When she saw our Black Lives Matter sign, our neighbor asked me, “Don’t all lives matter?” She got me thinking. I realized that she was correct or almost correct.
All decent people, religious and nonreligious folk; conservatives and liberals, can agree that all lives are equally valuable — the old white guy, the migrant, the Black infant in the stroller, the Asian housewife, the Middle Eastern carpenter, the white lady shopping. But it’s more an aspirational belief than a lived reality, and always has been.
Since before our country’s birth, men were valued more than women (hundreds of years later, men still earn more for the same work); European settlers and their descendants killed off most of the Indigenous population, stole their land, tried to obliterate or co-opt their heritage; originally only white men with property could vote; Africans, kidnapped, tortured, raped, murdered, were forced to do the work that made capitalism successful and provided the base for the industrial revolution; Jim Crow created vastly unequal education and health systems, class structures and property ownership opportunities (inequities that have never been fully addressed).
So, a little emphasis on the lives of the dispossessed is warranted.
