Black Lives Matter Is Living in the Past

[Valin]

The Daily Beast:

Yes, black lives taken by cops matter. But so do black lives taken by other blacks. BLM won’t win over America until it acknowledges this.

John McWhorter

Sept. 28 2015

 

It is considered the height of sophistication to declare that “America doesn’t want to talk about race.”

 

I say it’s time to retire this phrase. Imagine being from a foreign country and hearing that phrase, watching a room full of earnest people nodding warmly, after just the first eight months of this year. Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Sam Dubose, Sandra Bland, the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, the Charleston shootings, Rachel Dolezal, Bill Cosby, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, James Blake, and of course the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a country that “doesn’t talk about race”? Let’s face it—the assertion in itself is splendidly absurd.

 

It only even begins to make sense if we recast it as “America doesn’t want to talk about racism”—that America doesn’t want to own up to the fact that racism still exists and plays a part in black people’s life trajectories. So why not just say racism? No rational observer could deny that the national conversation about Gray, DuBose, Scott, Blake, Bland, Ferguson, Roof, Dolezal, Cosby, Coates, and Black Lives Matter has richly explored the topic of racism too.

 

Given that it is so painfully obvious that America is engaged in a fervent year-round discussion of both race and racism, there is only one possible conclusion as to what these people actually mean. When someone says America doesn’t talk about race, they mean something much more specific: that America doesn’t think racism determines black lives to such an extent that the nation needs a vast upending of procedure.

 

Clearly, to the people so aggrieved, the conversation we have all the time isn’t enough, and in fact conversation isn’t what they really mean....................(Snip)

 

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1 small(?) disagreement. Seriously talk about race....Its all we do! In the last (?)50 years name me a week when we haven't talked about race?