“Black Lives Matter” Is Bad — Yes, Even the Phrase
Photo: Shane Aldendorff (markup added)
It’s the big one. The “final boss.” The kingpin of all modern progressive slogans. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a million times: black lives matter. But what does this slogan really mean? And, is it true?
The phrase “black lives matter” has been used by different people in different ways. This is the outworking, in my opinion, of a clever marketing ploy to create broad acceptance from a wide range of people who interpret the phrase differently and end up supporting, if unintentionally, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization and its worldview.
There are some who try to denounce the organization and still use the phrase. The problem with this is that the seed of the organization’s worldview is hidden within the words themselves—and that worldview is a lie.
Let me explain.
It Doesn’t Mean What It Says
If you were to take the words “black lives matter“ at face value and at first glance, you might think they are merely affirming the value of black people’s lives. But, as I have written previously, there’s a problem: the “black” part of “black lives matter” is totally irrelevant to the rest of the phrase. Think about it. The color of a person’s skin has no bearing on the value of that person’s life. So, it’s a contradiction in itself. It’s as if it’s trying to say that all lives are equal, while at the same time elevating one group of people over others. And the proof to that is that when people respond “all lives matter,” BLM proponents get upset. If they were not trying to promote one people group over another, then any time someone said, “No, all lives matter,” BLM supporters would simply say, “Exactly! That’s what we’re saying! Just treat black people like everybody else!” But they don’t say that. Because that’s not what they’re saying. The proponents of this idea don’t want equal attention to “black lives.” They want special attention. And that is, by definition, injustice. They call it social justice, but it’s actually injustice. As Deuteronomy 16:19 makes clear, justice and impartiality are inseparable, if not synonymous: “You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality…”
So no, the slogan doesn’t mean merely what it seems to suggest at first glance. There are unavoidable implications. By pretending to call for equal treatment while simultaneously calling for special treatment of one ethnic group, the slogan promotes a particular worldview. And this is where we get down to what BLM proponents really mean by this phrase.
What It Means
What BLM proponents really mean is that black people’s lives are disproportionately at risk because of systemic racism, especially racist policing, and to fix this problem there needs to be a radical transformation of our nation’s institutions according to the principles of cultural Marxism, a.k.a. critical race theory.
That’s what they mean.
Now, I know, I know… If you’ve been paying any attention to the news and the goings-on in our culture, you may be tired of hearing about “critical race theory,” even if you only ever first heard of it within the last year or so. But, unfortunately, it remains important to talk about—because yes, that really is what’s behind such things as “black lives matter.”
That said, I won’t define critical race theory and talk about it in all its detail here (for a “two-page overview,” read this article). For our present purposes, I’m more concerned about the mindset of critical race theory. And that mindset is one that sees most if not all social problems through the lens of race. More specifically, it is the idea that white people, or at least that the supposed cultural milieu in which white people live, are oppressive to black people and other ethnic minorities. That’s the idea at the bottom of it all.
Here’s why that’s significant: we could go through all of the history and the tenants of critical race theory, intersectionality, white fragility, its relation to Marxism, and everything else, and someone could say that they reject all of those things, on paper—but that same person could still have a mindset that is consistent with critical race theory, if it is their conviction that so many of our modern-day social problems go back to white people oppressing others. That is the essential critical race theory idea, so that if you reject everything else about it but still believe that, you are still supporting it in spirit and in practice. Again: you can reject it on paper and still support it in practice.
And if you believe that, if you believe that systemic racism is fundamental to everything about our culture, then it only logically follows that everything about our culture must be torn down and rebuilt anew. If you start with the premise, the solution is inevitable.
But here’s the thing.
It’s A Lie
I said at the start of this article that the BLM worldview is a lie. There are two parts of the lie: the premise and the solution.
The premise is a lie.
The truth is this: black people’s lives are not disproportionately at risk because of systemic racism or racist policing. A 2017 study by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was “unable to detect any racial differences in either the raw data or when accounting for controls” when it came to officer-involved shootings. I repeat: he found no racial differences in officer-involved shootings. And he’s not the only one to study this issue and turn up with surprising results. Researchers at Washington State University found “officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects.” Three times less likely! That’s a gaping hole in the BLM narrative, if there ever was one.
Now, it is true that black people are overrepresented among those shot and killed by police: for instance, while blacks are only around 13% of the U.S. population, they were 24.4% of those shot and killed by police between 2015 and 2019. But a statistic like that only tells you the effect, not the cause. So while some jump to the conclusion of racism, here’s another statistic: black people made up 37.1% of arrests for the violent crimes during that same span of time. In other words, while black people are overrepresented among those shot and killed by police, they’re even more so overrepresented in arrests for violent crime. This lends itself to the interpretation that black people end up being disproportionately shot and killed not because of racism but because they’re disproportionately committing violent crimes. The lesson: a disparity does not necessarily indicate discrimination.
At the very least, these numbers should cast some doubt on the idea that black people are being targeted for mistreatment. And all this is only on the topic of policing, but if we were to evaluate each of the disparities that people commonly point to as evidence of systemic racism—related to education, employment, housing, healthcare, criminal sentencing, etc.—we would similarly find it dubious to name race as the causal factor in most cases.
But here’s the thing. No such facts matter to the BLM crowd. The way hardcore BLM advocates talk about systemic racism, it’s virtually non-falsifiable. According to them, even denial of systemic racism is an aspect of systemic racism. In other words, the question is settled and no alternatives can be considered. You know what that means? It means belief in systemic racism is a presupposition, not a reasoned conclusion. This belief is not a result of evaluating the evidence; it comes before any evidence, and all evidence is evaluated in light of the belief. There’s no problem with having presuppositions (everybody has them), but the problem is when a presupposition distorts reality rather than makes sense of it.
