A common objection I have heard to the Black Lives Matter movement is, “Well, don’t ALL lives matter?” The thing is, I doubt very many people in the movement would disagree with that. In fact, that is the point of the movement: that all lives, including black lives, matter.
A few years ago, a woman who was walking along a Bay Area street had her baby shot out of her arms. The baby did not survive the incident. I would bet a fair amount of money that you never even heard about that incident. A big part of the reason you never heard of it is that it happened to an African American woman in a poorer neighborhood in Oakland.
I would also bet a fair amount of money that if that had happened to the blonde-haired wife of a radiologist in, say, Orinda, you definitely would have heard about it. There might even be an Act of Congress named after her.
In one of my first columns for this newspaper, I wrote:
“Mother Teresa used to say that the greatest pain for the poor she fed and comforted was not the physical facts of their poverty, nor the chronic hunger, the untreated infections or the million inconveniences that complicated their lives. Instead, she said, it was that they believed themselves to be invisible — People Who Don’t Matter.
“America, too, teems with People Who Don’t Matter; there are entire cities inhabited by almost no one but them. We know those cities by the names of Watts, Compton, the South Bronx — and, here in the Bay Area, by the names Richmond, East Oakland, East Palo Alto. There are many more.”
I also described the divide between poorer blacks and richer whites that I perceived in my childhood neighborhood, which (except for my family) was virtually 100 percent black:
“From my neighborhood in Richmond you could see, about a mile away and on the other side of the freeway, The Hills and the comparatively lavish homes of middle- and upper-middle-class folks. To us, the people in those houses seemed to live on the other side of an unbridgeable divide. On those rare occasions when we ventured into those hills, we were greeted with cold stares and parents pulling their kids indoors. When I began middle school in The Hills, I was shocked by the attitudes of the kids in my school. My dear childhood friends and neighbors were dismissed as ‘Zulus,’ and worse.
“But those kids in The Hills were immeasurably poorer for not knowing the people I knew; they were deprived of the joy of being held by (my next door neighbor) Mrs. Pender; they never sat on a porch and learned from a wise young boy who’d had polio.
“The ongoing emergency in our poorer neighborhoods is our greatest moral scandal. With their grinding poverty and their unconsoled victims and relatives whose bodies and minds have been wounded by violence, Richmond and the many places like it stand as searing indictments of our (society’s) greed and selfishness. The violence and the tattered social fabric of Richmond is a poignant expression of the outrage — more than that, the unutterable pain — of priceless children of God who have been told, with words and the bleeding wounds of a million injustices large and small, that they are People Who Don’t Matter.”
The Black Lives Matter movement is that pain I described reaching the point that the people who suffer it will no longer allow our society to continue to inflict it. They are saying, in no uncertain terms, that they do, in fact, matter: that the life of a young African American man who may have a petty criminal record matters just as much as the life of a blonde radiologist’s wife who lives in comfortable circumstances in American suburbia.
I don’t always agree with the tactics of Black Lives Matter protesters – particularly its predilection for blocking freeways and passenger train tracks. In my opinion such actions alienate more whites than they persuade, and the goal of BLM, as in all nonviolent movements for social justice, is reconciliation and healing with the white community once basic justice has been achieved.
Martin Luther King pointed the way almost 60 years ago, in his memoir of the Montgomery Bus Boycott titled “Stride Toward Freedom.” In it, King emphasized the core principle of nonviolent action was the creation of what he called The Beloved Community:
“First, it must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this method because he is afraid or merely because he lacks the instruments of violence, he is not truly nonviolent. This is why Gandhi often said that if cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight … while the nonviolent resister is passive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent, his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade his opponent that he is wrong. The method is passive physically, but strongly active spiritually. It is not passive nonresistance to evil, it is active nonviolent resistance to evil.
“A second basic fact that characterizes nonviolence is that it does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that these are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent … The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”
In that early column I mentioned previously, I concluded with a vision of what America might look like once the reconciliation King describes comes to pass:
“If America is to be a truly great nation, we must realize our fundamental kinship with all who share our shores. I pray that one day, the God who made us all will break our hearts. On that day, we all will be reunited across the gulfs that divide us. We will be so reconciled with one another that we will finally, truly and deeply recognize our brother- and sisterhood.
“On that day, the sounds of reunion will echo from the walls of our cities, and we will weep tears of joy in one another’s arms, flooded with gratitude that our long separation from our brothers and sisters is finally, blessedly, at an end.”

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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