” are fundamentally misrepresenting the complete, articulated thought embedded in the compact version of the claim in justifying their underhanded negation of it. Ask yourself what any informed, plausible reading of this claim yields:
ONLY Black Lives Matter?
or
Black Lives Matter TOO?
In willfully misreading the latter as the former, interpreters of ignorance and bad faith are turning a plea by one group to be recognized as full human beings into a battle cry for race war, the invocation of a “zero-sum” game in which only one race can win— in other words, White Supremacy in blackface.
If you assert that “Blue Lives Matter” in this context you are establishing another kind of zero-sum game in which only one group can “win.” And by one side winning, the other must lose. But what does this say about “Black and Blue Lives”? -— African-American law enforcement officers? Must they choose a side? Does choosing “Blue” mean denying “Black” and seeing it as your mortal enemy? Does choosing “Black” mean you cannot do your job, which is to “protect and serve White” at the expense of its mortal enemy, “Black”? [Or, as Jon Stewart put it this week “serve as border patrol between the two Americas”]
This is all so cynical because the “Black Lives Matter” is an exemplary case of a mainstream, intersectional movement which is backed by a vast coalition that cuts across race, class, region, age, education level, etc. And perhaps that’s why it is such a threat.
Speech Acts and Types of Claims
Another crucial dimension of the "All Lives Matter" debate is productively illuminated by the application of a little speech-act theory.
- There are different types of “speech acts” where you attempt to “do things with words” — there is a difference between an utterance that describes a factual state, an utterance that asks a question, one that gives an order, one that makes a promise, etc.
- Since the same string of words can serve as different kinds of speech acts depending upon context, we distinguish between Locution— the straight up grammatical “meaning” of the utterance and Illocuation — the statement fully contextualized, with the speaker’s intentions included in the interpretation.
Thus, when Donald Trump quoted the notorious segregationist Miami mayor Walter E. Headley recently in regards to uprisings “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” it was an ambiguous statement. As a locution it can be taken as a detached observation about historical causality ---in the past, when one event of this type happened, another even of the second type followed. But it can also be taken as an entirely different type of speech act, a threat: when event A happens, I will respond with B. In the original context (1967 Miami civil unrest), Headley was certainly issuing a threat to shoot on site anyone designated a “looter” -— thus empowering cops to be judge, jury, and executioner in applying an effective death penalty for property crimes.
So we have one locution here and two possible illocutions. When Trump tweeted the Headley quote everyone took it as a threat, deliberately soaked in segregationist rhetoric to throw more red meat to a racist base and affirm his solidarity with White Nationalism. But Trump’s spokespeople eventually developed a defense that no one believed -— he was not issuing a threat; he was simply making a detached statement of about historical cause and effect. Given Trump’s long history of issuing threats, his encouragement of violence against targets he designates, his cheering on of police brutality (all the way up to the pardoning of the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio) this attempted shift of illocution cannot be taken seriously.
With this in mind we can see that there can be ambiguity in any statement. Two people can utter the same locution and yet they have the effect of two very different illocutions in context. Such is the case with “All Lives Matter.” As stated earlier, “in a vacuum” it is an admirable, if vague ethical statement about universal human rights-— perhaps the prelude to a real commitment to making the aspirations of universal justice true. But as a counter to “Black Lives Matter” -— as an illucution in context of a debate-—it has the force of negating and undermining the original claim.
What Should Be vs. What Is (Ethical Commitments vs. Factual Descriptions)
But even within the speech-act of making claims, there are different types. And in the “Black Lives Matter/All Live Matter” debate there is serious slippage going in between the claim as an ethical statement of principle ("All Lives Should Matter") and the claim as a statement of empirical or historical fact ("All Lives are currently--or have been historically-- treated as mattering”).
In other words everyone will continue to talk past each other until we introduce precise distinctions of usage into the debate. We could designate speech acts which state an ethical principle about the way things "Should be" as E and factual statement about the way things really are as F.
