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It Depends On What You Mean By “Black”
Having just come home to Maine from attending the funerals for three slain police officers in Baton Rouge, I was again mystified as to why “Blue Lives Matter” and “Black Lives Matter” aren’t understood to refer to overlapping groups. Surely anyone who lives in an even moderately diverse city—or watches television— would notice that not all law enforcement officers are white?
In Dallas, surrounded by police officers of every hue and addressed by the remarkable Chief Brown, it seemed obvious enough to me that Micah Johnson, who only wanted to murder white officers, failed in this, at least; he managed to kill three white ones along with one Mexican-American and one Taiwanese-American.
Less picky, the Baton Rouge cop-killer murdered Corporal Montrell Jackson, who was just as black as the man, Alton Sterling, that his murderer wished to avenge.
It struck me that the failure of what gets referred to as “both sides” to communicate is rooted in semantics; when police officers and other ordinary Americans use the word “black” they do not mean what Black Lives Matter activists mean by the word.
An ordinary American looks around and sees a black president with a black family living in the White House. There’s a black attorney general, black government officials in major cities, and black police officers patrolling their neighborhoods. Ordinary American veterans served in the military alongside black people, often under the command of black officers. Ordinary Americans very often can boast (if they bother to boast about something so…ordinary) spouses, children and other family members of different races. Meanwhile, to ordinary Americans, the travails of black people living in poverty don’t look all that different from the struggles of their poor white neighbors.
So naturally, the ordinary American’s response to “Black Lives Matter” is to say what seems perfectly and inoffensively obvious: “All Lives Matter.”
The ordinary, older American sees Chief Brown, or Montrell Jackson or the president, and thinks “wow, cool! Things have changed.” As the president himself will sometimes admit, things have changed …but not enough. Just look at Ferguson, Baltimore, the death of Alton Sterling at the hands of white officers in Baton Rouge.
Given that Corporal Montrell Jackson and others like him are available, why would the likes of Alton Sterling (a documented domestic violence offender and sexual abuser armed with an illegal firearm) be anointed the very model of authentic blackness?
Because—silly ordinary Americans!— “blackness” isn’t about having black (or dark brown) skin. Blackness means being different from whiteness, with most of the characteristics ordinary Americans think of as being ordinary and American defined as “white.”
When a black person takes on those characteristics, they become less representative of “blackness.” (Hence the especially vicious vituperation heaped upon the heads of black police officers during #BLM protests.) This distinction was articulated in an essay on the website Everyday Feminism:
“Under white supremacy… those who most fully represent Blackness (the poor, queer, femme, disabled and women among the community) have nothing to celebrate.”
“If your activism prioritizes (some) people gaining rights over destroying the system, or doesn’t consider that part at all, it will never be activism that benefits the Blackest and poorest of us.” Everyday Feminism
Get that? Those who “most fully represent” Blackness are sexual minorities, impoverished, disabled or female (though my guess is that Michelle, or Oprah, don’t count either).
By this definition, Montrell Jackson is not black, and neither are Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Clarence Thomas or most of the many black police officers who joined me in honoring the dead in Dallas and Baton Rouge (nor, for that matter, those who traveled to Maine twenty years ago to honor my late husband).
In a startling variation on Martin Luther King’s formula, black people are indeed not to be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. If their character is demonstrably good, if they have made fine, intelligent choices and virtuous use of the life God gave to them, they are less black… or maybe not black at all.
How extraordinary. How idiotic.
Published in General
Having knowledge assumed of you is a privilege. Even if it’s true that your demographic trends better or worse on a metric, if that trend is allowed to replace individual assessment you’ll have inaccurate ratings on a demographically biased basis.
Go see Hillary’s America and you will. {:-)
A “white guy”? Get it straight, TG, he was a Zionist (that’s the coc term . . . I’ll spare you the book “The Son of Pigs and Apes“).
The Left has never objected to stigmatizing and denigrating based upon race and ethnicity . . . it was done to non-whites until about 1965.
Even a solid retort like this is accepting some of their ideas, though. Do we need to find ancestors who were victims to be considered equals today?
You know that’s an exaggeration. The new guy argued that white racists have been weirdly attracted to Republicans since Goldwater. The guy did not argue that all righties are racist.
Check out Mona’s new podcast. Sadly, some whites are joining urban blacks in dysfunction.
