8/15/17

Black Lives Matter -White Lives Matter:
Not the same thing at all.

Being upfront: I think most law enforcement folks are great.  I have friends who are police officers.  Heck, I have KIN who are police officers.  They have my upmost respect and support.

However…

One of my political psychology professors at UCLA back in the 1990s was a guy named Jim Sidanius.  He was a proponent of what’s called social dominance theory. SDT postulates that human societies are stratified with a superior class, the hegemony, and at least one subordinate class. The hegemony then reaps the benefits of the resulting unequal distribution of wealth, status, education and so on.

If you’re part of the hegemony here in the U.S., for example if you're a middle class white guy, most of this may be invisible to you. That bears repeating:  If you’re part of the power structure, you may not be aware of it.  You may think that everyone in the country has equal access to education, good jobs, upward mobility and so on.  All they have to do is exercise some gumption.  If they don't, that's on them. However, if you’re part of the underclass, like many women or people of color, you live in a very different world.

The institutions of society – education, justice, religion, etc. – have many functions, but they also act in part to preserve the power of the hegemony. Law enforcement, as one of these institutions, provides for the safety of the citizens and retribution for criminal behavior.  However, they may also act as agents of the overclass. Nowhere is this more clear than in the stunning differences we have begun to see on a regular basis between a police report of the shooting of a person of color and the video that shows what happened.  A clear example is the shooting of Chicagoan Laquan McDonald in 2014.  The police report said that he lunged at officers with a knife.  Yet the dash-cam video, which the city sat on for a year, shows McDonald walking away from officers when he was shot in the back multiple times. 

Is this an isolated incident? I can’t be the only person who wonders now how many other shootings of the underclass have been filed away as justified when video footage might have revealed something quite different.

And then Black Lives Matter became a movement.

But wait: Don’t white lives matter too?  Of course they do.  All lives matter.  But when you capitalize it as a movement, it’s something else entirely.  Thus, when a white person states that White Lives Matter, it's about stating membership in and supporting the hegemony and the unequal distribution of the benefits of our society. Blue Lives Matter is about respecting people who do a difficult and sometimes deadly job. And Black Lives Matter is about justice.