Thus "All Lives Matter" (E) is a unifying statement about human rights, the founding principle for any decent society, whereas the statement "All Lives Matter" (F) is simply a tragic and shameful untruth which can be amply demonstrated by mountains of anecdotal and statistical evidence. Further, if "All Lives Matter"(F) were true, then there would be no need to assert "Black Lives Matter" (E). Thus, the fact that the statement "Black Lives Matter" (F) is not true makes the statement "All Lives Matter" (F) untrue as well. And in doing do, it gives the lie to the facile universal bromide of “All Lives Matter” (E) as used by opponents of BLM. For them it is not only not true in fact, but it is not even true as a serious statement of ethical principle. It is vague, squishy PC yadda-yadda which is useful principally as a rhetorical dodge.
The problem of the distance between the the "E" statement and the "F" statement --- the gap between ideology and reality --- begins with the founding of the nation. The Declaration of Independence says "All men are created equal" but the Constitution says some men are the property of others and only counted as partial human beings, i.e. people whose lives don’t matter. The "all" in "all men are created equal" has never been true as an F. And who cares about the E statement if it hides the ugly truth of the F statement, if, especially as it is today, it is actually used as a cudgel to silence those who point out the lie of the F statement?
“Doing Things With Words” -— And Then Doing Nothing Else.
The whole game of "All Lives Matter" (and, in fact, of the Right in the USA for decades) is to pretend that simply asserting E is magic. Once you say it or enshrine it in a document, the logic goes, your work is done. (And for White Supremacists, being forced to admit that people of color are indeed human beings, seems like a bridge too far already. “Where’s my credit for magnanimously granting that?” they ask before whining about “political correctness,” etc.). “The Emancipation Proclamation (1862) ended slavery on paper, so why are you complaining about the fact of Jim Crow and segregation?” they asked in the 19th century. “The Civil Rights Act (1965) guaranteed equal rights and access on paper, so why are you still complaining?” they asked in the 20th. “Barack Obama was elected president (2008), so why do you insist that racism is still a force in American society?” they asked in the 21st.
And so today, anyone questioning the statement “All Lives Matter” as an F (factual truth) will be accused of disagreeing with it as an E -— and trying to privilege one race (“Black”) over the supposedly more ethical choice (“All”). This is the rhetorical shell game. It is how you turn "Black Lives Matter Too" into "Only Black Lives Matter". It's the ultimate bad faith move --essentially accusing your opponent of what you yourself are guilty of: White Supremacy in blackface as a coded rationalization for a return to overt and probably violent race-based politics and vigilantism.
“Black Lives Matter” is Paradoxically more universal than “All Lives Matter” right now
And here we come to another deeply ironic dimension to this matter. For it is the claim that is, on the surface at least, less universal ( “Black Lives Matter”) that is creating near universal mobilization. More, it is already showing its potential to “wake” ordinary citizens of all races and catalyze, in the process, a whole range of issues and claims that threaten the corporate police state and international neoliberal order. Should this surprise us?
In discussing how “politics proper” actually works, the contemporary philosopher Slavoj Zizek, following Jacques Ranciere has written:
. . . the political struggle proper is therefore . . . the struggle for one's voice to be heard and recognized as the voice of a legitimate partner: when the 'excluded'. . . protested against the ruling elite. . ., the true stakes were not only their explicit demands (for higher wages, work conditions, etc.), but their very right to be heard and recognized as an equal partner in the debate-. . . Furthermore, in protesting the wrong they suffered, they also presented themselves as the immediate embodiment of society as such, as the stand-in for the Whole of Society in its universality, against the particular power-interests of aristocracy or oligarchy ('we-the 'nothing', not counted in the order-are the people, we are All against others who stand only for their particular privileged interests').
www.lacan.com/...