Asians will assimilate to upper-middle class white culture (if they haven’t done so already). They will be like the Irish or Italians. Those people were originally considered to be racially suspect but integrated so well into America that they barely have a sense of being a hyphenated-American.
Kate Braestrup: “Under white supremacy… those who most fully represent Blackness (the poor, queer, femme, disabled and women among the community) have nothing to celebrate.”
I believe that the author is trying to say the more victimized you are the less white you are. I believe that she believes that victim=innocent and doing well=oppressing someone else.
Great post and spot on.
You’ve clearly identified the reason that the slogan isn’t All Black Lives Matter.
I wish you would write a post about this. Black religious leaders have been at the forefront of the pro-life movement for years, for example. They know intimately the perfidy of the Left, which disproportionately targets poor black communities in its abortion advocacy. There is a hardworking, church-going, decent black middle-class which no one, on either side, ever cares to talk about. Why not?
Andrew Klavan talked about this on a podcast awhile ago. I remember it being a remarkable thought at the time. (The whole thing is good but if you are in a rush, listen at 15:00)
@She, this is brilliant. That’s a t-shirt I’d wear.
Black Lives Matter care not one wit for actual black lives. Almost 90% of murdered blacks have it happen at the hands of other blacks. Black Lives Matter is the latest iteration of the attempt to gain political power and money at the expense of white guilt . This game has been going on since at least the 1960’s.
Until the black community looks hard in the mirror and fixes the pathology in the black community black lives will continue to be lost.
And yet, they use black churches as the organizing point for Democratic pols urging their members to vote enmass for the Left.
The Left will not talk about black families who adopt conservative values and thrive, because they have captured the votes of an entire race by grievance mongering race-baiting rhetoric and have no interest in improving the lives of black families.
Conservatives have just given up. We see that the black families who emerge from the wreckage of the urban community and move in with us in the suburbs do not want to participate in changing politics; they are too busy trying to do triage for their extended families. They do not vote. They won’t vote for the Democrats who betray them, but they don’t want to lie to their families, so they won’t vote for Republicans, either.
Well, but calling Alton Sterling a victim is also a neologistic use of an ordinary word, isn’t it? The truly bizarre thing is how easily the left is able to suppress a supposedly heartfelt outrage about violence against women (“There’s No Excuse For Domestic Violence”) in order to wax lyrical about “this father of five.”
It is one thing to object to perceived or actual police misconduct, no matter who has been on the receiving end.
As a human being, a child of God and a citizen, Sterling deserved the best the police could do to preserve his life even if he was spending it by (frankly) making other people’s lives unpleasant.
With Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice there are—or at least appeared to be, for the casual observer—one very good reason to excuse misbehavior and accord them “innocence”— they were young. But how could anyone get all misty-eyed over the all-grown-up (and ironically named) Sterling? If it was not the nobility of his character that drew Jesse Jackson, and senior representatives of the President of the United States to Alton Sterling’s funeral service, what was it? If it was race alone, why weren’t all these people in attendance at Montrell Jackson’s funeral?
Incidentally, the Governor, the mayor of Baton Rouge and the Chief all spoke beautifully, with great love. I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with the people of Texas and Louisiana.
No, I’m not sure at all. That’s part of the point.
In fact, now that I think of it, the extraordinarily strained vocabulary may be a symptom of the end of the racial divide. More and more Americans are not just theoretically accepting a multi-racial society, but living it intimately within their own, racially-integrated lives.
Here on Ricochet, from casual remarks dropped here and there by members, it is obvious that many (maybe even most) of us have family members of what certainly would have been considered “other races” a few decades ago, including white people with black family members and vice versa. The strategy of dividing races—whether on the left or the right—is now a matter of drawing lines not through cities, or even neighborhoods, but through families and even through American bodies. The president’s, for example.
It would not surprise me if the racists who support (at least via Twitter) Donald Trump would—given more than 180 characters to work with—describe a “whiteness” that is something other than skin color, too. At least in my experience, once you get someone who casually dismisses “blacks” in conversation, it turns out that his Marine Corps drill instructor, or the guy who works beside him at the factory doesn’t really count…
We’ve always made exceptions in our human racism. Hitler himself lamented that even his most ardent Nazis had a tendency to make exceptions for their “good Jews.” Hypocrisy is not the worst of sins, really— give me the hypocritical racist over the racist-with-integrity any day.
