Not My Story

But it made me cry...

Yes, All Lives Matter...

But if your kneejerk response to "Black Lives Matter" is "All Lives Matter" then you are very much missing the point. Thankfully a nice person at Reddit explained it better than I possibly can, so here, read this and see if it changes your mind about the slogan. Apologies for any serious language, this is a serious topic.

Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don’t get any. So you say “I should get my fair share.” And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, “everyone should get their fair share.” Now, that’s a wonderful sentiment — indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad’s smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn’t solve the problem that you still haven’t gotten any!

The problem is that the statement “I should get my fair share” had an implicit “too” at the end: “I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else.” But your dad’s response treated your statement as though you meant “only I should get my fair share”, which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that “everyone should get their fair share,” while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out.

That’s the situation of the “black lives matter” movement. Culture, laws, the arts, religion, and everyone else repeatedly suggest that all lives should matter. Clearly, that message already abounds in our society.

The problem is that, in practice, the world doesn’t work the way. You see the film Nightcrawler? You know the part where Renee Russo tells Jake Gyllenhal that she doesn’t want footage of a black or latino person dying, she wants news stories about affluent white people being killed? That’s not made up out of whole cloth — there is a news bias toward stories that the majority of the audience (who are white) can identify with. So when a young black man gets killed (prior to the recent police shootings), it’s generally not considered “news”, while a middle-aged white woman being killed is treated as news. And to a large degree, that is accurate — young black men are killed in significantly disproportionate numbers, which is why we don’t treat it as anything new. But the result is that, societally, we don’t pay as much attention to certain people’s deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don’t treat all lives as though they matter equally.

Just like asking dad for your fair share, the phrase “black lives matter” also has an implicit “too” at the end: it’s saying that black lives should also matter. But responding to this by saying “all lives matter” is willfully going back to ignoring the problem. It’s a way of dismissing the statement by falsely suggesting that it means “only black lives matter,” when that is obviously not the case. And so saying “all lives matter” as a direct response to “black lives matter” is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.

I know I'm racist. I was born and raised in a racist society, and I'm absolutely certain that I have internalized things that happen in a way that I don't see the problem as clearly as people who are victims of racists attitudes can. I fight it when I'm aware of it, but I bet I offend people all the time with my racism, and I bet I am blissfully ignorant of some, if not most, of the hurt I cause that way. And I'm sorry about it. I try to get better, I try to recognize the ways my skin color has benefited me, but there are some experiences I will never be able to truly understand. And I will never truly get rid of it, no matter how hard I try. I will do the best I can, but it's so embedded in our society, so pervasive, that I don't know if it'll ever go away in my lifetime. I hope things are getting better, but I have my doubts.

Black Lives Matter. Don't dismiss the slogan out of ignorance or deliberate misunderstanding of what it means. Black Lives Matter.

Linkdump

Adam Savage talks about cosplaying. I love this little story.

Check out this comment on Reddit that explains how people find it easier to eat out and why it's often a surprise to folks to find they can eat at home cheaper.

You heard about that woman that got $2 million for spilling McDonalds coffee on herself? Well, here's the real story, which is far more nuanced and reasonable than people who constantly repeat the lie about her getting $2 million. Don't have time to read it? She didn't get $2 million, only enough to cover her very real medical bills caused by third degree burns from coffee that McDonalds knew was too hot, due to hundreds of complaints. And she didn't spill because she was driving, the car was parked and she was a passenger. Read the first comment on the post, as well. I do wonder how often the lie will be repeated before more people say, "um, she didn't get that much money" than say "that's outrageous!"

My feelings on this project are so very mixed I have no idea how to respond to it. I am linking to it for your edification.

Listen to Wikipedia. Nice background sounds, actually, driven by something happening out there in cyberspace.

There's something very, very frightening to me about having calls for boycotts treated as hate speech. Incitement to not buy? How is that "political terror"?

Easy to read parking signs are easy to read. I like 'em.

A few links

Oh, hail... Seriously, go look at these pictures of what a hailstorm did to a town. The car dealership images are particularly amazing.

Google makes you forget.

How open data can save people money.

While I enjoy seeing "if you liked this book, try this other book" memes, I've only read four books from this one, and one of those (Serephina) is in the "try" column.

Mark Evanier's iPhone mystery.

Hitler's useless defenses.