In other words, we are really doing politics, not spouting bland bromides about “the brotherhood of man” and “international human rights”, when a particular excluded group steps forth and makes a compelling particular and often local claim against the system. In doing so, the group acts as a stand-in for “The People” as a whole. This is “the paradox of a singular which appears as a stand-in for the Universal, destabilizing the 'natural' functional order of relations in the social body.”
Kimberly Jones’ much discussed viral moment was a perfect example. Without ever losing hold of the specific issue, the specific grievance, the specific injustice, she opens up a whole range of other struggles (institutional, economic, class-based, etc.) that get “woke” in the process of mobilizing to protest the death of George Floyde, Breanna Taylor, and others.
This is “politics proper” as Ranciere defines it. And it has a long history, in his account, going back in the West at least to the Athenian demos rising up against a corrupt oligarchy.
This is the way the specific claim “Black Lives Matter” becomes the “stand-in for the universal” claims of all the injustices of the current rotten political-institutional-economic system. This, I think, helps account for its unprecedented power of mobilization. It is the old saw that “all politics is local” in action. Vague general notions reflecting a statistical mindset don’t mobilize. A particular man dying a horrible death on a particular street corner becomes the start of something that can “change the world.” Why? Because the path to the universal runs through the particular. If “Black Lives” don’t “Matter,” no lives matter. As MLK put it: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” What happens in Birmingham cannot and will not stay in Birmingham. What happened in Minneapolis has spread across the globe.
“All Lives Matter” right now means “One Life Matters”
Consider this story, “Florida ‘All Lives Matter’ Protest Turns Into a Rally for Donald Trump Instead.”
Could the irony be made any more pointed? Where the supposedly less universal claim “Black Lives Matter” precipitates and catalyzes a true universal mobilization, the supposedly more universal claim “All Lives Matter” quickly shrinks to its real size, the claim that One Life Matters -— That of Donald Trump.
Is this not Trumpism in a nutshell? It’s all about “freedom” but with a catch: only one shall be free -— free from restraint, free from law, free from scrutiny, free from criticism, free from accountability. And we, the followers, will enjoy our freedom vicariously, through Him. His freedom is our freedom so thoroughly that we no longer need any of our own.
And further: His freedom will be ideally expressed in the denial of freedom to others, in the denial, in fact, of their existence as lives that “matter” at all. The logic seems to be: “as long as one white man, the one who “runs” the country, is free to behave as if it is still 1859, it doesn’t matter what happens to me, personally.”
Thus Trump’s so-called “populism” is in reality a “de-populism” which works, not by gaining adherents to a “popular” movement, but, on the contrary, by shrinking what counts as the polity down to the size and character of his own base. In doing so, it makes more and more of us non-citizens of “Trump Nation”: Muslims, Latinos, African-Americans, residents of blue states, urban dwellers, Democrats, never-Trump Republicans, etc. etc. all “don’t matter.” The “shouldn’t be allowed to vote” as Trump has said on occasion. He has not grown his base, he has grown the category of “the excluded” so much that suburban soccer moms and white teenagers in Ottumwa, Iowa are risking a deadly disease to mobilize in the streets over the death of a black man they never met.
And what do we make of the fact that his own supporters are being asked to agree to the tacit admission that even their own lives “don’t matter” when they are forced to sign liability waivers for contracting COVID-19 during one of the many maskless mass rallies he plans for the rest of the elections season? As DKos’ own Mark Summer puts it here: “Trump is determined to have his rally and his convention, no matter who has to die for it.” And as the Guardian puts is “Trump is Killing His Own Supporters — even WH Insiders Know it.”
The conclusion is inescapable: “All Lives Matter” in the end means “No Lives Matter -— Other than Donald Trump’s Political Life.”
But we can at the same time take comfort in the converse of this Orwellian point: that we are right in our instinct that is telling us that right now, at this historical moment, the only way to assert the universal is through the particular. The only way to say “All Lives Matter” and to really mean it honestly, is to say instead “Black Lives Matter.”
