It's both obviously true AND a racist dog whistle.
Stripped of context, it is obviously true, and utterly harmless.
Placed in the context of BLM, it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
Stripped of context, it is obviously true, and utterly harmless.
Placed in the context of BLM, it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
80 to 90% of the times I’ve seen this phrase, it’s been used in response to Black Lives Matter. As opposed to being used in the positive for, say, universal healthcare, food assistance programs, and initiatives to house the homeless.
Note: above comments relative to the insanity that is the USA, of course.
The whistle should be a red flag, rather than surefire proof that you now know everything the person is going to say, therefore you shouldn't listen any more. I think one of the problems in the US is the pervasiveness of the mindset of "I think you're X, therefore I refuse to listen to anything else you say".
It's not that Black lives matter _more_, it's that systemic institutionalized racism dating back to the origins of the US make it so that Black lives matter _less_ than white lives when dealing with organs of power.
This is definitely true, I'm just puzzled as to why you'd focus efforts on solving a subset of the problem rather than the whole problem. Wouldn't that lead to fragmented movements of "<race> lives matter" rather than one single effort?
The people complaining are black. They want their lives to matter. If you can't campaign for that without there being something in it for you as well .. why not?
The legislative programs that people are advancing in the wake of this attention do indeed focus on solving the problem for everyone, not just Black people. For example, Colorado recently passed a police reform bill that does a lot of beneficial things, none of them specifically targeted at the Black community[1].
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/colorado-passes-sweeping-police...
Ahh, okay, that makes more sense, thanks. I wasn't aware of that.
Unethical medical experiments? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
The ""FEMA camps"" meme? Hurricane Katrina response.
People are focusing on Black Lives Matter as a rallying cry because the police system is expressing its terrifying lawlessness through overtly racist terror-inducing acts.
The problem won't go away without massive reform to the system. And asking "what about these other people?" in the general context is not useful; asking "what about these other people in the specific context of 'will this proposed solution work for these other people, too?'" is very useful.
“Black lives matter” is not just asserting that black lives are among the lives that matter. Like, it IS asserting this and that observation IS somewhat banal and that IS kind of the point.
The banality of the statement is meant to invite you to think, “wait, why do we even have to say this?” which exposes a deeper meaning.
That deeper meaning is more like “We occasionally get hunted and killed out in the streets like rabid dogs by the very institutions that are supposed to protect people from violence—and this can only be understood as the culmination of America’s vast history of trying to ignore and bury and forget about its racist history rather than talk about it and address it, to the point where that «we don’t wanna talk about it» inclination has metastasized into an active implication that our lives are valueless to the culture at large. And we cannot breathe this stifling choking smog of «oh well another black man was shot but let’s not put it in the news, they don’t matter enough for that» any more, as happens when death transitions from stories into statistics. Fuck that. We DO matter.”
In turn the deeper meaning of “Blue lives matter” is “we respect our police enough to give them unconditional arbitration of who lives and who dies in cases where they feel their lives are at stake and sorry black people but we don't see a way for your needs to not die be satisfied without good honest police officers losing their lives because some of y’all shoot them—like, not the majority, I am sure most of you are good, but like when I think of inner city gang members shooting the police I think of black men stereotypically. Fix your gang problems first and then you won’t get shot by police.” You can see why that seems to have a kernel of truth but really came across as tone-deaf (see how it takes a statistical view rather than a story view?) and not understanding that most of these actual stories are about getting shot in the back while walking away or being strangled slowly while being totally immobilized and protesting that you are being strangled and could they please not do that, others involve very young innocent children being killed as collateral damage or worse.
Meanwhile “all lives matter” is a similarly banal statement but it serves the function, when used as a response to “black lives matter,” of saying that “no, you know, I really like our racist history being buried, I liked it when we didn't talk about race. We should focus on the global human condition and forget the specific gruesome stories of what’s happening to folks of your race right now as just the smaller problem of what’s happening to you right now. But I find myself very worried that if I am sharing these black stories someone is going to get mad at me for not sharing the Mexican stories of police injustice and then the poor white stories of police injustice and, well, can’t we just go back to a time where we didn’t talk about the race problem that we were having?”
The basic response to this I suppose is “we have been trying the ‘all lives matter’ approach for hundreds of years and we don’t seem to be improving, meanwhile cultures with similar race dynamics, like South Africa, are actually processing their difficulties over much shorter time scales, possibly because they are willing to talk about it and be frank. There is no reason to believe at this point that the mentality of ‘all lives matter’ leads to a better outcome for the black lives that are hemorrhaged today in such quantities that it becomes numb statistics rather than individual stories if we don’t make a point of getting outraged over every single damn death.”
