Black Lives Matter

After an exhilarating exchange with my daughter, Amanda, and son-in-law, Dan, about the issues surrounding protests over police conduct we focused briefly on the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” We agreed that all lives should matter or that all persons have significance and are each “endowed by their creator” with certain native rights such as “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.” Then it occurred to me that this phrase was written when most “Black” people living at that time in America were in economic and social bondage. They did not enjoy the liberty granted those whose “conditions of servitude” were different from their own. If a human being is the personal property of another human being, and laws were written only to protect that property, then the slave benefited only from the rights afforded an animal owned by his owner. That person, who was enslaved, might rightly ask “What do I matter?”

The statement “black lives matter” answers those who say “black lives don’t matter.” If we say, “white lives matter more than black lives.” Or worse, if we repeat the pre-emancipation ethos that assumed “black lives matter only as they are valued property” then the retort “black lives (really do) matter” makes perfect sense.

Regardless of your race, have you ever questioned your personal worth? Is not the phrase, “I feel worthless” not behind the assertion that “my life should matter.” I have a tendency toward social introversion. In some settings I feel as though I am invisible. Have you ever been in a conversation where you spoke and no one acknowledged your words? They just hung in the air and floated away. In such a situation, I ask, “Am I talking to myself.” This is another way of saying, “Do I matter to anyone here.” I can remember seeing a half dozen black people standing in the alley behind a café waiting for their lunch orders to be passed to them. They were there because that was the only way they could be served. I wonder how their sense of worth was impacted by social racism. They might have rightly asked, “Do black lives matter.”

I mistakenly thought the phrase “Am I not a man and a brother” came from William Wilberforce but it seems that Josiah Wedgewood, in the late 1700’s engraved this on a medallion. It brought the question of slavery from economics to ethics. We don’t own our brothers and sisters. Property has economic worth, persons have spiritual, thereby, infinite worth. It is a worth “endowed by a Creator.” The phrase “Black lives Matter” at least faintly echoes the question posed by British anti-slavery advocates. It is now the five times great grandsons and daughters of slaves, long ago given their freedom who raise the question afresh. ”Do I really matter?” I think the sane and humane response ought to be “Why do you ask?”

I don't wish to imply that black persons are more worthy, only that such persons might have a cause to question their perceived worth in the eyes of the majority race. I certainly am not in a position to judge how black people are treated by police officers.