Matt Cooper
Managing Editor
Photo Credit: Star Tribune
Last June I was speaking to a friend from Tanzania. We were driving down the highway between El Dorado and Wichita. I was helping him move to a new apartment in southwest Wichita. His bed mattress and box springs bounced up and down in the truck bed as we drove.
Then suddenly, half way between the two towns on the turnpike, we passed a highway patrolman. My friend nonchalantly hunkered down in his passenger seat and said something I may never forget.
“If you get pulled over, you get a warning,” my friend said. “But if I get pulled over, the cop is going to ask me to get out of the car and spread my legs.”
He then told me that he knew being black in America was dangerous; I couldn’t help but give him a pensive look from out of the corner of my right eye and agree.
What my friend had pointed out so succinctly is a basic truth that we face as human beings and more specifically in our current state of affairs in the United States. The prejudices that I face as a Caucasian male will never be the same as that of a black man or woman.
These prejudices may evolve. But we are always going to be products of the past and in the case of America, that past is one of racial division and varying degrees of hate crime. As the playwright August Wilson once said, “We are left over from history.”
In the last four years, Americans have witnessed the inception of two culturally significant racial interest groups. Really though, one focuses on race and the other seems to be willingly oblivious to the significance of race.
I speak of “Black Lives Matter” and the subsequent “All Lives Matter” interest groups.
In the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in 2013 for the murder of Trayvon Martin, the Black Lives Matter movement sprang into action, forming chapters from Los Angeles Calif. to Philadelphia Penn. The movement has only came to strengthen in the years since. After Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, Mo. which led to months of rioting in the city and after Baltimore, Md. resident Freddie Gray turned up deceased in the back of a police van, “Black Lives Matter” seemed to become part of the every-day lexicon. It became a movement that acknowledged that the race issue is by no means a problem of the past.
On the other hand, we have “All Lives Matter”. This is a secondhand movement which attempts to encompass “Black Lives Matter” into a greater attempt at inclusiveness. But what are black Americans to think when certain politicians belittle the movement? Such was the case when last year Sen.Tim Scott from South Carolina, himself a black man, proclaimed in an interview with CNN that if anyone didn’t like his using the phrase “all lives matter” then it was quote, “their issue”.
The argument that Black Lives Matter is exclusive of the rest of society seems to this reporter as shallow at best. But, that is the argument that some make. That somehow the movement is based on reverse racism has become plausible in some certain company.
Feeling offended or excluded by the struggles of another race of people, does not make their problems go away. “Black Lives Matter” is about bringing to light the persistent and ever aging issue of racial targeting.
And yet there is a kind of subtle racism that exists in our country right now which has enabled a neglectful attitude toward the plights and abounding rights violations of minorities across the nation.
So, do all lives matter? Yes.
But my hardships as an American middle class white male will never equal that of any black man of the same stature and intelligence. Because as my friend at the beginning of this story pointed out, police officers will simply give me a warning.