In his book A Bound Man, Shelby Steele—like the president, the product of a biracial marriage— speaks of a “blackness” that is something other than mere skin color, too. And he writes of the anxiety that feeling inauthentically black, (or too white) can provoke. This explains some of the odder aspects of Obama’s character (attending Rev. Wright’s church, for example) but I think it may also explain the willingness of black Americans to put up with, and even endorse the public beatification of the likes of the ironically-named Sterling.
Let me guess. Was it a Unitarian church? (Sigh.)
I’ve been in Catholic churches where the priest might have berated the same way. No Christian sect’s preachers have a monopoly on sanctimony!
Thank you, GFH. It was my sad privilege to go to Baton Rouge to attend all three law enforcement funerals, as one of thousands of law enforcement officers and their chaplains. I didn’t know any of them personally, though I wish I had.
Sure, there are plenty of liberal black churches, not to mention Black Liberation Theology churches. But it is not true that all black churches fit in with and parrot the Democratic Platform.
Because they largely refuse to challenge—vocally and publicly—the dogma of the black community’s so-called leaders. These “leaders” are people who for five decades White Leftists have touted as speaking for all blacks. Often they are merely stooges for the largely White Leftist power structure (also known as Democrats) which to maintain its positions of power requires a permanently dependent black underclass—ill-educated, ill-mannered, unemployable, often criminal, often violent. Those characteristics are glorified by what gets peddled to unthinking adolescents as “authentic” black culture. Barack Obama has done nothing to confront this abomination (in fact he promotes it) because he’s a half-white beneficiary of the White Leftist power structure. It’s not cynicism; it’s self-interest that powers a coherent yet perniciously paternalistic worldview.
This is changing . . . people like Sheriff David Clark are proof of this. Until a vast chorus of courageous black men like Sheriff Clark rises up and directly challenges the White Leftist power structure—directly undermines its legitimacy and destroys the influence it has over black lives—the Democrat political machine will continue to grind to dust black men, be it through aborto-genocide or by pushing degenerate lifestyles that result in hundreds upon hundreds of dead black men every year.
I will bet at least 90% do.
Blacks get around this by saying black policemen aren’t authentic blacks, much like the “No True Scotsman” argument. Just look at the treatment Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice got. The terms “Oreo” and “Uncle Tom” are thrown around like confetti.
I’m willing to bet most BLM supporters believe black cops are traitors to their race. So sad . . .
Is it sanctimony or is it redemption that motivates these preachers and priests? The point of supporting BLM, it seems to me, is to—depending upon your pigmentation—redeem your non-blackness or affirm your blackness. No one ever loses social credit for identifying with a victim. Thus politics today is so overwhelmingly (and stultifyingly) a competition over victimhood.
Excellent post, Kate; thank you.
I’ve always wondered at the fact that blacks should be a natural constituency for Republicans on social issues, and hispanics (Catholic pro-lifers, family-oriented) too. I believe they’re afraid of being called Uncle Toms and race traitors. Bill Cosby spoke out against black youths’ unsuitable behavior and falling-down pants etc. Unfortunately he has been neutralized. Maybe I’m wearing a tinfoil hat, but I’ve wondered at the timing of all the women suddenly stepping forward after all those years. For the same reason I wondered at the timing of the leak of David Petraeus’s affair just before he was to testify about what really happened in Benghazi. People who speak out against the Establishment Left have bad things happen to them.
Have I got you to read Robert Putnam’s Our Kids? It’s the most Kate friendly book I can think of, and it pretty conclusively demonstrates that a lot of the facts that underlie racial politics stopped being true in the last two decades, particularly the last decade. If you don’t love it, I will owe you two drinks at the next meetup mutually attended.
I’ve certainly found the concept of “white [n-word]s” to be widespread among white racists.
I am Dallas Police Chief David Brown and I approve of this thread.
So, if I tell you truthfully that so-and-so is a graduate of Harvard Law School is it an unearned privilege to assume he or she ‘has knowledge’? Why is assuming someone who demonstrates punctuality will be a more productive employee an unearned privilege? Why are we even using the language of “privilege” as concerns actual attributes of individuals, like academic achievement and punctuality?
We are doing so because the Left has run out of excuses for underachievement in certain minority communities. There must be some other cause . . . can’t be that an individual exhibits behaviors that no employer ever has desired.
If you are going to accept the Left’s terms of debate, you might as well not bother with politics at all. You will never recover from that initial concession.