The truth is, in American culture, in large part, for decades, there has not been a question about whether a black person’s life is equal in value to any other person’s life. That’s why high profile instances of racism against blacks (real or perceived) are always quickly denounced in this culture. We hate racism. At least, we hate racism against black people.
So, the systemic racism premise is bunk. But the premise isn’t the only problem.
The solution is a lie.
I’ve already noted that if you accept the BLM premise, the BLM solution inevitably follows. But, if you deconstruct the premise as we have done, it’s plain to see that the solution they offer is no good. Since their theory of systemic racism doesn’t comport with reality, and is itself discriminatory, we can see that “black lives matter” ends up being a call to racism, to unequal treatment—not against it.
While Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of “a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” the mindset of critical race theory works to undo and reverse that. Its idea of “whiteness” (the idea that white people and the cultural milieu in which they live is oppressive to everyone else) promotes exactly the opposite of King’s dream: it promotes the judgment of people on the basis of the color of their skin. It promotes the judgment of white people. White is a color, too, you know.
In fact, to get away with this, critical race theorists have even redefined racism. They like to define it as “prejudice plus power” instead of “discrimination based on race.” That way, they can claim that racism against minorities is rampant, and get away with their own racism against whites under the guise of anti-racism.
And that raises the question, what is the end game? The answer: equal outcomes (i.e., socialism). That’s their “solution.” They only present their premise so they can peddle their solution. It’s not that racism really is a pervasive problem, and critical theorists therefore thought up equal outcomes as a way to solve it; it’s that they already had equal outcomes in mind, and they’re using racism as an excuse to promote that goal. They claim that racism is systemic or institutional because they want to deconstruct our society’s systems and institutions. This isn’t just my opinion; it’s the history of the movement.
But the truth is, racism (where it does exist) is not a systemic or institutional problem. At its root, it never has been. Racism is a heart problem. So, the deconstruction and reconstruction of society would be like tearing down and rebuilding a house because the members of the household don’t get along. The house isn’t the problem, and a new house isn’t the solution. Systems and institutions cannot fix a heart problem. What, then, can be done?
The Real Solution
If racism (ethnic discrimination) really is a heart problem, then the true solution is a change of heart. But what can change a heart?
Whenever you hear about racism, or about any situation where there’s hostility between people groups, think of Ephesians 2 and Colossians 3. In Ephesians 2, the apostle Paul refers to two groups, the Gentiles and the Jews. Historically, relations between these two were not always the greatest. There were misunderstandings, power struggles, and vastly different lifestyles between them, all of which led to hostility. Most of all, Gentiles were pagans, “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). So, God had made covenants and promises to Israel, and had even sent them the Christ—but the Gentiles were still in the dark. Then this happened:
“But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off [i.e., Gentiles] have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both [i.e., Jews and Gentiles] one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.” (Ephesians 2:13-16)
The death of Jesus paid the price of sin for Jews and Gentiles alike, such that Gentiles were able to be included in (“grafted in,” Romans 11:17) to Israel, to likewise be recipients of God’s promises. Thus, the hostility between these groups was destroyed along with the sin. As Pastor Voddie Baucham has pointed out, the difference between Jew and Gentile was a real distinction, which was made by God when He called out Abraham and instituted the rite of circumcision (Genesis 12, 17). By contrast, ethnic distinctions are much less significant; every human is genetically related to every other human, and ethnicities are merely a result of physical adaptations and cultural changes that have occurred over time as people moved into different parts of the world. These differences are not as important as a difference that God Himself decreed by setting the Jews apart. So, if the hostility between Jews and Gentiles has been broken down through the death of Christ, then certainly any hostilities between other people groups have been broken down. If the real distinction is abolished, then superficial distinctions are definitely gone.
But how can that be, since it’s clear that hostilities between groups still exist? That brings us to Colossians 3. In Colossians 3:11, Paul writes something shocking. Describing the Church, he says,
“Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.”
(Colossians 3:11 ESV)
As in Ephesians, he mentions the distinction between Jew (“Jew,” “circumcised”) and Gentile (“Greek,” “uncircumcised”), but here he also lists other ethnic, cultural, and social distinctions. And he proclaims that, in the Church, “there is not” any one of those. Those differences—differences like ethnicity—don’t matter. It’s not that they do matter, but that they don’t. Those differences essentially disappear in Christ.
Think about that. People say “black lives matter,” but in the Church there is not “black,” or any other color. People wonder how we will bridge our racial divides, but in the Church there are no racial divides because there are no “races.” Some churches pride themselves in being multiethnic or multicultural, as though to say, “Look, here there is black and white, Latino and Asian, etc. etc.! They’re all here!” But Paul says, “Here there is not…”
That, then, is the real solution to racism—to be in Christ, where none of those things matter, and He “is all, and in all.”
A New Race
In a fallen world where there is imperfect discipleship and “weeds among the wheat” (Matthew 13:24-30), there will always be professed Christians and churches that care about racial differences. But those folks are doing it wrong. Christianity rightly understood completely annihilates racism, because it brings every “race” together into one new race, as the apostle Peter wrote:
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).
That’s what’s going on in the apostle John’s famous vision of heaven, too:
“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’”
(Revelation 7:9-10)
At the end of times, every tribe, people, and language is represented in the worship of “the Lamb,” Jesus Christ. So, it is Jesus who changes all these people’s hearts and brings them all together. They are at peace with one another because they are united in worship of Him. Indeed, there can be no true and lasting unity apart from Him.
Even if the Black Lives Matter movement understood racism correctly, it could never hold a candle to that.
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Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.