Act like all lives matter

By Edmund W. Lewis
The Louisiana Weekly Editor

It is impossible to turn on the evening news or picking up a newspaper and hearing or reading about someone saying that all lives matter usually, those words are uttered in response to any discussion about police killing unarmed Black people or Blacks generally being treated unfairly by the criminal justice system.

While some may view it as a clever catch phrase, “all lives matter” is a counter-argument that lacks the power that comes with factual data, truth and substance.

All lines matter? I can’t tell if all lives mattered, there wouldn’t be so much substantiated evidence of Black and Brown people being treated inequitably by so many entities and government agencies. There wouldn’t be such widespread abuses that target communities of color like predatory lending and payday loans. There wouldn’t be so much redlining or cases where Black and Brown people are charged more for goods and services than their white counterparts.

If all lives matter, the general public would not remain silent when prosecutors get away with framing Black and Brown people for murder and sentencing them to times on Death Row. There would be no need to spend so much time talking about mass incarceration and the 13th Amendment would have been repealed a long time ago.

If all lives truly mattered, the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t be allowed to get away with chipping away at the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and Voter suppression would be a thing of the past. Cops would not be allowed to get away still with racial profiling, harassing, bullying, antagonizing, dehumanizing and exterminating Black and Brown people.

If all lives mattered, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Ezell Ford, Sandra Bland, Wendell Allen, Alton Sterling, Adolph Grimes, III, Eric Garner and so many others would still be alive. The State of Louisiana would never have been allowed by the judicial system to fire thousands of New Orleans administrators, educators and staff after Katrina and take over the city’s public school system.

If all lives mattered, the Recovery School District in New Orleans would not be allowed to get away with its plan to build a school for Black children on a toxic landfill, treating George Washington Carver High School students like prison inmates or forcing John McDonogh High School students to attend classes in a crumbling, mold-infested building. The State of Texas would never been allowed to write Black history out of U.S. history textbooks, and there wouldn’t be so many cases of educational apartheid in the U.S.

If all lives mattered, Black boys would not be so widely misdiagnosed by school officials and urban schools would not be routinely closed without any input from members of the community. The white business community would not be allowed to control public school contracts in majority – Black cities and the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities would not be controlled by the wealthiest one percent of Americans.

If all lives mattered, there wouldn’t be substandard goods and services in supermarkets in urban areas compared to those in the suburbs. There wouldn’t be so much blatant disrespect for President Barack Obama or so much widespread “taxation without representation” in communities of color. There wouldn’t be such talk among the general public about Black-on-Black violence, but so little acknowledgment or discussion of white-on-white or Blue-on-Black violence.

Violence can take many forms in America, among them educational, psychological, legislative and economic violence. Anyone who believes that all lives matter needs to act on that conviction. Act like you know that America would never have come to be without the systematic extermination and disenfranchisement of Native Americans, centuries of free slave labor from Africans and the fallout from the Haitian Revolution.

Act like you live in a democratic republic and hold elected officials accountable when they fail to “provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our prosperity.” Stop acting like Black people are three-fifths human and have no constitutional rights that whites and the police are bound by law to respect.

Finally, act like you believe in every fiber of your being that all men are created equal and that each of us is endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This article originally published in the September 12, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.