A day or two ago, a police officer in my area was killed on duty in a gunfight. Some of the reactions on Twitter were deranged and vile, literally celebrating that an officer was killed. I saw the same shit the day or two before when a police department near me tweeted about one of their police dogs dying, apparently of old age.
People deliberately try to ambush and murder police on a fairly regular basis. It doesn’t get reported much—partly because it doesn’t fit any popular media narrative, partly, I suspect, to not encourage copycats, and partly because it’s not really news. In 2013 a man in Southern California—you might recognize his name but I won’t give him the dignity of using it—carried out a brief campaign of murdering police officers and their families in a self-declared campaign of “unconventional and asymmetric warfare” against the LAPD.
I used to personally be very strongly biased against the police. I’m less so now, and part of the reason for that is that I’ve had the opportunity to see dozens of dashcam and bodycam videos of actual officer-involved shootings. The vast majority of the shootings I’ve seen were situations where the officer’s life was very much at risk.
I can even pick out patterns when people post videos of police not shooting people, presumably because those people are white. It’s not because they’re white, it’s because while they might have a bladed weapon and occasionally lunge in an officer’s direction, cops usually hold their fire and maintain distance until the guy breaks into a full-on sprint to try and close that distance.
I’m not trying to minimize or dismiss the actual police brutality that takes place, and I agree that we need higher standards and accountability. But from actually listening to some of the people on that side of the issue and seeing their evidence, I can understand where they’re coming from.
I think my misconception was that I thought BLM is a movement against police brutality, where it's actually more general than that. Under that light, it makes sense.
eg: Imagine if someone told you the Pacific Temperate rain forest needs saving and you responded with "sure, but we're prioritizing resources for the Amazon first - its got it way worse"
You just (wittingly) downplayed the imminence of one over the other and missed on the particularities because of how you perceived their relative danger.
Now consider your original metaphor without the bias about which forest is worst off in reality. You might find that "all forests matter" might be a more valid response in that context because they don't want to dis-proportionally favor one at the cost of the others.
If you continue to allow these statements to polarize and force a false dichotomy that demonizes a group and lionizes another, well, you're not really helping heal the divides either.
The actual _people_ have much wider divergence of opinions, for sure. I don't expect a Republican to go around chanting the slogans of people who have declared themselves to be their enemies; why would they?
And yes indeed it would be awesome to revamp the US political system, but that won't happen anytime soon short of armed revolt, and keeping people alive in the meantime is still important.
And I'd say neither party is truly conservative, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing this absolute shambles from an ostensibly "law and order" President. Nothing is being conserved. Nobody has taken away gay marriage, abortion, legal weed, etc. Nobody sent in the Army to destroy CHAZ.
The reality is that in the American system the President is not very powerful, and the permanent bureaucracy and moneyed interests have a lot more control over policy than one might thing at first glance.
An incompetent conservative is still conservative. And the trump admin did try to erode many of these things: protections for gay and transgender workers[0], abortion[1], etc. That reversing supreme court decisions (which most of these were based on) is exceedingly difficult worked against his goals, but denying that he tried is ignorant.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/06/12/trump-trans...
[1]: https://www.jurist.org/news/2020/01/trump-administration-urg...
The slogans black lives matter, all lives matter, blue lives matter, etc., are all straw men slogans/arguments that communicate to whomever you're speaking with that you're not planning on interpreting them charitably.
I know lots of people who think black lives matter some, but who don't think they matter as much as white lives. Like going around and murdering black people is clearly unethical, but overpolicing and imprisoning them for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people.
> but overpolicing and imprisoning them for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people.
was and is (relatively) commonly stated. I claim that to believe this is alright, you must implicitly value black safety less than white safety. I'm open to counterarguments.
I think your understanding of the situation is that black people are “overpoliced” and disproportionately imprisoned for nonviolent crimes. This is why you want to change the situation, which is a logical conclusion.
I think people who disagree with you about the conclusion you reach didn’t get there by sharing your understanding of the situation, shrugging their shoulders, and saying it was fine. I think they perceive the underlying situation itself differently than you do. It’s not a difference in values. They might be wrong, but people are wrong about things all the time.
Is willful ignorance acceptable?
I agree. But that's not what I asked. The statement I originally made was that
"overpolicing and imprisoning <black people> for nonviolent crime isn't. Yet they can't imagine doing the same to white people."
Which I do think is fairly clearly demonstrated. There's a subtle shift, but a relevant one. Creating new systems of oppression based on race is racist, but letting existing systems that treat races unfairly is okay, even though the results would be the same.
