Black lives matter

In the wake of the George Floyd tragedy, history looks to be repeating itself in the increasingly less “U” S of A. One of the main points of division between politicians, pastors and social media pundits concerns the use of the phrase “Black Lives Matter”, or BLM for short. What I think is happening is confusion over, or ignorance of, two distinct uses of BLM: (1) BLM as a political organisation, and (2) BLM as a cultural movement. The former refers to a decentralised international human rights organisation founded in 2013 in response to the judicial outcome of the Trayvon Martin shooting (February, 2012). Although I have no way of ‘proving’ this, it seems clear enough from the circumstances surrounding its formation that the organisation began from a place of legitimate hurt with the good intentions of raising public awareness about real racial issues within the socio-cultural psyche of the USA. However, since its formation it is clear that the agenda of BLM has grown to incorporate all sorts of ideologies. For example, following some preliminaries of how the organisation was founded under the “What We Believe” section on their website, we read the following:¹

• “We see ourselves as part of the global Black family, and we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black people who exist in different parts of the world.
• We are guided by the fact that all Black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location.
• We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.
• We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.
• We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.
  We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.
• We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.
• We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
• We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).
• We cultivate an intergenerational and communal network free from ageism. We believe that all people, regardless of age, show up with the capacity to lead and learn.
• We embody and practice justice, liberation, and peace in our engagements with one another.”

Whether these concerns for sexuality, personal identity, the family unit and so on were always on the agenda for the BLM organisations or came along the way, I do not know. Regardless, it is clear that as an organisation stands ideologically for a whole lot more than just the advocacy of black people.

In contrast to the first use, the latter cultural movement takes the phrase BLM propositionally, that is, for the plain meaning of the words “Black Lives Matter”. So far as I understand, this use seems to be what most of us in the online space (at least in my social circles) mean and for the most part it seems well-meaning in its general support for raising awareness about racial injustices and inequalities around the globe. Importantly, the usage of BLM in this latter cultural movement sense does not necessarily entail an affirmation of all of the ideologies associated with the use of BLM in the organised, political sense.

Given these differences, it is clear that the divisions over the usage of BLM are ideological. Personally, I support the proposition “Black Lives Matter” and condemn racism wherever it exists. At the same time, I do not support the decentralised organisation – not at all – because, despite some good intentions with respect to raising awareness about racial injustices and inequalities, there are clearly deep seated ideological agendas above and beyond black lives related more generally to sexuality, personal identity and the family unity which I think are both insidious and destructive for the greater good of society and human flourishing (but that’s another topic for another day).

You might say, then, that I support the cultural usage of BLM. I don’t know the numbers, but if I were to hazard a guess, I would think that the majority of those who use the phrase BLM do so in the latter cultural movement sense (the BLM organisation has 792k followers on Twitter, but I wonder how many of those followers take the BLM political ideologies hook, line and sinker?). Regardless, if we have to qualify every instance of our usage of BLM in the cultural sense, lest we be mistaken for endorsing the political organisational sense, we may well wonder if it wise to use the phrase at all. For many, the answer is a simply ‘no’ and in response they promote a rival phrase: “All Lives Matter” or “ALM”. But is this a helpful alternative?

Why Particular Terminology Matters

Perhaps no literary figure in recent modern history calls our attention to the use and misuse of language in political discourse as clearly as George Orwell. In a short essay titled “Politics and the English Language”, he writes:

“It is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”²

Orwell’s concern was not political correctness (though I would love to know his thoughts on that!), but that degenerative language as “an effect can become a cause”. Language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”. Applying this to the divisions of the usage of BLM, I think Orwell has nailed it: there is something slovenly or ‘untidy’ about the uses and abuses of “BLM” and “ALM”.

I do not believe that the struggle with universal and particular language is merely a sentimental archaism, like preferring classical music to contemporary rock. Underneath this conviction is a monumental presupposition, namely that truth exists, it is objective and knowable and the function of language is to signify or point to that truth via the medium of conventional symbols and sounds for communicative purposes. As sure as words have meaning, black lives matter because the truth is, black lives matter. They matter precisely because all lives matter and it is because all lives matter that we should be concerned specifically for the fact that black lives matter. In other words, propositionally speaking, BLM and ALM are not mutually exclusive options – they are mutually reinforcing. What would be mutually exclusive is a phrase like “OBLM” (“Only Black Lives Matter”), but that is not the claim of BLM, at least propositionally speaking. Granted, the use of the phrase ALM is more foundational in its universality as a moral principle of sorts, but it is not the case in normal parlance that one need express moral complaints in strict universal terms.

Though I do not wish to get side tracked on the metaphysics of universals and particulars, I do think Aristotle has much to offer on this subject worth noting in brief. One of his major points of departure with his teacher, Plato, was his conviction that universal principles do not exist per se, that is, in themselves. Universals, concepts like freedom or justice and injustice or good and evil – even the colour red or the number 1 – do not exist in such a way that you can point to them and say ‘oh, look, there’s red’ or ‘look at freedom over there!’ Universal concepts are always instantiated within particulars: ‘look at this red tomato in my sandwich’, or ‘look at that gross act of injustice on the news’ and so on. In other words, the universal principle is what it is because of its realisation within particular instances. When justice is realised and made concrete in a just man or woman, that just man or woman is much more than the abstract idea of ‘justice’. In the same way, when a person dies on the battlefield in an act of patriotic duty, they are much more than ‘patriotism’.

