The stories behind Black Lives Matter
Maxwell: From Trayvon Martin to George Floyd — what it means.
The email I received last week expressed a sentiment I’d heard before.
“Scott, where did ‘Black Lives Matter’ originate? I feel it is discriminatory, because ALL LIVES MATTER! Dawn”
My slightly edited down response:
Hi Dawn. I wonder where people get the idea that “Black Lives Matter” somehow means other lives don’t. I can say I like apples. That doesn’t mean I hate oranges.
The slogan stems from the notion that black people are killed at a disproportionate rate in this country, and that we should all care about that. To me, that’s clear. I think some have tried to warp its intent.
I mean, if I told you my own daughter’s life mattered, I can’t imagine you’d conclude that I’d somehow suggested your children’s lives don’t — or that your first reaction would be anger.
So I sometimes ask people to think about where that anger comes from and who might be stoking it.
I appreciate you taking the time to think about it. Scott
I didn’t hear back. But really, that was a simplistic response about a complicated issue. And the response came from a white person with the privilege of never really worrying about being stopped by police because of the color of his skin.
So I thought it’d be worth hearing from other voices — and remembering that the roots of Black Lives Matter were planted here in Central Florida.
See, long before protesters marched in Washington or Minneapolis, people were angry about a case just 40 minutes north of Disney World.
You probably remember Trayvon Martin. But you may not remember why the
outcry began.
Not because a jury acquitted his killer but because, long before that, people wondered whether anyone cared that the 17-year-old was dead.
Weeks had passed since Trayvon had been killed on nighttime run to 7-Eleven for candy and a canned drink. He was unarmed. And authorities had charged no one with a crime and released few details.
Frustration reached all the way to the White House as people questioned whether authorities would have handled the death of an unarmed white teen the same way.
That was when, for the first time I found in a newspaper, someone uttered the phrase “black lives matter” — not as a protest chant, but rather as a desperate plea.
It was April 12, 2012, six weeks after Trayvon’s death and one day after an arrest was finally made. New Orleans Times-Picayune editor and columnist Jarvis DeBerry, a black man about to become a first-time father, had read a study that showed many white Americans thought the case was getting too much attention and was troubled by pundits who suggested black Americans were trying to use Trayvon’s death to advance a bogus narrative about racism.
Wrote DeBerry:
Sometimes, it’s not just who is arrested, but in which communities the laws are most aggressively enforced.
It’s a slander, the accusation that black people, individually or collectively, long for such tragedies. What we long for is some enduring sign that black lives matter: that they matter to black people, that they matter to white people, that they matter to the state.
I can’t pretend to have a first-person understanding of this issue as I’ve benefited from white privilege my whole life. The phrase makes some people uncomfortable. And some toss it around recklessly. But it is real.
Studies consistently show that black Americans are stopped and arrested with greater frequency than white Americans. And even if people choose to believe carefully crafted retorts that cherry-pick contradicting statistics, there’s also overwhelming evidence blacks receive unequal treatment after they’re arrested.
An investigation by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune found that black people consistently get harsher punishments than whites — 68% more time for first-degree crimes even when defendants had similar track records.
Still, some people choose not to believe all this.
That’s why a number of black Florida legislators have pushed legislation attempting to track and publish data. Yet it has been an uphill climb.
Several efforts to compile data on arrests and use-of-force have failed. And it took two years for legislators to agree to simply compile conviction data. (So you can now see that in Lake County, for instance, black citizens make up approximately 11% of the population but account for 23% of trespassing convictions and 38% of the convictions for resisting arrest.)
Sometimes, it’s not just who is arrested, but in which communities the laws are most aggressively enforced.
Just ask Geraldine Thompson, a black state representative from Central Florida, who says she has been stopped more times than she can count in the heavily black community of Parramore but rarely in her own wealthier, whiter neighborhood.
Thompson is still fighting to get the state to compile and release more data on arrests and force — something that shouldn’t be a fight at all.
In fact, at this point, I’d like to challenge readers who don’t believe white privilege exists or that blacks receive unfair treatment: What sensible objection could anyone have to tracking all that data and making it public?
“If you don’t have the information,” Thompson said, “you can’t deal with it.”
Amen.
Still, Thompson is encouraged by changing attitudes.
NASCAR wants to banish Confederate flags. And last weekend, CBS’s leading golf anchors, white and black, talked with viewers about racism, privilege, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. And this was professional golf, mind you.
“I’m glad it’s being talked about,” Thompson said. “And that the conversations and protests are multicultural and multi-ethnic.”
That’s encouraging for a 71-year-old black woman who grew up taking bus rides in South Florida that carried her far from her home, past allwhite schools she wasn’t allowed to attend “even though my parents paid taxes just like any other Americans.”
For too long — perhaps until the Floyd video came out — Thompson said some people honestly didn’t believe races were treated differently.
But now, she said: “More people view this as an inhumanity toward man and are saying: We are not going to turn a blind eye.”
They now get why people say: “Black Lives Matter.