Syntactically, Black Lives Matter is a complete sentence in English, but it’s only (what Rudolf Carnap has called) a pseudo-sentence. It’s not a real sentence because mattering is a two-place relation. If something is to matter, it has to matter to fill-in-the-blank. Usually to someone. So Black Lives Matter is an abbreviation for … For what? Let’s find out.
Moreover, is Black Lives Matter saying that all black lives matter to whomever they matter? That most black lives matter to whomever they matter? Or just that some black lives matter to whomever they matter? Because if your life happens to be a black one, you might want to know which of these quantifiers, all, most, or just some, is intended.
That each black life – or for that matter any life – matters to the person whose life it is, though aspirational, is probably false. Ask every person on the planet whether her life matters to her, and there’ll be at least one who’ll honestly answer no. That each person’s life matters to someone other than herself, again though aspirational, is also probably false. There just needs to be one newborn whose mother died shortly after having given birth in the wilderness. So the most we’re going to get is that most black lives matter to someone. Which is not to say – though it may be true – that there’s someone to whom most black lives matter, but rather and only that, with the exceptions noted above, for each black life there’s at least one person to whom that life matters.
So far our quantifiers have been scoping over who matters, not to whom they do. Let’s repair that. Whether we’re talking some, most, or all, do each of these black lives matter to everyone? Clearly not. Should they? Not to the infant. Not to the severely retarded. Not to the would-be refugee whose dinghy has just capsized and his lungs are filling up with salt water.
Alright then, do all or most of these black lives matter to most people? Just as clearly not. Should they? In the Hereafter maybe. But in the here and now, no. Why not? Because most people have more urgent and important things on their minds than the wellbeing of complete strangers. Fair enough. But couldn’t the wellbeing of complete strangers matter at least a little? Sure. But Black Lives Matter, But Just a Little probably wouldn’t have moved that knee off the neck of George Floyd.
But then surely all or most black lives matter to some people. Well maybe, but surely not surely. Unless, of course, we weaken what it is to matter to something that hardly matters at all. I don’t relish seeing anything lose its life. So if not relishing is a mild form of mattering, I guess anything’s losing its life matters to me. But that hardly stops me from swatting a pesky mosquito.
So what’s left is that, with the few exceptions already noted, each black life matters to somebody. Certainly George Floyd’s life did. But that’s the all-too-small consolation the Black Lives Matter movement is hoping to repair.
But if more than just a few black lives matter to those to whom they matter, which black lives matter and which don’t? To those Americans, black or white, to whom black lives matter, do black African lives matter or just black American lives? Or if their lives do matter, do they matter as much as black American lives do? I could be wrong – and I sincerely hope I am – but my sense is that to most Americans, black or white, black African lives matter little or not at all. Or if they do, they matter more to white Americans than to black Americans. Huh? Because more white Americans than black Americans keep abreast of the news, including the news from Africa.
All of this is to flog the obvious. I know perfectly well that Black Lives Matter is not a proposition. It’s entreaty. It’s asking white Americans to care more about black American lives than is currently the case. All black American lives? No, because no one can be expected to care, other than notionally, about the lives of fifty million other individual human beings. And notional caring – as we saw with my concern for all God’s creatures, great and small – isn’t really caring at all. Rather we care about those we can identity with. Many of us, black or white, could and did identify with George Floyd. About those people, black or white, we can’t or don’t identify with, most of us don’t give a shit.
That’s how the caring, a.k.a. mattering, relation works for human beings. It hangs on the reach of our moral imagination. There but for fortune it would’ve been me unable to breathe under the knee of Derek Chauvin. But my imagination doesn’t extend to every black neck. It doesn’t because it can’t. And it can’t because the longer the focal length, the fewer the pixels.
Slight change of subject. What’s Black Lives Matter in America, is Every Child Matters in Canada. And the same analysis, both syntactic and rhetorical, applies. It’s simply impossible that every child could matter to anyone. Or even that most children could matter to anyone. At most some children matter to some people.
Are some of those children indigenous? Certainly. Are some of the people to whom they matter indigenous? Certainly. Are some of the people to whom they matter other than indigenous? Certainly. But fewer. What would Every Child Matters have non-indigenous Canadians do about that?
This is not a rhetorical question, but the answer is a disturbing one. Black Lives Matter got white Americans to sit up and take notice because they could identify with George Floyd. And they could identify because ever since the release of In the Heat of the Night, a hundred thousand movies, sit coms, and detergent ads have prepped them to do so. But Canadians have a much harder time identifying with indigenous Canadians precisely because there haven’t been movies, sit coms, and detergent ads prepping them to. If anything, because of the growing tension over the whole Kamloops 215 issue, too many Canadians have been prepped not to.
In fact there’s a backlash in Canada to de-settler and decolonisation rhetoric, and especially to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Not as ugly a backlash – and certainly not as violent – as there was in the 50’s and ’60’s to the civil rights movement in America. But a backlash nonetheless. And as a result, Every Child Matters is proving more incendiary than reconciliatory. What would non-indigenous Canadians have Every Child Matters do about that?
This is not a rhetorical question. I have some ideas. But input from people of my ilk was not invited by the TRC. Nor would it be welcomed now.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
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