Black lives Matter vs All lives Matter

Black lives matter is one of the most significantly important movements to have taken place against the continuous systematic oppression on the Black people across the globe. It originally emerged as a rebellious movement by the African-American population in 2012 when an African-American teenager named Travyon Martin was shot and murdered by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida.

This movement was apparently inspired by the 1980s Black Feminist movement along with the movement of Pan-Africanism. Both these movements emerged from the continuous socio-political oppression towards the Black people. Pan-Africanism also focused on developing a sense of solidarity among all the native cultural communities residing in Africa.

With the growing amount of violence and oppression, the chief significance of this movement has been proved over and over again. In 2013 #blacklivesmatter developed to be a popular hashtag in different social media forums. Their first in-person rally was organized by its members in August, 2014. In the same year, Michael Brown was killed by the cops, contributing to the systematic violence against the black community.

On May 25,2020 another African-American man named George Floyd was brutally murdered by a white cop, who pressed his knee on Floy’s neck for nearly 10 minutes which led to a lack of oxygen in his body due to the continous choking and eventually he died. After this heinous incident, people from different parts of the world started protesting against this continuous process of oppression by the police generals towards Black people.

However, another group of people started another movement called All lives Matter in a generalized form which, according to them, covers a wider range of perspective including all human beings residing on earth. Several people even talked about how animal cruelty is a certain problem that is being overlooked by Black Lives Matter unlike All lives Matter.

The problem with this movement is that it fails to grasp the original essence and the true meaning of the former movement. It shows how lack of knowledge and ignorance towards a particular matter can lead to such movements that lack the very concept of the main ideology.

All lives Matter is not only a misleading one, but it also goes on to establish itself as a racist one since it totally overlooks the systematic hegemony followed by brutal violent incidents towards the Black people which have been going on since the beginning of time. This internalized racism is not identified by ALM promoters who seem to completely disregard the specific issues that Black people have been constantly dealing with. It also fails to show solidarity and unity but rather brings about a sense of generalization and obliviousness of the BLM movement.

The basic objective of BLM is to fight against the oppressive violence imposed upon them and it never aims at belittling the struggles and abuses other people/animals go through. However, this notion seems to have been misinterpreted by the ALM promoters who have taken up the responsibility of promoting the importance of every organism without even comprehending the origin of the BLM movement.

Another movement called Blue Lives Matter (BLM) has evolved as a countermovement by some retired law officers in the United States of America promoting the importance of reserving law officers along with a demand to punish those who seem to oppose the preconceived so-called law orders under hate crime statutes.

However, these countermovements go on to prove to what extent this internalized racism and ignorance have taken over people’s lives, that they choose to be blind and deaf whenever it comes to violent occurrences towards Black people. The fact that these movements have so many promoters and followers further shows the level of idiocy, lack of knowledge and sheer ignorance towards the real violence that so many people, even today, seem to possess as an internalized systematic approach within their behavioral system.

– Suvasree Bandyopadhyay.