"Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feelings

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

Well, that isn't exactly correct. Genes determine skin color just as they determine a great many things. We inherit our genes from our parents and they from their grandparents, wtc etc.


As this image shows, our ancestors skin color arose from the condition that our first ancestors were from. It is a evolutionary advantage that has been passed on. No one is more or less for having a different skin color, it just means they all had past family members that were good at surviving and adapting to the environment around them.

Now as we head into the future and more "dark skin" genes and "light skin genes" and "tan skin" genes mix maybe the your statement will be true.

To the person who thinks slavery is unique to America, you are quite wrong. Every current and past country has had slavery at some point, and once those slaves were freed they were treated like shit. There are still smaller countries where there is still slavery. America just happen to be one of the last larger countries to give up on it and accept them into society.

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

I only agree with all lives matter. Because no matter if you're white, black, gay, straight, or short, tall, skinny, fat, or anything in between all lives do matter. I get why they have black lives matter to fight racism but at the same time it's like so Asians lives don't matter? I think it's best to say all lives matter. So personally I only agree with all lives matter.

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

If you are addressing me, I did not say slavery was unique to America. Not at all. I suggest reading what I wrote again.

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

I have heard one person say "all lives matter" (unironically) in real life. That was a black man.

---------- Post added 24th Feb 2016 at 05:44 PM ----------

See I don't think the BLM movement is representative of black people at large. Just young liberal black people from certain areas of the US.

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

All civilizations in human history have collapsed, but I don't think the present one will. Nobody would turn up for a revolution. Not as long as they are busy with netflix, relationships and food.

Europe has many countries that had to do with slavery at some point. They preferred to keep them on their countries of origin, extracting diamonds, working on silk or cigarettes, etc. So much for your wonderful, civilized Europe.

We could ask, what is slavery? You can enslave someone by debts, by guilt, by so many other things...

Think slavery is still alive, under many other names and disguises. Where do you think your sneakers come from? Do you even care? But yeah, we keep buying them anyways...

About the topic -> 'Black lives matter', say it loud and proud, even as a white man. White privilege? Sure it exists, deal with it. Feeling guilty just because of being white? Doesn't make any sense to me, I didn't chose this, therefore I also have zero white pride... I'd rather be ashamed of all what whites did. We owe them, there can be no doubts about it.
'All lives matter' was a nice try, very clever, but I won't buy it. One of those verbal tricks, more doublespeak. Language is a trap.

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

The problem with the phrase "Black lives matter" is that it really should be "Black lives matter too." I think the omission of that last word has created a PR problem for that movement. I think that PR problem was exacerbated when CNN aired the question "Do black lives matter, or do all lives matter" in a presidential debate as if there's a dichotomy between "Black lives matter" and "All lives matter."

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

You kind of a point there. Part of the white supremacest ideology is to erase other races outside the white and black binary. Thus the implication is that other non-whites aren't as important, and it's not like police aren't murdering Native Americans and so-called Latinos.

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

It's unfortunate that one little adverb can create such a controversy, but that is how it is. Those who are gifted in common sense know that "black lives matter" does not mean "only black lives matter", but the same can't be said for the masses in general, nor those who simply wish to create trouble by focusing on a loophole in the phrasing. Saying "X matters" does not imply that Y doesn't matter. It's not clear to me why this is such an issue for most people, but clearly it is, and BLM should've played it safe and included that little "too" at the end.

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

It's an issue for many people partly because of how it's (often) presented. For instance, the question that CNN chose to air in the presidential debate was, "Do black lives matter, or do all lives matter." Phrasing the question this way is antithetical to interpreting, "Black lives matter" with an implicit too at the end. Such a question should've never been aired in a presidential debate.

When people hear it phrased like that, I think that it's reasonable for them to interpret "black lives matter" to mean "only black lives matter."

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

I think both movements have good intentions but won't really ever work out. The goal should be equality, not more segregation.

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

The question was poorly phrased. However, I still think the vast majority of people pitching fits about "black lives matter" know good and well that the intent was not to say "only black lives matter." They just want to be pissy about it and try to use semantics as some kind of gotcha.

The movement was in response to a specific issue....unarmed black people getting shot by cops. To me, the tactic of crying "all lives matter" is very similar to people who try to undermine other causes by telling people that their pet cause is more/just as important, except in this case, the detractors often don't have an actual cause, they're just bigots.

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

Interestingly, here in the UK a lot of complaints about immigration is centred around Eastern European immigrants, hence the whole Brexit issue. Though I do agree you can't say the UK isn't racist at all.

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

Story tends to repeat itself unless we keep it in mind, and it seems we are not doing a good job seeing that there are still people who refuse to even accept there was even a holocaust.
We do need to keep in mind what happened. The rise of the nazis didn't happened overnight. Antisemitism had always been there, tolerated even inside academia. The nazi parti had been around, waiting for a chance, and they sure had it when Germany went to hell after the first war.

You ask me if young germans owe all the victims anything today, and we sure do. We owe them to remember what happened, and keep in mind these people were not just 'jews' or 'queers', we owe them to remember their names, their struggle, the iniquity comited against them, and who was to blame, and what ideologies were to blame, the ideologies that went against human rights. We owe them to keep in mind the answers, for the next time we heard something similar, so we can stop them and say 'Hey, this tune is not new, we heard that one before'. Such atrocities never happen overnight, people just act careless until it's too late and one morning you wake up and a terrible law is there, and monsters are in positions of power. We owe them to keep awake and vigilant as well.

History is invaluable because it's not just a theory : There are images, records, written testimonies... We can see what happened is for real. You can't discuss an image of a KZ and go 'Well, they seem a bit underfed and unhappy, but who cares? It wasn't me who sent them there'.
However if we discuss an idea, no matter how radical it is, we can't see the consequences of the idea, therefore we do need to keep in mind history to avoid repeating it again.

Of course we owe them, same as americans owe the blacks. We are sharing this earth, so we owe one another anyways. It's not about guilt, it's about the moral responsibility with the guy living next door, and with your own morals.

 

Re: "Black lives matter?" "All lives matter?" "White privelege?" My thoughts and feel

I am not sure why people got all up in arms over this.

It was meant to draw attention to black people that have been targeted by cops, and the shootings of black people. People got all upset about a minority groups saying 'hey folks, we have an issue we need to address". This simple fact tells me that we have a MUCH larger problem about race and with racial relations than people in the USA want to admit.

If a Transwoman was pictured outside of a male bathroom, dead, with the caption 'Trans lives matter' under the pic, people would get right on board with 'we have to protect Transpeople'. No one did that for black folk, and it's sad.