All Lives Don’t Matter

SEVENTH DAY | WEEK TWENTY-SIX | 2020 JUNETEENTH 

I can’t breathe.

Those were the dying words of George Floyd. Those were also the dying words of Eric Gardner. Those were the unheard dying words of the many black men, women, and children whose lives perished due to centuries of social injustice and the lethal nature of racism.

The sad truth is…they will not be the last.

Black people are still gasping for air centuries after the first slaves were stolen from their homes and forced into slavery, 155 years after their emancipation, and more than five decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Social injustice pervades today in all areas of black lives – in housing, education, employment, and health care.

It is not easy to live if you are redlined into densely packed, crime-ridden urban areas. It is challenging to get a quality education if you are stuck in underfinanced, substandard schools. It is difficult to create wealth if you are systematically discriminated in all areas of life that matter.

So, when people say “all lives matter,” they’re missing the point. Yes, all lives matter, but not all lives have been in a state of terror for more than 400 years in this country. Saying “all lives matter” is like ignoring a chronic heart disease because all your organs matter. It discounts and diminishes the focus where it is needed: the chronic subjugation of black lives and the deep structural inequality that they face every day.

There comes a time in every generation when the wound becomes so infected that the body of people cannot stand it. Now is one of those times.

All lives don’t matter until black lives matter.