I want to reiterate: I don't believe this person claims that black people should be policed different purely based on their race, but it does seem that this person is comfortable with that being the way the world operates.
And way back, the statement we started from was "black lives matter". And in general I hold that to mean "black lives matter just as much as any other race".
How do we square the value statement "black lives matter just as much as any other race" with the acceptance of over-policing of black communities as justified? I don't see how we can. But again, I'm open to other interpretations.
Many black communities are disproportionately victimized by violent crime, and increasing the police presence there protects them from that crime and hence saves many of their lives.
Maybe it hasn’t worked out that way, but here we are again arguing how we perceive the situation, not the underlying values we’re trying to optimize for. I might listen to you mention the drug charges and say, “fine, let’s legalize weed”. I might listen to you talk about how black people distrust their local police departments and vice versa and I might counter by advocating for community-oriented policing. You might convince me that none of that works and the basic concept was wrong-headed. But nowhere in this process do we actually disagree about the basic value you mentioned.
Sure, and that was the common understanding 20-30 years ago. (see: Dem and black community support for various crime bills, "Superpredator", etc.). But our understanding of the situation has evolved (based on evidence, I should add!).
> I might listen to you mention the drug charges and say, “fine, let’s legalize weed”. I might listen to you talk about how black people distrust their local police departments and vice versa and I might counter by advocating for community-oriented policing. You might convince me that none of that works and the basic concept was wrong-headed. But nowhere in this process do we actually disagree about the basic value you mentioned.
But now you're arguing for a bunch of policies supported by various sects of Black Lives Matters supporters, all of which could be summed up in various ways as "reduce police interactions with black people".
My point is that there are people who don't accept that. Who insist that nothing should change. The argument goes something like this:
(1) Because black people commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime (2) police will naturally interact more with black people so (3) black people will also be arrested more for nonviolent crimes, and therefore (4) nothing needs to change.
This breaks down somewhere between one and two, for a variety of reasons. The amount of violent crime isn't proportional to the amount of overpolicing, a lot of the forms of overpolicing don't actually reduce violent crime, etc. These are the people who I think it's reasonable to have suspicion of. People who agree that some form of action is necessary, cool! But people who think the status quo is fine and dandy, that's the group where I can't quite square things (and I'll note that the person who I linked earlier was in that group).
I think community-oriented policing is actually intended to increase police interactions by adding more non-adversarial interactions in order to establish trust.
I don’t think “reduce police interactions with black people” is necessarily desirable if that includes things like ignoring 911 calls from black neighborhoods. In fact, that strikes me as deliberate failure to provide equal protection under the law, and could be even more ruinous to black communities than the status quo.
“Reduce police interactions with black people” is yet another thing that might sound like a good idea at the time, but would ultimately lead, in my opinion, to unintended negative consequences for the very black lives it’s intended to protect. Even if your ideal solution would turn out to have fewer police interactions, setting that as a goal is just begging for Goodhart’s Law to manifest itself.
Also, I think you’re minimizing nonviolent crime. DUI, car theft, burglary, and arson are all “nonviolent crimes”. We can’t just ignore them. A neighborhood where these things happen frequently is made more dangerous and impoverished by them. So when you talk about having more police presence in black neighborhoods resulting in more non-violent criminals behind bars, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you drive drunk through a black neighborhood, you might run over a black kid, and that black kid’s life sure as hell matters so I hope the police are around to catch you before that happens.
If you’re talking about drug crimes and arguing that the enforcement of those laws is worse than the offense, then maybe you should just repeal those laws. And if I disagreed with you about drug laws I might argue the point with you.
> People who agree that some form of action is necessary, cool! But people who think the status quo is fine and dandy, that's the group where I can't quite square things
We got into this mess by agreeing that some form of action was necessary. Stopping to make sure we aren’t just making things worse is reasonable.
That isn't what I said. You can agree that the status quo is bad while being unsure of how to fix it (noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions!). I'm speaking about people who believe the status quo is okay.
“Okay” is a relative term. Fundamentally, no state of affairs on earth can ever be truly “okay” because humanity is imperfect. No human society is capable of perfect justice. No human society ever has or ever will achieve perfect justice. That means injustice will always exist.
> noticing flaws is a lot easier than finding solutions
Yes, thank you. That’s my point. We’re all noticing flaws in the status quo. And a lot of people, yourself included, are proposing changes to the status quo. Changes which, in and of themselves, will also have flaws. But I think, as a conventional shorthand for “the best of all possible worlds because humanity is imperfect and damned”, you can just say the status quo is “okay” in that scenario.
