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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

It goes a little further than what the other people are saying. It's not just that the reply "All Lives Matter" is ignoring the issue of police violence against African Americans. It's being used as a defense of the police officers who did the killings, an apologistic post-hoc rationalization that the cop was defending himself. When a person uses "All Lives Matter", what they really mean is "cop's lives matter more".

The easiest thing you can do is donate to the ACLU. You could probably also find part-time volunteer work at any of the many institutions trying to end or mitigate poverty.

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>When a person uses "All Lives Matter", what they really >mean is "cop's lives matter more"

No, I understand it to be "police can sometimes use force unjustifiably towards anyone, of any race." If a cop murders someone, s/he should be held responsible (sadly, they are not). The reason that more black people get murdered by police is that they (blacks) get in trouble more often (which is NOT a justification to kill them)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

yes, of course

> No, I understand it to be "police can sometimes use force unjustifiably towards anyone, of any race."

This would be true if this is what the people saying it demonstrated beliefs that were congruent with their actions. However, the overwhelming majority (to the point where the counterparty is anecdotal and, frankly, possibly mythical) use it to establish a fundamentally conservative defense of the status quo. I mean--"All Lives Matter" sounds good. Except it is used as a direct and intentional response to the institutional prejudice and societal control via police that is applied to black people, and when you look at deeds instead of words, that's super fucked-up.

"All Lives Matter" requires intentionally misunderstanding "Black Lives Matter." What it means, and what they no-sell as hard as they possibly, possibly can, is that it's really "Black Lives Matter, Too". Because right now, to society at large, black lives don't matter.

Deeds, not words, and the deeds are uniformly bad.

  > the overwhelming majority (to the point where the 
  > counterparty is anecdotal and, frankly, possibly 
  > mythical) use it to establish a fundamentally 
  > conservative defense of the status quo

While "All lives matter" is an inappropriate response, it is a natural one which well-meaning people come up with all the time. Honestly, when heard out of context "Black lives matter" is more than a little cryptic, and the first time I heard it my initial thought was "Are they claiming their lives matter more than most??"

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/06/24/417112... http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/18/politics/bernie-sanders-netroo...

If it's a default response for you (the generic you, not you specifically) to say it rather than think through the problem...I mean, that says a lot about societal awareness, and I can't really find much sympathy for that, but you're right in that some well-meaning idiots might view it as a surface-level thing. But those well-meaning, superficial people aren't in the discussion in the first place. Even Hillary Clinton--who should have known better--isn't going to BLM events explicitly as counter-protestors to chant "All Lives Matter" at them. Right now, as 2016 opens, "All Lives Matter" is the dog whistle of dog whistles.

My point is that it's not just a question of societal awareness. The links in my GP post show Secretary Clinton and Governor O'Malley making exactly this mistake. They are not idiots and their ambitions depend on courting black voters, so they are acutely aware of the issues affecting black people.

The phrase is probably the best you can do in a slogan, but it is cryptic.

> they are acutely aware of the issues affecting black people

See...I really don't think they are (or at least were before they got shellacked). I think it's so profoundly pervasive that even at the highest levels it hasn't been An Issue until very recently. So it's pretty tough for me to see that. (While I don't know O'Malley, I don't pay attention to inconsequentials, I think Hillary Clinton is a status-quo-favoring moderate on most things, which probably doesn't make me more sympathetic.)

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