My Understanding of the Black Lives Matter Movement

One of my Facebook friends asked some questions about the Black Lives Matter movement. Here are my answers.


Is Black Lives Matter (BLM) any different from the KKK or Neo Nazi groups — racist hate groups?

BLM is not a hate group, nor is it racist. It is a group that is trying to get people to understand how systemic prejudice affects the lives of black people. They are not trying to pit black against white. It is possible to understand what they are saying and not feel like they are trying to put white people down. They are commenting about the system, not about individuals.

Why are the police being targeted?

Police are part of the system. There are many parts of the system that favour the majority. If you are not part of that majority, your experience of the system is very different.

There is an inherent problem with the system: in our current society, everyone is inherently prejudiced against black people, including black people. Even if you think that you are not prejudiced, or rather, especially if you think you are not prejudiced, you are. This means that police officers tend to perceive more of a threat from black people, which means that the fear that they feel makes them more likely to act more aggressively to a black person, even if that person is not acting in a way that would be perceived as threatening if he/she was white.

The main issue is, therefore, that there is a lower threshold for police to show aggressive behaviour towards black people, but there is a secondary issue of police using too much force in general. The way our societies are set up is that the government makes the laws, the police enforce the laws, and the judicial system decides whether laws have been broken or not and issue the consequences if the laws have been broken. The police are invested with the power to apprehend people who are perceived to be not following laws, but they do not have the right to mete out judgement on those people, nor are they given the right to summarily execute them. There are many examples of police officers killing people these days. With a heavily armed populace, this may be inevitable, but it still seems problematic to have so many deaths at the hands of the police.

I am not saying that I sympathize with the Dallas shooter, nor am I saying that the job of a police officer isn’t one of the hardest jobs to have. (It is possible to have this conversation without being anti-police.) What I am saying is that the system is currently set up in a way that police officers are authorized to use lethal force, and that that lethal force is sometimes applied too liberally in cases where it wasn’t necessarily warranted, especially when the person being apprehended is black.

The final piece of the puzzle is that the police system and the judicial system are predominantly set up to favour the majority, so if a black person (or the family of a black person) wants to question the actions of a police officer, or take a case to the courts, they feel that their chances of receiving a fair judgement are very low.

Taken as a whole, this makes black people feel like the system is set up in a way that ends up with black people killed in cases where white people would not be killed, and that they have no recourse to say that this is unfair. That is what is meant by “black lives matter”. It is not saying that black lives are more important than white lives. It is not saying that the police are bad, or that they are they enemy. It is saying that the system needs to be examined and changes need to be made so that black people do not have to live in fear of being killed by police officers, and so they do not have to live with the understanding that if their loved ones do get killed, there is no process for them to question it.

Yes, there are many cases where both white people and black people are interacting with law enforcement officers in a way that would be expected to get them subdued aggressively. We are not talking about those cases. We are not talking about cases where the person is acting aggressively towards the police, and the police officers have no other choice but to act aggressively back. We are talking about cases where the person is not a threat, or is no longer a threat, and they still end up getting shot. Why is that happening? That is the question at the crux of this matter. All other matters should not be confounded with this one. Yes, there are more black people in prison than should statistically be the case. Yes, there is a lot of black on black violence. Yes, white people also get shot by the police. These are all problematic, but they cannot be used to explain why black people who are objectively — based on undoctored video evidence — not acting in a threatening way are getting shot by police.

One reason we can’t all agree on this issue and try to find answer is that we can’t come to an agreement on whether the black people in the video are acting in a threatening way. When you watch the videos of the two black men who were killed by police recently, do you feel that their deaths were justified? Do you feel like the police had no choice but to kill them? Do you think the police were acting within their rights to kill these men? If you feel that the police were justified in killing these two men, then we need to dial the conversation back to the role of police in society and the rights and responsibilities given to them in our society, without even talking about the race of the people they are interacting with.

Why is there so much hate in the world?

In my opinion, hate comes from misunderstanding and ignorance. And we are all guilty of both. We don’t listen to each other. We stand on our pedestals and shout things to each other, but we don’t engage in healthy debate and really listen to what we are trying to say to each other.

If we can’t wrestle with the hate that we perpetuate ourselves by shutting down and not listening, then we can’t be surprised to see it reflected back to us in our society.