Then I'd reject this on moral grounds:
Which is a better society: that everyone is approximately equally happy, or that overall happiness is greater, but at the cost of an inequality in happiness based on birthright?
I'd claim that the second system is inherently unequal and therefore we should prefer the first even if it is, in a strictly utilitarian sense, better.
To put it in concrete terms: every possible human society has some inequalities based on birthright. Or, as I stated it, perfect justice is impossible.
It’s not a question of prioritizing certain values over others, although those questions can and do arise. It’s a question of achieving any one of those values in the real world.
And I think that it's pretty obvious that we aren't at such a maximum.
Like, holding values constant, "make marijuana legal" would reduce inequality. It might have some second order effects that are problematic in general, but it would reduce policing inequality. I don't see a counterargument to that.
The only way to prove that we aren't at a global or local maximum is to make the case for some specific set of changes. If this isn't the best of all possible worlds, show me a possible world that's better. Even if we agree about the values, we can still disagree about factual and counterfactual questions enough that maybe I won't believe your better world is possible, or that your possible world is better.
> Like, holding values constant, "make marijuana legal" would reduce inequality. It might have some second order effects that are problematic in general, but it would reduce policing inequality. I don't see a counterargument to that.
The original value we were trying to maximize was the value of black lives, because your claim is that nobody can possibly support the status quo while believing that black lives as as valuable as white lives. So let's try and stay consistent here--you're the one shifting values on me all of a sudden! :)
I happen to agree with you about cannabis, but as I said before, that's the same as saying that cannabis should be legal irrespective of racial equality. And that's because we agree that cannabis usage is less of a threat to black lives than the enforcement of cannabis prohibition. I think the number of black people killed in police encounters due solely to the prohibition of cannabis is probably very marginal. I might be wrong, but again that's not a values difference.
Wait now hold on! I'm not trying to maximize the value of black lives. My claim is that black lives are currently given less value than white (or broadly, other) lives. The goal isn't to maximize the value of black lives, but to bring parity to white lives. Maximizing the value of black lives is a very different position.
Or in other words, Black Lives Matter is about maximizing equality. I claim that Marijuana legalization is one such change that will reduce inequality, and will have few enough side effects that they don't make it unacceptable to implement.
tl;dr: We were looking to increase the societal value of black lives, but that is done within the lens of achieving equality.
> I think the number of black people killed in police encounters due solely to the prohibition of cannabis is probably very marginal. I might be wrong, but again that's not a values difference.
I would agree, but (at least if you take the systemic view of racial injustice that I do) the long term impacts of things like incarceration due to the inconsistent enforcement of petty drug charges do have far reaching consequences that make other kinds of change difficult to consider/analyze.
Fair. Though they are effectively the same until parity is reached.
> I would agree, but (at least if you take the systemic view of racial injustice that I do) the long term impacts of things like incarceration due to the inconsistent enforcement of petty drug charges do have far reaching consequences that make other kinds of change difficult to consider/analyze.
And here we are back at (hypothetical) differences over our respective understanding of the situation, particularly in comparing the social impacts of drug use and incarceration. I still don’t think any difference in values is necessarily implied.
Two people have have a moral position and disagree because they are fundamentally working from different axioms.
Again this isn't very charitable. I've had many of the same discussions and very few people I've debated this with come to the conclusion that things don't need to change. Most agree that things need to change, but they conclude that different changes are warranted than you do.
Many people today focus the change on step 2 ("police will naturally interact more with black people") with policies like defund the police, while others might focus on changes that change the step 1 ("Because black people commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime"), while others even still will focus on things the are priors to even step 1.
Disagreement on the change required is perfectly normal and to be expected. Just because people disagree on the change and don't see things exactly as you do doesn't mean they don't care or are bad people.
This isn't a very charitable interpretation.
There is no lack of injustice in the world. There are more injustices in the world than any single human can possible wrap their head around much less devote attention to caring about.
Just because someone prioritizes other concerns does not mean they are uncaring about a concern you care about, just as you prioritizing the concern you care about do not imply that you're unconcerning about the injustice the other person is prioritizing.
If I live in a neighborhood that has a greater incidence of violence, it's reasonable to assume that such a neighborhood might experience more policing. A neighborhood that has more policing in inherently one where you're more likely to be caught afoul of any law, violence not withstanding.
I had friends that lived in the boonies that saw a police officer maybe once a month if that. At the time I lived in the suburbs. I saw a cop maybe once a week. Now that I live in a city I see a police officer roughly once a day or every other day. If you see cops more often, it's more likely that you'll commit a crime in their presence and be incarcerated.
