Black Lives Matter answers a question of emphasis – with so many worthy causes, what deserves attention?
Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, explained why she emphasizes black lives during the University of Idaho”s celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
In her keynote address, she affirmed that all lives matter – but that a specific group of people are denied their worth and humanity. Diverting attention to “all lives” is dismissive and counterproductive.
Garza discussed the pain she felt in the wake of Trayvon Martin”s death. How could this still be happening in 2012? How could a child, Skittles and iced tea in hand, be gunned down with impunity? Could her brother be next?
Garza found a way to channel her shock, anger and sadness into a movement that has pushed the unfinished work of racial justice into the forefront of the national conversation.
Danny Bugingo
Argonaut
But her framing of the situation – her emphasis – bothers me. Martin was not an irreproachable child. He was a teenager, loud, funny and troublesome. Scared that a strange man was following him. Defensive. Dead.
When we martyr Martin and make him the cherubic victim, we lose important pieces of the story. Garza rightly denounced media outlets combing through Martin”s life and looking for any evidence of delinquency – any reason to rule him out as a “thug.” Nobody should be put on trial for their own death.
However, we should not counter this injustice by putting forth the narrative of an innocent child that was killed for eating Skittles. We ought to emphasize that we believe in rule of law and not vigilantism, that a school suspension does not mark someone for death, that black lives – even misguided ones – matter.
When someone like Martin, a black youth, is suspended from school or acts out, society looks no further than some sort of moral failure on the part of the child or the parent. Choice is seen as consciousness in a vacuum – a context-free decision between “good” and “evil” completely divorced from environment and life experience.
When black people steal, shoot and murder, they have chosen “evil.” If only they had the grit, the resolve, the moral strength to grasp American opportunity and choose “good.”
The most powerful moment of Garza”s presentation came when she mentioned Rachel Jeantel, a key witness in George Zimmerman”s trial. The court of public opinion ridiculed and rejected Jeantel. She was illiterate and ghetto, a courtroom sideshow.
Garza noted that the condemnation was of Jeantel and not the public schools that let her down. Instead of engaging a broken education system, America passed around YouTube videos and gawked at its own failure. A legacy of being entertained by black culture and completely uninterested in black people continued.
Garza shifted our understanding of Jeantel”s style of speaking beyond poor decision-making or moral failure. She pointed to a specific systemic issue, education, instead of pretending that Jeantel was a skilled orator in a racist courtroom.
Emphasizing causes and systems, rather than glorifying every black person facing injustice, will make justice a reality for all.
The reason behind black struggle is no mystery, nor is it an accident. It is the result of policies that were intended to subjugate black people, policies that will continue to reverberate through American institutions, even with reform, even without any super villains of white supremacy.
Jeantel was not uneducated simply because her parents did not try hard enough – there is a far longer chain of causality that runs through American history. Black people were robbed of the New Deal and the ensuing accumulation of intergenerational wealth. Black people were denied reasonable interest rates and relegated to the ghetto. Black people were and still are mired in a sprawling system of mass incarceration.
Fundamentally, this country was not built for black people – it was built at their expense, and this fact plays out in violent, poor, black neighborhoods every day. America responds the same way it responds to drug addiction, mental health crises and any other social issue – by over-policing and incarcerating.
State sanctioned violence is not the answer to problems in black communities. But if Martin was a saint, then the central point of Black Lives Matter cannot be made.
American politics are quickly changing. Millennials, whose formative experiences were the invasion of Iraq and the Great Recession, are skeptical of power structures and will vote in larger numbers than ever next fall. There is bipartisan support for changing how we approach criminal justice, and conversations are opening up that were not possible even five years ago.
We should emphasize broader causes of social issues and not dismiss people as morally deficient. We should emphasize broader systems and see justice as more than redress for singular incidents. Opportunities for meaningful reform are rare. We cannot afford to get this wrong.
Danny Bugingo can be reached at [email protected]