Original post by tazarooni89I think the main advocacy of “All Lives Matter” is that, not only do Black Lives have to matter to make this true, but so do the lives of many other oppressed groups.
Of course Black people are oppressed in America and that oppression needs to be eliminated. But is the same not true, perhaps even more so, of Uighurs in China or Rohingyas in Burma? When we are capable of protesting en masse in such a scale to stand up for injustices against a certain group, why not these groups?
I agree with what you say. But once again I would point out that the same is also true of other groups of people too.
For example only a few days ago, an innocent, unarmed and autistic Palestinian man called Iyad Halak was shot dead by Israeli police, whilst he was trying to run away from them due to fear, and shortly after his career had made it clear to them that he was disabled.
But the thing is, this doesn’t tug on our emotional heartstrings as much as the death of George Floyd. Perhaps it’s because it occurred in a part of the world that Westerners don’t culturally identify with so much. Perhaps we in the UK live and work amongst many black people but haven’t ever met very many Palestinians. Perhaps it’s just because such occurrences are so common that they’re not even deemed that newsworthy anymore, and it’s almost seen as normal.
But objectively speaking, a death is a death, a life is a life, and this one mattered too. Objectively speaking, this is systemic racism as well, heavily embedded in daily life in that part of the world. Objectively speaking, huge numbers of innocent people have been killed for reasons like this, on the basis of being Palestinian. And if we naturally turn turn a blind eye to this for any of the reasons I mentioned above, we too are guilty of the same systemic racism that we are fighting against on behalf of black people.
But there is no hashtag or protest for “Palestinian Lives Matter”. In fact I said this recently on another (American) forum and received comments like:
- “No they don’t” and when asked why: “Terrorism”
- “Um sure but not as much as the lives of civilised people”
- “That’s one less Muslim in the world to deal with”
We’re able to dehumanise such people and trivialise their death’s so easily just because, on the basis of which part of the world they belonged to, lived in and were killed in, we don’t see them as “one of us”, in the same way that we do for African Americans. We’re not that emotionally traumatised by it. If that isn’t systemic racial bias then I don’t know what is.
There are many other injustices just like this going on all over the world every single day. And whilst I heavily applaud the fact that today, we are standing up against this on behalf of black people, “All Lives Matter” should remind us that these other injustices that we barely pay 2 seconds of attention to when we read it in the news are deserving of our outrage and mass protest too.
A more accurate analogy would be to say that, there is not just one house on fire. There are multiple houses on fire. But at this particular moment in time, only the house of the black man is getting the firefighters’ attention. The rest of them are constantly on fire but routinely overlooked.
I don’t think the purpose of “All Lives Matter” is to brush over the fact that Black Lives in particular are heavily oppressed.
The point is to say that there are several other groups of people which are routinely oppressed, but we tend to turn a blind eye to it. Their houses are on fire too, and we need firefighters there as well.