To get a more definitive answer on the magnitude of effect racism has, it would be important to control for other factors so you have a more fair comparison.
For example, if you take people of race X, Y and Z that are all of the same socioeconomic status and live in the same neighborhood, what is the likelihood that each are arrested for non-violent crimes?
The meta point here is that policies can disproportionately affect people with certain characteristics without any intent to disproportionately impact people with certain characteristics.
Racism may very well be the cause of the phenomena you've highlighted, but the data presented thus far is mostly inconclusive and at best suggests an amount of racism that explains far less of the discrepancy than accompanying confounding factors.
The sundry multivariate analysis I've seen (example [0]) attempted generally arrive at the conclusion that yes there is some racism, but that the magnitude of the impact of racism on outcomes is greatly overstated relative to other explanations. That doesn't mean that we still shouldn't address that injustice, but it does mean that there may be lower hanging fruit we might want to address first if our goal is a maximal improvement in justice instead of a modest improvement in justice. Not that we should eventually address all injustices, but resources are finite and it's fair to have a discussion about how to prioritize tackling different injustices and come to agreement on criteria we use to prioritize tackling different injustices.
Basically of that 3x rate, what percent is explained by racism and what is explained by other factors? What are those other factors and what is the contribution factor of each towards the 3x discrepancy.
[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-ana...
You can't strip phrases like that of context. "All lives matter" isn't just a statement, it is a direct response to black lives matter (too).
Anybody who's been half paying attention to the news for the past few years understands that and is not making an utterly harmless assertion.
In fact, the angry reaction to "all lives matter" precisely is what encourages its use. Because if you take as premise, that "all lives matter" is true then it becomes easy to cast anybody who gets angry about a true statement as unreasonable.
You might think that there are no Mongolian tourists in America, especially right now, but you might be surprised how little many people pay attention to current events.
[Disclaimer for the internet mob, I have never and would never use the phrase.]
Your statement
> Placed in the context of BLM, it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
simply doesn't reflect the actual beliefs of many people who use the term. I, for one, am absolutely certain that racism exists and gets people arrested or killed. However, I have seen people become fed up with the narrative being promoted by BLM that frames the issue as being a 'black only' problem. To keep those people on the side of progress it's important to make sure we're not excluding them from the discussion.
It's also worth noting that BLM is not just a movement, but there are organized entities operating under the brand. [1]Many people disagree with those organizations for reasons that have nothing to do with racism or police brutality. Nonetheless, those people are called racist and accused of using dog whistles.
If you're not trying to communicate effectively, or if you are trying to communicate your sympathy with racism, you keep using that phrase.
Language is a tool.
Therefore, if someone uses a phrase also used by racists/communists/some other baddies, and does not fall into that category, it is your error to guess that someone does. It is just victim-blaming for error of judgement.
In the context of a programming discussion, "Just hash the string and see if you get a match" is a reasonable and meaningful thing to say. In the context of cooking breakfast, it's meaningless drivel.
Reasonable people try to use words that their current audience will understand in the current context. If they make a mistake, they learn from it.
Unreasonable people insist that they are being victim-blamed.
This is exactly correct. Not everyone's experiences are the same, leading different people to wrap a situation or a statement in different context.
When some people hear BLM they wrap it in the context of the ideology of the founders, or in the riots they see on television, or in the intense anti-[insert group] hate on social media. Those people aren't racists, and they would happily work with you to combat corruption in our politics and policing. They want the world to be better, they simply disagree with how the movement is organized.
> Unreasonable people insist that they are being victim-blamed.
People who said 'All lives matter' early on were labeled racists and attacked mercilessly on social media and television. I don't believe these people are all unreasonable.
Maybe you are a Marxist and you think it’s a grand idea to abolish capitalism and the nuclear family. But actually, effective communication is a little beside the point here. If you effectively communicated that you wanted to abolish capitalism and the nuclear family, nobody would care or pay attention. If you instead hid those ideas under a slogan specifically chosen to be as undeniable as possible, you can sneak a lot of things in pretty fast.
> it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
Like you did here. In my experience, an "all lives matter" activist is quite happy to both acknowledge racism and have a discussion on the nuance of racial treatment in the United States.
Where the two sides really differ is in their general view of America. Whether its optimistic or pessimistic. Whether its isolated or systematic. Whether its "racial" or "cultural".
To be blunt, its absurd to label a movement which has millions of adherents as a "racist dog whistle". Its either an overt, racist megaphone or just a difference in opinion.
> its absurd to label a movement which has millions of adherents as a "racist dog whistle"
It's entirely possible (and historically true!) for millions of people to be overtly racist.