The All Lives Matter movement, as a reaction to BLM, is essentially saying that they don't, and that the racial struggles of American Blacks are irrelevant.
That is the reason why All Lives Matter is considered abusive.
Yes, of course, they do. But some houses need immediate attention because they're in danger.
I'm not really up-to-speed with US politics, but I know it's horrifying how easily and with impunity the police have been killing black people. Still, "Black lives matter" isn't a great slogan, and calling "all lives matter" racist definitely seems like an overreaction. I'm not familiar with ALM's positions, though, so maybe it's a racist organization in disguise, I don't know.
Well, the fire department does tell people that they need to pay attention to things that might cause fires. The response isn't "well, people should pay attention to all dangerous things! What about car accidents?"
I mean, this isn't a difficult concept to grasp. When someone is raising money for orphans, people don't usually say "but what about money for veterans?" When people are raising awareness about breast cancer, you don't usually tell them "hey, we should be raising awareness for all cancer." They don't get angry that Smokey Bear focuses on forest fires ("Oh, house fires don't matter to you?").
People understand single-issue campaigns for most things, but some suddenly have an issue with it when it comes to African Americans deaths. This naturally raises a few eyebrows.
The controversy isn't because it's a bad slogan. The controversy is evidence of it being the correct slogan.
It seems that the argument has been framed around black people's mistreatment in general, which is fair enough, but, when specifically talking about the police, it seems to me that getting the latter to be less trigger-happy would alleviate the problem for all races, which is why I find the focus on black people a bit odd.
A group of people is experiencing horrible and unjust treatment. The implication of the situation is they don't matter, and the correct reformist statement is that they do matter.
Black lives matter also is not the correct statement. It is the correct understanding of the while situation but you need to keep in mind the nuance of language.
"Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter."
Whatever may have happened after, there was little justification to destroy that candidate for saying this.
Make no mistake, Trump and the alt-right are incredibly hostile to anyone who doesn't see Black Lives Matter as an evil, racist attack on white people, who don't think that blacks complaining about police violence against them is the real racism.
[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/21/politics/martin-omalley-do...
People had to choose between two extremes, not one extreme and one moderate position.
EDIT: Perhaps I am wrong here, as I said, I know nothing about All Lives Matter, can you justify calling it an "abusive" movement?
The statement 'All Lives Matter' not as response to BLM would have been fine, but come on. No one here is blind to the current discussion to that extent.
That's not what "all" means. It's turning the name of the movement by implying it means "only" Black Lives Matter. So All Lives Matter is saying that not only Black Lives Matter.
O'Malley was eviscerated for that statement, even though he clearly agreed with the sentiment that black lives matter.
I can understand the concern that some have that turning "Black Lives Matter" into "All Lives Matter" could conceal the reality that people with darker skin have been disproportionately impacted by our Justice system, but I also agree with the contention that overreaching and overreacting to a statement that seems completely reasonable to people not deeply aware of the discussion can ultimately have the opposite effect and serve as fuel to movements like the alt right.
It does happen to black people somewhat more often, per capita, but 50% of people killed by police are white.
Predicting the likely response to this, of course, we get into the (surprisingly hard to accurately work out) question of what proportion of crimes are committed by people of various races, and to what extent that figure is manipulated by conscious / subconscious bias on the part of law enforcement. (It's a swamp, and I don't feel like arguing about it tonight, I just wanted to acknowledge it's complicated.)
Edit to acknowledge: yes, it's more like 60% white if you're splitting out Hispanic-origin into its own category. Still, disproportionate.
I find this argument (the one you are referring to) to be spurious. We don't calculate the number of rapes committed by men and there is no subsequent societal bias against men as criminal by default (or suspect by default). Not to mention the mindset leads to a feedback loop: "Of the bugs found during team code reviews, 50% were in Bob's code" will lead to everyone going through Bob's code with a fine tooth comb - and finding yet more bugs, while Stacy's code never gets a second glance regardless of its quality[1].
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...
If the main problem is (2), but society mobilizes to solve (1), thigs won't get better.
If we solved (1), everyone would be equally likely to suffer from police brutality. This would make us more likely to then go ahead and fix (2), because suddenly it would no longer be something which mostly happens to long-downtrodden minority groups.
Mind, if we fix (2) first, it's somewhat plausible that we might continue in a situation where minority groups are disproportionately targeted by the police, and we just go "eh, it's not that bad, we're not shooting them all the time any more".
The thing is most violent crime is commited by blacks even though they are about 13% of the population. So please don't act like evil cops just hunt them down for fun, that's the biggest gripe with BLM. They act like it's 1900 when that's just BS
Agreed.
And that implies that Black Lives currently do not matter, which hopefully we can all agree is a big overstatement.
I understand that movements need simple powerful slogans to chant and make bumper stickers from. That's fine. But let's not treat these three words as some definitive analysis of race in America.
The problem is innocent people who happen onto the conversation, interpret it at first glance, not unreasonably, as some insane asshole saying "only black lives matter", engage in good faith on that basis, to uphold ideals that we can all agree are right... and subsequently are piled on by a mob who agree that the offender has just instantly and irredeemably proven themselves to be one of the worst things they've been taught it's possible to be. With a real, non-zero chance of their real lives being actually, materially ruined as part of this public shaming.
The problem is things like "Black Lives Matter" being used as a shibboleth[0] -- an excuse to form a gleeful lynch mob, giving everybody a pleasurable and community-affirming chance to engage in collective norm-enforcement against The Other.
The problem is an atmosphere where I'm so paranoid about even attempting to have a good-faith intellectual conversation about this that I have to create a throwaway account to remove a not-at-all implausible chance of having my life ruined for even engaging on this topic at all.
And this isn't even getting into the atmosphere that seems to really be setting in, where agreeing to listen to someone has become tantamount to agreeing with everything they say. That's the really frightening one.
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It could also mean that black people are not especially target by the police and that outrage at law enforcement is misplaced. For example we know that the rates of police violence against black people vs white people roughly mirrors arrest and conviction rates.
Now you might consider this incorrect, but I think it's a debate that has to be had in the open and not shut down by calling people racist.