Black and Blue Lives Matters
Black Lives Matter is a movement in opposition to the
perceived excessive brutality used by the police against people, especially
men, of color. The reason for the movement is pretty clear; unarmed Black men are routinely killed by police. Even
undercover Black police officers are sometimes
killed by their White peers who mistake them for a perpetrator rather
than a brother in blue. This is because,
as Bryan Stevenson has so brilliantly demonstrated in his book Just Mercy, when it comes to Black people there is a
presumption of guilt rather than a presumption of innocence.
So, what is the purpose of Blue Lives Matter? Blue Lives
Matter is Jim Crow in sheep's clothing.
The attempt to create an equivalence
between Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter is disingenuous. While police
officers do die in the line of duty, a job they willingly undertook as opposed
to people who were drafted into the military, Blue Lives Matter implies that their
lives are not valued in the same way as Black people's lives are not valued. If
a police officer suddenly decides that being a police officer carries a higher
risk than she or he is willing to take,
they can always remove the uniform and
find another job.
Black people do not have the option of ceasing to be
Black. Furthermore, there are no eleven, thirteen or fourteen-year-old police officers. So, Blue Lives Matter is just
another tactic in the traditional role of the police as enforcers of unequal
and unfair treatment of Black Americans.
Black people were slaves until a century and a half ago.
Then, there was a hundred years of Jim
Crow, denial of voting rights, terrorism in the form of lynchings,
unjust and biased prosecution, segregation and job discrimination, especially
in the South. While Black people are sometimes
killed by police without cause, police are
insulated from the consequences of their actions by a panoply of laws
that allow them to claim fear, an unquantifiable
and untestable entity, as a justification for the use of lethal
force.
When police do get
injured or killed, the public automatically provides pensions and death
benefits for the officer. If Black people are
killed or injured by the police by accident, incompetence or malice,
they have to prove malfeasance by the officer by
suing in a court, a remedy beyond the means of most of the poor people who are
overwhelmingly the victims of police misconduct.
Anyone who doubts the accuracy of
the above analysis (and even those who don't) should read Just Mercy, A story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson.
Get it on audio (available on Audible) being read by the author. It will change
your life.
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