For this reason, I think universal alternatives such as ALM are unhelpful. There is already too much vagueness, circumlocution and euphemism in present political discourse and we would do well to avoid it here. The more specific and concrete we can get with our language, the more accurate, practical and efficient we can be in addressing whatever it is we are discussing and that is why I think particular terminology is important. Dismissing “Black Lives Matter” because “All Lives Matter” is as unhelpful as dismissing “Unborn Children Matter” because “All Lives Matter”. Proposals resisting particular terminology to address particular issues are at best naive and at worst dismissive, which, with respect to the present subject, is to say implicitly or explicitly racist.

If we need an alternative phrase to BLM out of fears of promoting the political organisation, then so be it. I don’t have any clean answers as to how we move forward. In the least, I think we should be charitable in how we agree or disagree with one another. Those trending the BLM hashtag are not necessarily endorsing the political ideology of organised BLM. Reciprocally, those wanting to avoid such terms are not necessarily denying that there are specific racial issues which need to be addressed.

Why Universal Realities Matter

In saying all of that, I do not want to dismiss or down play the importance of universals. Without universals, we wouldn’t grasp the significance of the particulars we are considering. That BLM demonstrations have been seen across the world in recent times is testament to the reality that racism is not just a USA problem, nor even a ‘Western’ problem – it is a global problem. The George Floyd tragedy was the trigger for a fresh reckoning with the racist global history of humanity.

Fundamentally, racism is not a skin issue it is a sin issue.

Recognising racism as a problem in the human heart before it is a problem in the laws of the land is essential if we are to move forward. Regardless of one’s class, cast or creed all human beings have intrinsic worth and inherent dignity because of what they essentially are: human beings. What makes racism so morally reprehensible is one and the same with what makes it so profoundly idiotic: in wedding ideology to melanin pigmentation, racism denies particular people or groups of people rights they are already in possession of in virtue of their being human. In short: racism is dehumanising.

So if skin colour isn’t the issue, then arguing for or against the use of phrases like “Black Lives Matter” seem to miss the point entirely. The issue is not the actual colour of one’s skin but who has that colour: the person. But again, recognising as much already presupposes something universal, something transcendent about the intrinsic worth and inherent dignity of human beings.

The Imago Dei

This is where I think the Christian worldview is unmatched in its relevance and explanatory power. The opening chapter of the Bible says that human beings are unique in all of creation because they are made “in the image of God” (Gen. 1:27). I submit to you that there is no other worldview that describes human beings like that. The intrinsic worth and inherent dignity of human beings is essential to their nature, being in the image of God (in Latin: the imago Dei). Without this universal reality, what is the alternative? All one has is the construal of self-worth by some criterion of characterisation: economic status, educational degrees, social standing, visual appearance, all of these measures specify a moment in a process as a means to some unspecified end. They never quite ‘arrive’; they’re always restless, searching for the next thing. By contrast, the Christian teaching of the imago Dei is one in which a person is not merely a specification but a unique status in all of creation. As the Psalmist elaborates:

“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honour.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

(Psa. 8:3-9)

Within the Christian worldview, the polarity of universal and particular, of class and member, is one which all people have the power to transcend in the nature of their God given humanity. By comprehending the universality of our being in the image of God, we break free from particularity. As individuals, we are not simply an instance of a universal concept, ‘human’, we are ‘universal’ in a unique and irreplaceable way. We are ‘absolute’ in ourselves which accounts for the absoluteness of our intrinsic worth and inherent dignity.³

Christianity does not get any more un-Socratic than this. The absolute claim of human worth and dignity is not determined by any appearance, capacity or function spun by the wheel of chance in the lottery of nature. The absolute claim of the rational good prevails in human life upon the basis of the human being him- or herself. But it must be reimpressed that what makes this the case is not individual persons. In the words of Blaise Pascal, “Nature has perfection, in order to show that she is the image of God and defects, to show that she is only his image.” Christianity teaches that human ‘absoluteness’ in the worth and dignity of their being is absolute because of the Absolute One it ‘images’: God. Hence, being human is being an underdetermined representation of ‘The Absolute’ in virtue of the imago Dei and that is why human worth and dignity is found apart from appearance, capacity or function. Whether a person is black or white, in utero or out, has profound intellectual disability or is in a persistent vegetative state, they remain human nonetheless and thus always in possession of equal and inalienable rights.

As to why people don’t seem to realise this, the New Testament tells us plainly. People do not know because they do not want to know: “… light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19). This is sin: “they do not believe me” (John 16:9).

The sin of disbelief in the human heart gives voice to a real discovery about existence, a discovery which contextualises issues like racism. Perhaps no one said it so poignantly as Augustine when he penned: “you have made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”⁴ If being human is to be in the image of God, and if sin is not believing in God, then not believing in God is simultaneously not believing in yourself. The Johannine decision between light and darkness, good and evil, is not an academic decision about an idea but a relational decision about a person, Jesus, the rejection of whom consists of the fact that “they do not believe me” and results in a diminished, nay dehumanised, view of the self.

In sum, the Christian story has a reason for the problems we are considering and provides, not simply answers, but the answer with the greatest victim the world has ever seen: Jesus of Nazareth… and He wasn’t white.

1. Available online at: https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/.
2. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”. Available online at: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
3. Robert Spaemann, Persons: The Difference Between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, trans. Oliver O’Donovan (Oxford, UK.: Oxford University Press, 2007), 19.
4. Augustine, Confessions, trans Henry Chadwick (Oxford, UK.: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1. Cf. Plotinus (6. 7. 2. 4).