All Lives "Should" Matter. But They Don't.

White public opinion could not “conceive of the negro having any rights at all”: “Men, who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors, will cheat a negro without feeling a twinge of their honor; to kill a negro they do not deem murder; to debauch a negro woman they do not think fornication; to take property away from a negro they do not deem robbery….They still have the ingrained feeling that the black people at large belong to the whites at large.” *

Richard mellor
Today there are hundreds of thousands of people across the US protesting police violence and the killing of black people in particular. As she says in the video, a black person can surrender to the police and still die.  We see it all the time.

In this situation, to raise in response to Black Lives Matter, "All Lives Matter" is simply absurd. Of course all lives matter. As I have said before, if Jews in Nazi Germany were calling for Jewish Lives Matter, would we respond with Christian Lives Matter?

The police are an arm of the state and they swear by oath to defend the laws of the state. In our system they defend capitalism. They are there to prtect Amazon, the banks, the energy companies, the tech billionaires and so on.

In the poorest communities and the urban centers, heavily populated by black people, the role of the police is to ensure the anger and rage at the system that has abandoned them cannot develop in to any for of organized resistance. In strikes they defend the bosses rights not the workers. Historically the police have broken strikes and often with extreme violence.

There is one staggering statistic that reveals the racial disparity in the US that is a product centuries of social marginalization since the times of slavery.   The Wall Street Journal noted last week that in 2016, the median Black household had $18,000 in net worth. The median white household had $171,000.

There is a "pandemic" of racism and violence directed specifically at this group of people and it has a long history in the US.  It is important to see and understand that racism and color prejudice is ingrained in US society, it has been the main means of social control and how the ruling class has maintained power.

I made a short video myself in relation to the use of "All lives matter" or "Blue lives matter".

It is also of no help to say to a person of color, "I don't see color" in order to separate oneself from those that apparently do. Whether you "see" color not is not an issue. The state sees color, society sees color, and it sees color very differently.

* Eric Foner: Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution