All Lives Matter Analysis

"All lives matter" is a given, a truism, close to a cliché. It is easy to claim, as a consequence. No reasonable person would resist the generalization. Of course, pretty much everyone says, all lives--all human lives, that is--matter (though Cecil the Lion evidences that at least some non-human lives matter too, apparently sometimes more so than human lives).

"All lives matter" is a universal moral principle, a Kantian categorical imperative. Other things being equal, all lives matter, equally. Except when they don't. And they don't when other things are taken not to be equal. Like racial standing in a society such as ours.

The universalizing politics of "All lives matter" is one of racial dismissal, ignoring, and denial.

The insistence
Black people are far too readily denied decent education and employment, stopped and frisked, apprehended, incarcerated, criminalized, animalized, killed.

Black lives in America are the objects of social suspicion as their constitutive condition, their very being. Blacks are presumed to be up to no good, to be no good. Black lives are flippantly extinguished, not least by cops, by state representatives, by law and order. For no good reason other than being ontologically suspected, the given objects of suspicion. It is necessary to insist that "Black lives matter," to shout it out loud, to organize around it because this society provides repeated proof--literally on a daily basis--that in the U.S., for it, for many, Blacks don't.

So "Black lives matter" is not a cliché, precisely because the truth it expresses is far from a given, precariously established, if at all. Its anti-truth is evidenced in the constitutively fraught everyday of Black lives: walking while black, driving while black, speaking "as" black, speaking b(l)ack, shopping while black, being at home while black, being black at school, black at the pool, black in the hands of police, black in prison. Just being