On the Matter of Black Lives

Let's imagine a street lined with high-rise buildings. One of them is burning. What do you do? All of the buildings matter, but the one on fire matters most at that moment. The thing is, if you don't put out the fire in the burning building, you risk all of the surrounding buildings burning down as well. This is the message of the Black Lives Matter movement: Black lives are under attack, and we all ought to galvanize a sense of urgency to address the direct, structural, and cultural violence that Black people face. It's not only the right thing to do, but the fate of the entire neighborhood depends on it. We, as a society, cannot say we are all free and equal until those who are at the bottom of various domains of our society — political, economic, social — are also free and equal.

Needless to say, this message of mattering sounds differently to different people. This is perhaps best illustrated by the competing hashtags in response to #BlackLivesMatter, such as #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter. These rejoinders, or at least the motivation behind these alternative hashtags, we believe, can best be understood with the help of social science research, which tells us that Americans across different racial groups see the world differently. This is one of the few facts that social scientists actually agree on. On matters related to race and racism, white Americans and Black Americans, on the whole, have almost diametric perceptions about the way the world works. Latinx and Asian American attitudes often fall somewhere in between these viewpoints, sometimes closer to Blacks', other times closer to whites'.

There are many reasons for this divide, but one that strikes us as particularly noteworthy is the tendency for Americans to surround themselves with (or be surrounded by) people who are very similar to them. For example, one study showed that if the average Black American had one hundred friends, eighty-three of them would be Black, eight would be white, two would be Latinx, and the rest would be of some other race. If the average white person had the same number of friends, he or she would have one Black friend, one Latinx friend, one Asian American friend, a few friends of other races, and ninety-one white friends. Perhaps more striking is the finding that nearly 75 percent of whites do not have any nonwhite friends.

Intuitively, this makes sense. We live in a racially segregated society. We tend to live in neighborhoods with people of similar racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. We go to schools with people who are demographically similar to us. And at eleven o'clock in the morning on Sundays, when many Americans go to church to worship, their communion with one another still initiates the most segregated hour of the week. As we will explain, this reality is the outcome of historical and contemporary public policies, but it is also due to the choices of individuals, some of whom have more choices and greater latitude to pick and choose than others. Ubiquitous racial segregation across several domains of American life means that whites, Blacks, Latinxs, Asians, and American Indians live very different social, political, and economic realities.

People across racial groups also have different relationships with racial inequality and racial injustice. As such, when members of different racial groups hear "Black Lives Matter," some are likely to interpret the meaning of that message in different ways. Some folks may hear "White Lives Don't Matter" or "Black People Hate the Police," thus leading them to defensively declare, "All Lives Matter." We should like to note that these interpretations are quite antithetical to what the participants of this social movement intend to communicate. Its supporters might be afraid, tepid, or even suspicious of some police officers, but they are not anti-police, mostly just anti-police-brutality. They are not even antiwhite, because that too would be antithetical to the purpose of the movement; although, to be clear, they are anti-white-supremacy. While these alternative interpretations serve to undermine Black protestors' efforts to codetermine the narrative that explains ongoing racial inequality, they show us that some people are simply oriented toward inequality in a totally different way than others.

For other people, the message of "Black Lives Matter" resonates clearly. In this slogan, they hear, "Yep. Black Lives Don't Really Matter" or "[Insert name of any Black person] Could Be Next," thus leading them to suggest that something needs to be done about racism in US society. Supporters and participants of this movement, like those of previous Black social movements, believe that "we must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other — we are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to contend even with the inexorable forces in order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the world!" Again, different life experiences lead to alternative perspectives of how the world works, what our roles are in it, and what we can do to change it for the better.

The phrase "Black Lives Matter," generally speaking, is an odd thing to hear in the first place, particularly in the twenty-first century. If we could travel in time and report back to Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth, they might be surprised to learn that a major social movement that began nearly a century and a half after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment (which abolished slavery) and during the first self-identified African American president's second term in office is premised on the notion that Black people's lives are in a precarious position. Indeed, that is the point: "The brilliance of the slogan 'Black Lives Matter' is its ability to articulate the dehumanizing aspects of anti-Black racism in the United States."

Many Americans often feel a sense of cognitive dissonance when they hear this slogan chanted in the street, printed on T-shirts, and debated by pundits on the evening news. On one hand, native-born Americans and immigrants alike have been taught that if people play by the rules and work hard, everybody has an equal opportunity to succeed. The path mapped out toward the American dream is indelibly imprinted on our brains; our shared language of individualism and value of meritocracy is practically learned through osmosis. We find comfort in knowing the formula to American-styled success like we know the back of our hand. On the other hand, a movement that suggests that some lives matter less/more than others has developed well past the historical era when Black Americans were first eligible for full citizenship. Something does not compute. Right?

These two dueling ideas...