Mattering lives

Black lives matter.  It needs to be said.  It shouldn’t, but it needs to be said.  Brown lives matter, too.  Of course.  Indigenous lives matter.  LGBTQ lives matter.  Of course.  It’s not a competition.   When someone says “Black lives matter,” and someone else responds with “All lives matter,” in theory, the counter-response should be, “Exactly!  That’s the point.”  But, really, they are missing the point, aren’t they?  And if someone responds with “White lives matter,” or “Police lives matter,” then they’re REALLY missing the point.  Not because the melanin-deficient or officers of the law DON’T have lives that matter, but because nobody is SAYING we don’t.  At least outside of the paranoid fantasies of white racists afraid of losing privilege.  Certainly, there are not massive governmental, economic and cultural institutions acting consistently and forcefully as if they don’t. The same is not true of the other categories I listed.  Police are not acting collectively as if they could casually shoot any random white person (let alone each other), and expect no serious consequences to follow.

If, when you hear someone say “Black Lives Matter,” a person from some other oppressed group responds “so do ours,” that is at least understandable.  When this reaction comes from a member of a privileged group, this is a classic “What about me?” response.  “What about me”-ism happens when an oppressed person speaks about their oppression, and a relatively privileged person feels compelled to respond with some version of, "Well, we have problems too..."  What has effectively happened is that the oppressed person has been silenced. Again. It's a way we privileged people have of telling less privileged people that only OUR voices count.

On the specific issue of murder rates, it does seem that “Black lives matter” needs special elaboration, above and beyond all the others.  I haven’t seen data on Native Americans as homicide victims, but one study I read showed that black Americans are killed at about 12 times the rate of whites.  Latinos are killed slightly more frequently (as a percentage of their numbers) than whites, but the difference is relatively small.  Still, it all depends on time and place, doesn’t it?  We’ve seen mass graves in Texas.  Massacres of immigrants in border states, by vigilantes – maybe  by Border Patrol? – are hidden in the dark of the night, and not tracked by statistics.  Even one murder inspired by racism and mindless hatred is too many.

But the mattering of lives is not just about life and death.  It is about our hopes and aspirations, the things we strive for in our short span between birth and dying, and our dreams for our posterity.  Those of us with white-skin privilege, especially if we also have some share of class, male, straight, cis-gendered privilege, easily form and sustain many expectations in these areas.  We may not achieve our dreams, but those governmental, economic, cultural institutions have not been organized to dampen our hopes.  I’m not saying nothing ever stands in our way.  That would be stupid.  But what privilege is all about is that things stand in our way less often*.  We get more encouragement, less discouragement.  We get a lot more helps along the way.  What “Black lives matter” is about is black people saying, “We want that, too.  Our dreams matter as much as yours.  We want as much chance to form them, and see them to fruition as you do.”  Until EVERYBODY, black, brown, women, LGBTQ, WHATEVER has exactly the same chance at these things as white, cis-gendered, straight men**, then BLACK LIVES MATTER.  It needs to be said.

Footnotes and afterthoughts

*Some people will object to this, because they’ve bought into the “reverse racism” bullshit, and they think the Great Society social programs actually succeeded in eliminating discrimination, have maybe even gone too far.  I won’t go into detail on that, except to say, if that is you, study the actual data, not the sound bites.  Listen to the actual life experiences of black people.  If you believe racism and discrimination have effectively ended, you’re wrong.

**I don’t explicitly include class issues in this list, because wealth disparities simply need to be eliminated.  There is no way to equalize the power distribution between rich and poor other than by eliminating poverty and wealth.

Another aside:  Not a single thought in the above is unique to me.  And I hope I don’t come off as “white-splaining”.  I’m certainly not trying to teach people of color any of the above.  But I encounter, continually, enough confusion and uncertainty about these ideas from other white people, that I thought it would be worth throwing my 2-cents-worth into the mix.

That’s not the American Dream...

I’ve had people tell me that the so-called “American Dream” is about the idea, however false, that anybody can get rich.  Therefore, they argue, if your politics tries to clip the wings of the very rich, people feel you are choking off their dreams, and they won’t support you.

I won’t deny that there’s some truth to that, and if the issue of class fairness is presented the wrong way, you might get that reaction.  But I don’t think the American Dream is really about the ability to get filthy rich, and I think if you frame your arguments the right way, you can get around this obstacle.

Now, everybody has occasionally fantasized about what it would be like to be just stinking rich.  But I don’t think Americans feel that helping some people to get rich is a matter of justice.  I had to frame that sentence carefully.  If I had said “allowing some people to get rich”, a lot of people would think that was just.  To arbitrarily prevent some people from getting rich, “just because”, would be seen by many of us as simply mean.  But if you frame the question in terms of what others would have to give up for that person to become rich, then people hear a different story.

The American Dream is really about the idea that anybody, maybe even everybody, can do well.  It is about prosperity, not opulence.  You should be amply rewarded for a lifetime of honest work, and if you’re especially clever, or work especially hard, you should have a proportionate increase in your level of well-being.  That just strikes most of us as fair.  You should be secure in your enjoyment of these things.  You should do well enough that you can enjoy a few hobbies, and leisure time with your family.  When you’ve paid your dues for 40 years or so, you should be entitled to a comfortable retirement.  You should also have the right to feel confident that your children, and your children’s children will have the right and ability to enjoy the same comforts and opportunities that you have.  This is what the American Dream really means, to most of us.

What we need to get people to understand is that some people’s ability to become super rich, if it is realized, chokes off this dream of prosperity for the rest of us.  When 1%, 2%, even 10% of the people receive half of the total income produced by society every year, and lay claim to more than 70% of the total wealth, they do this by squeezing it out of our paychecks, out of our public or common goods (parks, roadways, schools), out of our healthcare, our retirement – lately, out of the equity that could have accumulated in our homes.
The vast wealth of the lucky few has been justified to us on the basis that they are somehow the engines of economic growth, that they are “job creators”, that their enormous wealth is somehow necessary for the rest of us to be prosperous.  We have now had nearly two generations of experience to prove that that is a lie; that policies to benefit the super rich not only don’t help the rest of us, but actually do us harm.

Since the mid-1970’s, when neoliberal talk of “job creators” and “trickle down economics” began to take hold, the richest 10% increased their share of national income from about 1/3, where it had held pretty steady since the early 1950’s (and which already meant they made between 4 & 5 times, on average, as much as the rest of us), to reach 50% about 2007.  Did this make the rest of us better off?  Total employment did grow a little, at the beginning of that period, before it crashed at the end of it, but it had been pretty stagnant for nearly a decade before the crash.  And how much of that “expansion” in jobs represented low wage, no benefits “Macjobs”, replacing the good “middle class” jobs that people had lost?  And our sense of security in a prosperous future for ourselves and our children has virtually disappeared. 

Trickle down economics does not, and never has worked.  Many, if not most, of the people who originally espoused it never really believed it would.  It was a convenient lie to justify their rampant looting of the economy.  It’s time we put an end to it.  We must put an end to it, if we are ever to reclaim the real American Dream.

“I have seen good working people, Throughout this mighty land. I’ve prayed we’ll get together, And together take a stand. “Then we’ll own those Banks of Marble, With no guard at any door. And we’ll share those vaults of silver That we all have sweated for.”