*This article is addressed to white people, particularly those from a Christian background, and especially those who want to better understand the use of the term “Black Lives Matter”, or explain it to other white folks. The Porch community is diverse and includes many Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color. If you’re among the people whose suffering, burdens, and courage is surfacing into wider society, thanks for your patience as we each try to discern the work we’re here to do together.
Let me explain. And if I do a good job of it, I'll have provided my white siblings with another angle on the importance of #blacklivesmatter being left alone in the spotlight—and why correcting it with “all lives matters” is, at best, inappropriate. I'll be doing this explaining the way I do everything; as a white, heterosexual man who sees the world more or less through a Christian lens.
In first century Palestine, one of the most tragic things that could happen to you was to become orphaned or widowed. Why? Because it left you vulnerable to poverty, starvation, isolation, homelessness, and very often physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. To be a woman or a child robbed by death of a husband and a father in that context was to lose your familial anchor, your rudder and your sails. It was to be robbed of all security and to become a lost and damaged piece of property that some man might take in or refuse like a stray. It’s not like there was a robust job market or government programs to create opportunities and protect people.
But wait. Wasn’t life hard for other people back then too?
Absolutely.
In that pre-science, pre-modern-medicine context, there were so many ways life was hard for everybody. But within that difficult context, widows and orphans were particularly vulnerable. Their hardships were particularly compounded. Theirs was a particular hell.
Which, for those in the Christian tradition, brings us to an interesting thing Jesus’s brother James said:
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
Notice anything?
Notice he left out men. And married women. And children whose fathers were alive.
Notice….he’s discriminating.
James, James, James—what’s wrong with you? Don’t you understand that we’re all God’s children? Don’t you get that “Faultless Religion” is actually caring for all people?
James is highlighting a particular vulnerability in his context that needed particular care. To say or imply “all people need/deserve care” ERASES the particular distress of widows and orphans. Of course indiscriminate love of all others was how James operated in general. But his particular call for his readers to not overlook the vulnerable in their midst was to, in fact, discriminate—to focus primarily on those whose suffering was most acute.
James even says this is how God defines good religion.
When white people say all lives matter, it ERASES the particular suffering of Black lives in the American context.* It’s not that all lives mattering is untrue, it’s that it stubbornly corrects the plea of particular sufferers, as though what they need is to be told that their unique pain is better addressed by it being absorbed into a generality. Or, to be subsumed into a narrative Black people are already a minority in. This correction that seeks to add more lives into the equation, erases the suffering of specific ones who beg to be seen.
Of course all lives matter.** But religion that God (the God of the Jewish and Christian scriptures who always sides with the oppressed and distressed) finds faultless is when triage is well administered, and vulnerable lives are lifted up, dignified, and cared for with the primacy their particular suffering demands.
This takes nothing away from other kinds of suffering. If anything, it benefits it because it teaches us all to be ever-more precise about pain since suffering can’t be remedied by abstractions and generalizations. "Black Lives Matter," among other things, gives Black people the spotlight they deserve in the eyes of the God of the Suffering and of those who want to apply this God's love and justice. To correct this, to plaster over it with generalized (and even spiritual-sounding) language, is to in effect say to the widow and orphan, “Hey, everybody gets hungry. Everybody gets sad. Everybody gets mistreated.” Addition is subtraction.
Perhaps you don’t believe that in 2020 USA, having Black skin makes you the target of disproportionate harassment, profiling, police violence, arrest, sentence length, and other ills affecting employment, housing, health, education, etc. For some, it remains important to deny that there is any particular plight associated with Blackness in the US. I’m unlikely to change your mind here, unfortunately. But I do hope, if you value the text, that you'll pay attention to the other thing James said in that same section about the legitimacy of our religion being measured in how we care for those whose lives are particularly vulnerable and difficult, because he also said:
“My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry…”.
It could literally save lives if you’d open yourself to listening, to going slow, and to changing your mind—especially if that mind has become defensive and annoyed—about this.
If you are white and really believe all lives matter—and I think you do—then join me in allowing Black ones to speak to their experience while we allow ourselves to be a humble, engaged audience to that: Read Black authors. Listen to Black voices. Be shaped by Black theologians*** and philosophers. Believe Black testimony. And let us do more than look for individual Black voices whose perspective sounds more like our own. Let us listen to those whose lives are marked by a particular distress, remembering that doing so doesn't mean our own lives haven't had hardship, and let us remain unpolluted by the defensive, cynical, unteachable and arrogant spirit of the world.
Black Lives Matter.
* I do not imply that being a Black person is a tragedy, a sad thing like being widowed or orphaned. My analogy (and I believe the spirit of James’s point) stands on the ways Black people suffer uniquely, and how that unique suffering rightly qualifies Black experience to be identified as distinct, such as BLM seeks to.
**Interestingly, I never see people correcting "all lives matter" with "blue lives matter," or "blue lives matter" with "all lives matter." In my experience, I only ever see "Black lives matter" being “corrected”.
*** Black people are of course Christians. Be careful not to think (or hear me saying) that Black people are another category of people than Christians. They are not a “mission field” for white Christians, but are voices well-acquainted with the Biblical narrative on justice, oppression, redemption, equality and the overarching theme of Jesus’s all-loving-but-up-punching movement. Black Christian voices are voices that white Christians have historically, intentionally or un, often silenced and marginalized. Let us be quick to listen.
Steve Daugherty is an ordained minister, award-winning storyteller, and author hailing from the Research Triangle NC with his wife Kristi and three children. Make his interests yours at stevedaugherty.net
