Black lives matter.
It is bizarre and sad to me that this is a controversial statement. If your immediate response is “All lives matter” then I would agree with that. But if you cannot also say “Black lives matter” then your saying that all lives matter is dishonest.
Saying that black lives matter is like telling my son I hope he has a happy birthday on July 16th. I am not at all saying that I hope my daughters all have bad days. I am singling my son out to celebrate him on his special day. So saying that black lives matter is not saying that other lives like white or ‘blue’ lives don’t matter. It’s just emphasizing this particular group.
For another parallel, one of my daughters has Down Syndrome. So if I posted on March 21st (Down Syndrome Day) that “People with Down Syndrome Matter”, I would be kind of offended if someone replied that “All People Matter”. I would not be saying that other people do not matter or that they matter less at all. I would be celebrating her and reminding people that she and other people with Down Syndrome do matter because for so much of history they have been separated and shunned and mistreated and still are today in obvious ways like in Iceland and in less obvious ways by people who don’t understand or who see people with Down Syndrome as lesser or as burdens.
So by saying “Black lives matter” I’m celebrating a group of people and all those individuals. They are valuable and capable and made in the image of God just like me and everyone else. But we need to draw attention to them particularly because they have not been treated as though they matter for a long time. By emphasizing that they do in fact matter and by putting it into practice in our daily lives, hopefully one day we’ll get to the point where we won’t have to say “Black lives matter” anymore because the response would be “Um, of course they do.”
