#BlackLivesMatter vs #AllLivesMatter

Racism is spreading like wildfire these days and personally I’d like to blame Donald Trump for helping spread the hate. Though we are all adults and we know the difference between right and wrong, so perhaps we should blame ourselves…

Black Lives Matter was started in 2012 by three black women of the LGBT community. Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza started this organization and movement after the wrongful death of Treyvon Martin. They were angered and hurt after yet another murder that didn’t make sense. It became a huge public spectacle that started riots and struck up fear in the black community. The point of the movement was to bring awareness to a big social issue. They were making their voices heard by saying, “hey, we matter……too”.

In the U.S., African Americans make up more than 1 million of the 2.3 million people in the prison system. They are incarcerated at nearly 6 times the rate of whites. More than 58% of all prisoners are either African American or Hispanic. That’s more than half the prison population.
When it comes to children in foster care, if you look at highly populated states such as New York, more than 90% of the children in foster care are African American.

Now if you look at the breakdown of these statistics, it’s easy to make the assumption that being black is the “bad race”, like they’re all going to end up incarcerated and have their children taken away…..but that’s a myth. A hoax. A very inconclusive assumption. The numbers might be higher than that of the white population, but it could very well be that whites commit an equal number of crimes or child abuse or neglect to that of blacks.

Truthfully if a white man and a black man committed the same crime, the black man is more likely to be turned in for it, charged, and sentenced more harshly than a white man.
This is the same for child abuse or neglect.There are more black children in foster care than white children, which is also due to poverty.

Following incarceration, it is difficult for the average person to gain employment and rehabilitate themselves and reintegrate back into society, so that further criminal activity is halted. However, when you add being black to also being a convicted felon, the chances of finding employment go WAY down. Thus leaving people in poverty and struggling to know how to survive and keep themselves off the street, which becomes a cycle of endless criminal behaviors. This is often what young men are brought into, because they lack the resources to do or be taught anything else. There are very few programs to work with at risk youth, even fewer in impoverished inner-city communities, and often where the black population is higher.

So with these statistics, odds that are stacked against an entire race of people, what are they to do? The women who began this campaign are also of the LGBT community. Which means they experience more oppression than most on any given day. They are shamed for the color of their skin and their sexual identity or orientation.

As a white person, I obviously want to interject my thoughts of “All People Matter”. Because we do. Every single person of the human race, no matter sex, age, gender, identity, color, race, whatever have you…everyone matters. But at no point did these women say, “White lives don’t matter”. At no point did anyone say “police lives don’t matter”. At no point did anyone say “black is better” or “more important”. The entire premise behind the “Black Lives Matter” movement was to simply say that. Black. Lives. MATTER. 

When white people sit here bitching about this campaign, we perpetuate racism. We further assert our dominance over the black race. Whether or not we intend to, that’s exactly what we’re doing. There are good black people and bad black people and good white people and bad white people and there will always be those who ruin it for the rest of us.

“Reverse racism” is not a thing. Racism is the systematic oppression of a group of people. WHEN have a group of white people been systematically oppressed? When were white people slaves? When were white people lynched? When were white people segregated into crappy schools or sent to broken water fountains or to sit in the back of a bus? At what point did people start shying away from the well-dressed white man in the elevator? 

Black lives matter doesn’t mean White lives DON’T. It means that racism still exists. It means that people are still asking to be heard. It means that some white people are still oppressing blacks. It means that while we are white and the dominating race, we owe it to our friends and family to help stop this huge and INSANE social issue.

I am not saying all white people are racist, because we all know that’s not true. Just like we KNOW not all blacks are criminals. We can’t blame an entire race for acts that some commit, any more than we can all take the blame for slavery. We CAN however, stop whining about a movement that has nothing to do with us. It’s about AWARENESS. That’s it. I refuse to spit on a campaign or a movement that is not mine. No one said I don’t matter. This isn’t about ME. It’s about the racism that is STILL happening. Because Black Lives Matter. Always. 

This is about the wrongful deaths of black men. This is about the offensive jokes rednecks in small towns are still making. This is about the black students who attended a Trump rally and were thrown out for no other reason than skin color. This is about the lack of black politicians or men and women in power. This is about the lack of black professors and administrators on college campuses. This is about the lack of black actors in our favorite, mainstream tv shows. This is about the lack of attention and representation of black history month. This is about everything we are still missing in 2016 that keeps things UNEQUAL.

Someday we just might get there, but today we're not. So until that point, it's #BlackLivesMatter.