All lives matter.
Phew, got that out of the way. And it’s good to do so early, because any time someone makes a statement like “Black Lives Matter” it does not take long before someone screams out loudly and defensively, “All Lives Matter!”
As if somehow, someone pointing out that “Black Lives Matter” means that white lives for some reason do not matter.
TWO HOUSES, ONE ON FIRE
The cartoon that helped me really get and explain this the best was created by ChainsawSuit.com. It was a picture of two houses and the one house was on fire. A man stands with a hose pouring water on the house that is not on fire while you see the other house busy burning to the ground. The man has a speech bubble that says, “All houses matter.”
Can you see how ridiculous that is? Of course all houses matter. But at the moment one house really needs water because it is on fire and the other one doesn’t. So someone who arrives and shouts “Burning houses matter” when he sees the man with the house ignoring the burning house is not saying anything negative about the house that is not on fire. He is just at that moment drawing attention to the house that is in trouble and really needs some help.
ALL SICKNESSES MATTER
Arthur Chu was a man who on Twitter helped create the same kind of clarity by tweeting, “Do people who change #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter run thru a cancer fundraiser going ‘THERE ARE OTHER DISEASES TOO!’?”
Again, this feels like an easy one. He also tweeted a similar one about someone at a funeral announcing, “I TOO HAVE FELT LOSS!”
That is absurd and so we don’t do it. So why do we (I speak on behalf of white people here) feel the need to do so when someone says, “Black Lives Matter”.
ALL LIVES DO MATTER, BUT
I can’t think of a country in the world where there has been a need to announce that “White Lives Matter”. That seems to go without saying. When we look at how news is broadcast, how Hollywood and toy factories alike have catered predominantly to white people, and how whiteness itself has been raised worldwide as the standard of beauty, excellence and capability, white lives quite obviously do not need intervention.
But black lives have not always been treated in the same way (and I think we still have a very long way to go on this to be honest). In fact, more often than not it feels like they have needed advocates who will call out “Black Lives Matter”, not because white lives matter any less, but because too often that has not been an obvious statement of truth.
WHAT WOULD JESUS SAY?
If we look at the life of Jesus, we see that He constantly was redirecting His gaze towards the marginalised and needy. Those who had been pushed to the side. Those who needed an advocate. In His time it was women and children, it was lepers and it was Samaritans. When the crowds tried to keep people from Him, He was always pushing through to be right with that person. To Jesus all lives really did matter and He made sure that we would have the example of being aware of those that don’t seem to matter as much, so that we could do something about it.