The past few weeks have been troublesome for our country. Rather than add my voice to the chorus (read: cacophony) of those opinionating, I chose to listen, weighing the implications of cyber grief and outrage.
Many lamented our state of affairs has degraded so profoundly and wondered how we could have gotten to this point. My response is the following: How could we not have? Following hundreds of years of systemic oppression of people of color, is it now coming as a surprise we have reached, and not for the first time, a breaking point?
In a utopian vision, such as the disingenuous one of the aloof racists who wrote our Constitution, all lives do theoretically matter, but we know in our lived American reality this is not the case. As George Orwell wrote so accurately, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
A quick look at U.S. history and our chaotic present informs any disinterested observer that America’s status quo entails various intersections of oppression, whereby certain groups are afforded differing degrees of “mattering.”
We know affluent, hetero, white lives are those which by default matter, which is why no one bothers to even say “White lives matter.”
To say “Blue lives matter” is in my eyes equally absurd, because the police as a function of the state do not have personhood; they are just an extension of the solidification of the power of the monied classes. Furthermore, to say “blue lives matter” is to glorify the violence of the state.
Blue lives are lives in the capacity that corporations are people; both present illusions of personhood of money and power in society. Ultimately we must come to the acceptance that money and power are inherently inhuman and also dehumanizing: Hence, notions that “blue lives matter” and “corporations are people” must be discarded in the waste bin of history.
No amount of equivocation or white tears can change the reality that we are living in a virulently racist and despicably bellicose country. Hence, I end with a phrase which is an affront but should not be: Black lives matter!
Jordan MacKenzie is a second-year UF linguistics master’s student. His column appears on Thursdays.
