No. All Lives Don’t Matter, Not in America

Hardly a week goes by without another story appearing about a black citizen, often unarmed, who is killed by the police.

The latest story concerns the death of Botham Jean.  Mr. Jean was shot in his own apartment by an off-duty police officer, Amber Guyer.

According to officer Guyger, who lived in the same apartment complex, she mistakenly entered the Mr. Jean’s apartment after dark.  Seeing a menacing black man standing in what she believed was the front room of her apartment, she shot him.

Pause for a moment and see how many obvious questions that very odd scenario raises in your mind.

A neighbor, however, reports that he heard banging on Mr. Jean’s door and then a conversation between Jean and Guyger.  Ms. Guyger is alleged to have yelled, “let me in.”

The Texas rangers are investigating.

Call me kooky, but forgive me for not trusting the police to police themselves.

Mr. Jean’s family describes him as a Christian man, active in his local church. He had never been arrested, nor had he ever had a run-in with the police, that is until officer Guyger shot him dead.

Ms. Guyger was arrested briefly and released on her own recognizance after only a few hours.  She seems to have used some of that time to scrub her computer.  I wonder why.  Oddly, she forgot to erase her Pinterest page which contains a good deal of hateful, violent and racist material.

Mr. Jean, on the other hand, has suffered from post-mortem character assassination.  The police quickly obtained a warrant to search his apartment.  Apparently, in Dallas, Texas being the unarmed, black victim of a police shooting — in your own home, no less — is reason enough to be suspected of criminal activity.

The police didn’t discover any weapons but reportedly uncovered a bag of marijuana.

Excuse me again if I take another moment to pause and wonder if that bag was planted by the officers conducting the search.  After all, for some police departments, planting evidence is more common than shooting unarmed people in their homes (see here and here).

Only in the twisted world of Fox News is the ex post facto discovery of a bag of marijuana relevant to the killing of an unarmed man with no criminal record.

But, of course, we can’t forget that Mr. Jean was black.  Neither can we

forget that this happened in America.

Several recent studies reveal that black Americans are 2.5 to 2.7 times more likely to be shot by police than are white people. The disparity becomes even more striking when we turn to the shooting of unarmed people.

People of color compose about 37% of the US population, yet they make up 62.7% of the unarmed victims shot by police.

Another study investigating police killings from 2014 to 2015 concluded that:

“The disproportionate killing of black men occurs…because of the institutional and organizational racism in police departments and the criminal justice system’s targeting minority communities with policies—like stop and frisk and the war on drugs—that have more destructive effects.”

Obviously, something has gone dangerously wrong in the way America’s police officers are being trained and the atmosphere in which they do their jobs.

All lives do not matter in America today.  All lives are not equal here.  Some lives count more than others.  Mr. Jean’s death and the behavior of the Dallas police department is only the latest evidence.

Many who sneer at the Black Lives Matter movement are moral posers, pretending to a superior moral judgment by pasting “All Lives Matter” (the moral universalists) or “Blue Lives Matter” (the ethical particularists) bumper stickers on their cars. Tragically, such protests simply reveal how very, very deep are the wells of ignorance and incipient racism in white America.

To insist that “all lives matter” is to fain innocence while whispering behind a raised hand that “black lives don’t matter.”

Such reactionary slogans are rhetorically camouflaged “f**k you” bombs, equivalent to the old segregationist signs directing “Negroes to the Back of the Bus.”

Honestly, to insist that “all lives matter” in response to a movement led by African-Americans working to change a society where people who look like them are shot, killed, and arrested by police at wildly disproportionate rates is a stunning display of white privilege in and of itself.

It is a bold-faced lie to say that all lives matter in the United States.

That is why, as a Christian, an evangelical, a disciple of Jesus Christ, a citizen of God’s kingdom on earth, and the grandfather of a precious little black girl, I believe that every follower of Jesus must stand up and say, YES, BLACK LIVES MATTER.