Warming Up

I spent all day trying to put together a chapter about how “All Lives Matter” and “When’s White History Month?” are basically a magnified version of “When’s International Men’s Day?” (And how that question is possibly the soft drug that leads you on to the more awful hard stuff).

All Lives Matter is a bad enough misunderstanding of the Black Lives Matter campaign (which of course, does not imply that white lives aren’t, merely that black lives are treated with less sympathy and significantly more danger). It’s a phrase casually tossed around by people who maybe like to think they are promoting some kind of equality, but are in fact just undermining a movement and ignoring history and a blatant inequality, so the best you can say is that they are therefore “accidentally” racist. And that’s if you’re being generous.  For many of course it’s just a way to be openly racist, with a cheeky little wink.

Like I say, a magnified version of International “When’s International Men’s Day?” Day.

But tonight during the Man City/Burnley football match someone went to the trouble of hiring a plane and commissioning a banner that said “White Lives Matter”. Which is a whole other level. And this one really does imply that black lives don’t. It’s weird how a similar statement can be the exact opposite depending on the context.

These people, I suppose, will point to terrorists killing white people (though they kill many more non-white people globally) but that’s not the same as being killed by the police who are supposed to be on your side. One in a thousand black American men will die at the hands of the police. That’s an insane statistic.

It sent a chill through my marrow and made me wonder where the fuck we are heading now. Thankfully footballers seem to be doing a great job of standing up for what is right at the moment and the move was condemned as the embarrassment that it is.

Written more eloquently about that in 15 minutes than I managed in 8 hours today. But I am approximately two chapters from finishing the first draft of the book now and hopeful I can hand something in for notes by the end of the week (just 4 weeks late).

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