Black Lives Matter.
They are words you’ve no doubt seen stamped all over the Internet. A simple phrase, meaning, quite directly, that the lives of Black people matter. That they need to be protected, cherished, respected, not systematically targeted or shattered.
An idea so straightforward, yet it’s one of the most hotly debated across dinner tables, news panels and your social media feed, with responses such as “all lives matter” being bandied about.
Which, of course, is the point. All lives do and should matter, but it’s the Black ones that are historically under attack, as the death of George Floyd last summer once again made painfully clear.
Many a metaphor has been employed to illustrate this. In a 2019 Harper’s Bazaar piece entitled, “Why You Need to Stop Saying ‘All Lives Matter;'” academic, writer and lecturer Rachel Cargle explained, “If a patient being rushed to the ER after an accident were to point to their mangled leg and say, ‘This is what matters right now,’ and the doctor saw the scrapes and bruises of other areas and countered, ‘but all of you matters,’ wouldn’t there be a question as to why he doesn’t show urgency in aiding that what is most at risk?”
