Black Lives Matter

We are living in extraordinarily polarized times.  Every statement is fraught with the potential to be affirmed or vilified with overwhelming emotion.  Stay silent, and you'll get scolded for your apathy.  Take a side, and you invite rebuke from the other side.  See both sides, and you invite invective from people tired of "bothsidesism."  

I am not without agenda or motivation to jump into the fray, messy and exhausting as it is.  But sometimes I simply want to appeal to a common decency and humanity that I hope that the vast majority of people in my life can, without complaint or argument, connect with across a diversity of life experiences and partisan loyalties.  Today's post is just such an attempt, and yet the waters are so roiled that I must wade in with an abundance of caveats and caution.

The issue of race, intersected with power and politics and money, is an explosive one, and 2020 saw one conflagration after another.  Perhaps to the irritation of many, I am torn by it all, far more impatient and radical than some think appropriate and far less willing to burn it all down than others think right.

There is a time to litigate complex issues like whether and how to reform our criminal justice system, what if any changes are needed to our capitalist economic system, and which political party holds the promise for the most progress.  Now is that time.  But this post is not that setting.

What's poignant about the statement "Black Lives Matter" is that it started out in part with the desire to express the same sentiment as I've summarized above.  Obviously there was much behind the three words that wanted to get accomplished beyond the basic statement of humanity.  But it was also a plea for the more simple understanding that Black lives, like all other lives, are of value, and that in the face of the trauma that goes into being Black in this country, such a statement needed to be asserted.

Of course, "Black Lives Matter" is also a specific entity with a specific political agenda and operational tactics, both of which have engendered both passionate support and heated opposition over the years.  Which may make it difficult if not impossible to parse the difference between "Black Lives Matter" the lightning rod organization and "Black Lives Matter" the appeal to common humanity.  

It is important that we litigate these matters.  Race, politics, power, and money are worth learning about and arguing over.  Irrespective of our walk of life, these are relevant conversations.

I must point out, though, for some of us these conversations hit closer to home, the matter one of visceral identity and not intellectual discourse.  To inhabit a Black body is to feel the heaviness of centuries of oppression, to be traumatized over and over again by every new video and every new incident, to be surveilled and patronized and fetishized and scorned.  

I do not know what it is like to inhabit a Black body.  I am free to move about the world without all the weight and pain and attention that goes with that.  I have been fortunate to be brought into that perspective from dear friends, proud Black sisters and brothers, who have confided in me the exhaustion, rage, and dissonance that comes with being Black in this country.  And while I listen and feel alongside them, I cannot fully understand how encompassing this heaviness is.

But as Asher's dad, there is a direct and personal connection that enables me to feel some of the weight, and along with it the abject terror and worry that goes with it.  And so as with other parents of Black girls and boys, I fret and panic and hold my breath.

There is a time for saying "Black Lives Matter" and meaning all kinds of other things that go along with that simple statement of humanity.  Such meanings are ripe for substantive discourse and meaningful action and as such engender vehement support and opposition, as they should.  And maybe there is no way to say these words without them carrying all of that discussion with them.  

But for some it is in fact a basic statement of humanity.  Some inhabit a Black body and simply ask for that body to matter in this world and not be treated as disposable or sensationalized or less than.  And some of us hold tight to a Black body who means the world to us, and as such fret over how that Black body will be viewed and treated and valued as it grows into a man.  It is in this spirit that I assert, today and every day, that Black Lives Matter.  Asher's life matters.  All Black lives matter.