But a slogan like "All Lives Matter" wouldn't be asking for everyone to be treated equally? Why's that?
No. See, I don't think you understand what I've been saying this whole time.
That seems like a double standard, because didn't someone in this topic claim that there's an implicit "too" after "Black Lives Matter"? Isn't that saying "We really mean this"? How is it okay when one side does it but not the other? "You can't tell us what our slogan means! But your All Lives Matter slogan is racist!"
If you (plural) don't want people to tell you that "you really mean this", maybe stop trying to tell other people that "you really mean this".
"Black Lives Matter" was an unfortunate and short-sighted slogan, that's all. If your slogan requires "implicit words", then you've failed to make a good slogan. There are better slogans that get to the heart of the problem.
Sorry, but your slogan is "Black Lives Matter" not "Equal Policing For All!"
If you need paragraphs of explanations in order to make it clear that "no, actually, what we really want is this other thing...", it's a bad slogan.
The slogan is bad.
The message is confusing.
If you constantly have to clear up misconceptions about what your movement is about, you've failed, and need to rebrand.
Protesting harder is just going to cement those misconceptions in the minds of bystanders and your opponents until it really does turn into a race war.
Firstly? How about when the community has stated multiple times before that these sort of things were happening in the Black Community prior, they were met with the same brush offs?
1.) "That Can't be True because it doesn't happen to me"
2.) "What did you do to earn such treatment?"
3.) "Be ok with being dehumanized on the light end and/or brutalized on the bad end, because just comply to get by"
None of these things are ok. When these things happen in the black community, certain people look for any reason why dehumanizing treatment and/or police brutality is ok. Look at the violence in Chicago, we don't see the whole picture, these cops have a dangerous jobs and they have to get home to their families.
And? It's not dangerous to be completely stripped of any authority to defend yourself against a heavily armed and organized force? We don't have families to go home to? The answer is just to hope and pray you don't get a cop who secretly has an agenda or because you're a soft target and they have a quota, that's just basically the end of your life as an hopeful American because your officer needs to make a certain number of felony arrests?
The accounts that we given in the past (hereby proven correct with the proliferation of video) mattered then, but no one believed because it was our word against cops. And more and more cops come out and say
a lot of arrests are BS. But you need to arrest people to say that you arrested a lot of people... so your budget will be high enough to get raises and get more stuff.
People's lives are being traded for job security. Families are crushed under it. And another generation has no more mobility out of the conditions they were born in. Why say Black Lives Matter? Because they do. Even if Black lives are cheap in the United States. Probably the cheapest lives there are, besides Native Americans.
If your main source of contention is that is naming, then this is a meaningless road to go down. It does not solve any of the problems that requires the group, no matter of the name. It is the hackneyed joke of over-bureaucracy of tabling a committee to discuss the naming of the task force that will be assembled to address the issues of the terrible plight that's coming our way. It's a BS time waster that people are fighting over instead of doing what they can to handle the damn crisis.
Plus, there are literally millions of people every day protesting, tweeting, and trying to spread the word about the treatment of blacks across the globe. People are not as dumb as you paint them out to be, because there's a rainbow of people standing up and saying "Yeah. We get it. Black Lives Matter. Of course they matter. They shouldn't be victimized so easily because they are a soft target". The only people who aren't getting it are people who don't want to get it. They are apart of the problem. And adjusting our collective outrage to suit them is exactly what they've been making us do for years. That Kowtow stops.
And you're going again telling us what the problem is. My problem? My problem is that if I go out in the street at night, I have a much more chance being brutalized by the hands of the police than I do anyone else in this country. Bar None. My problem is that I actually worry that any time I need to call the cops, how would I survive the situation? Every time I take a picture, I freaking wonder if this is what they are going to use on the news to say 'Another tragic accident today...'
I am not a tragic accident. I am a human being. I do not wish harm on anyone, I do not want even my enemies hurt. I wish everyone to live in a peaceful co-existence. But I have strikes 1-3 put onto me because of how I look. That makes me measure every aspect of my life, to where I eat, where I go, and what I allow to happen to me. And I have my peers, supposedly people of my internet community often telling me to let that happen because instead of changing the cops, it's best to let me deal with the subjugation that has traditionally been placed on my people.
You can not tell me that's short sighted because it's treatment that we've had for Generations. It's conceptual for you. It's the only lives we've known. That our lives do not matter. That who cares what he will say, it's his word against ours. That if I end up dead at the hands of a police officer, that people would try to comb through my media accounts to see me in an unfavorable situation and use that as justification on why I had to die years or even decades in the future.
You're telling a race that has been marginalized for their entire time in this country that they need to pick a better name because it doesn't sit well with you. How can you be that blind to not even see this is what everything is all about?
