All lives matter vs Black lives matter

Years ago I worked for a boss who invited me to an event on the grounds that ‘people’ would be there. I asked her what she meant by this, since I’m not generally invited to events where there are no people, just random packs of hyenas, or waddles of penguins. The response I got was ‘You know, People’. I was starting to sense a capital P. It seemed there was a difference between People and people. I pushed, knowing full well what she meant but wanting her to have to spell it out. ‘Oh, well you know, the great and the good. People’.

It was not the first time I’d come across this idea that there are People and there are people. Words which are meant to encompass everyone rarely do. More often terms such as ‘all’, ‘everyone’ and ‘people’ are loaded with several meanings. When writing up my PhD 20 years ago I used the example of the contest over the university seat of Edinburgh and St. Andrews in the 1906 general election. Women graduates claimed their right to vote as university members. However, when the case was brought to court, the Lord Ordinary argued that ‘person’ in the 1868 Franchise Act did not include women. ‘Person’ might just mean ‘men’. Not everyone counts, particularly where power is concerned.

I encountered it in another guise later, when investigating the work of early twentieth century explorer—zoologists. White, male, at least upper-middle class, but sometimes aristocrats and often at least upper class, such explorers would write of the loneliness of solo exploration. But in a journal entry a few pages further back, they would have made some glib comment about the string of porters required to carry their equipment, the cooks, even sometimes the guards. They would have twenty people with them but cooks and porters, usually from local populations, weren’t People, so they didn’t count. Sometimes people are just nobodies, and somebodies feel isolated when surrounded by them.

All this might seem irrelevant and outdated. What does it matter what words were used in nineteenth century acts or by an elite group of zoologists some hundred years ago? But I was reminded of this not just by my former boss’s definition of ‘People’ but a reference in a manuscript I edited. This was a work by Exmoor writer Hope Bourne, written in the late 1960s, lost for almost 50 years and rediscovered in 2014. In the text Bourne made a reference to ‘Red Indians’. As an editor it gave me a headache. We were publishing it as a period piece but that did not give me reason to offend anybody so I spent some time trying to work out if there was a better term to use.

I considered changing ‘Red Indian’ to ‘Native American’ but aside from it simply not being something Bourne would have said, on investigating I found it had the potential to be just as offensive. There are Latin Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Italian Americans, Jewish Americans. The only Americans who don’t usually need qualifying in some way are white Americans. The very term ‘American’ might or might not embrace all those other groups. Just as ‘person’ might or might not include ‘women’, ‘American’ might not mean everyone living in America, but only a very specific subset.

In these instances, the terms ‘person’, or ‘American’ refer to a template, a perceived normality, rather than to an entire and inclusive population. Templates are exclusive. By defining the norm, they exclude that which is not considered normal. Under this system, African Americans need defining, whilst white Americans do not, since ‘American’ can denote only those who are white. If someone uses the phrase ‘All lives matter’ they run the risk of excluding anybody who does not fit the template. ‘All’ can be a sneaky word for it hides many meanings.

The most famous use of the term was perhaps in Orwell’s Animal Farm. One of the original seven commandments was ‘All animals are equal’. This was later amended to ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’. Thus ‘all’ and ‘equal’ become relative terms.

So, if someone in your life is seriously suggesting that ‘#BlackLivesMatter’ should be changed to ‘#AllLivesMatter’ I can offer two possible solutions. The tl:dr version is ‘stop bellyaching and making it all about you.’ The longer version is to explain that if all you know is privilege, equality starts to look like oppression. By referring to black lives, all anyone is aiming for is equality, and if to you that looks like oppression you should ask yourself why. I appreciate that for many white people the idea that they might be privileged just seems wrong. And indeed it does warrant an explanation. If you grew up on the Brooklands estate in East Jaywick you will in all likelihood be subject to many deprivations. However, if you’re white, your life will actually be just that bit less difficult than it would be if you were black. You may not realise this because your skin colour is invisible to you. You won’t know what it’s like to experience life knowing that your skin colour could get you shot and you’re just not recognising how devalued black lives are.

Ultimately, when it comes to the mantra ‘all lives matter’, its proponents need to be aware that they live in a world where some lives are deemed to matter far more than others. ‘All’ can be a relative term, or an absolute one. In that respect it is rather like the term ‘day’ which can mean a 24-hour period, or be used in contradistinction to ‘night’. And in this instance, it needs spelling out that it is black lives to which we refer, because in general we already operate on the assumption that white lives matter.