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Maxwell: What Black Lives Matter is really about

 
Published July 29, 2016

Few acts are more loathsome than intentional misrepresentation of an inconvenient or unpopular truth. In this instance, most Americans have witnessed Republicans intentionally misrepresenting Black Lives Matter, both as a movement and as a slogan.

Honest and knowledgeable people know what Black Lives Matter means. And I suspect that deep down, Republicans know, too, but they must pretend otherwise to carry out their nefarious agenda.

Aside from GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has been one of the most prominent Republicans to publicly misrepresent Black Lives Matter. At the party's convention in Cleveland, he claimed that Black Lives Matter is "inherently racist … because it divides us. … All lives matter: white lives, black lives, all lives."

Well, of course, all lives matter.

This is precisely the truth that Black Lives Matter is struggling to bring to America's attention: For too long, blacks have been, and still are, the "other" in the Land of the Free, the nation of their birth. The "other," by the way, is defined as a person or group of people who are treated as intrinsically different from dominant populations. The "other" are easily diminished or ostracized.

The philosophical essence of Black Lives Matter is the plea to fully include black people in the fabric of American life.

Well-meaning people acknowledge the unwritten variations of the Black Lives Matter slogan: Black Lives Matter, Too; Black Lives Matter Also; Like Other Lives, Black Lives Matter.

The movement is an apolitical call for inclusiveness, a call to acknowledge the unique challenges of the black experience and the enduring harm of institutionalized racism.

After Black Lives Matter leaders were forced to defend the movement's goals following the deaths of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La., President Barack Obama weighed in.

"The phrase 'Black Lives Matter' simply refers to the notion that there's a specific vulnerability for African-Americans that needs to be addressed," he said in a town-hall-style meeting. "It's not meant to suggest that other lives don't matter; it's to suggest that other folks aren't experiencing this particular vulnerability."

Obama was alluding to ugly milestones in black history. Blacks are the only group shipped to this country as slaves in large numbers, more than 10 million. Slavery lasted for nearly 250 years.

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 officially freed slaves, but Reconstruction, meant to rebuild the South, saw defeated whites punish former slaves. Freedom morphed into the Black Codes and the Jim Crow era, ushering in the legal separation of the races and making it impossible for blacks to become full citizens.

Over time, it took a string of federal acts and U.S. Supreme Court decisions to give blacks a modicum of full citizenship. Notable acts and decisions include Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954; President John F. Kennedy's 1961 executive order to ensure that government contractors "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race"; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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Just think: White Americans had to be forced by the government to treat black citizens equitably. And the struggle for equality continues.

Too many conservatives routinely discredit black people and matters associated with black identity. They engage in, among other tactics, blaming the victim, crass denial and appropriation and distortion of black ideas and expressions.

How often have we heard Republicans claim that unarmed black males would not get killed by the police if they did not break the law or simply kept their mouths shut?

How about this one? To respectably oppose affirmative action, whites appropriated select words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Many conservatives say that affirmative action gives preference to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites because it relies on skin color and not on the "content of character," which, they eagerly claim, King would oppose.

How about America's hyphenated names of nationality? From the beginning, we have been a hyphenated people. We have always had, among many other names, English-American, French-American, Italian-American, Irish-American, Jewish-American, Japanese-American, German-American, Scandinavian-American, Cuban-American, Russian-American.

But when the Census Bureau decided to drop "Negro" and replace it with "black" and "African-American" in surveys, many white conservatives protested. Why? I am not sure. I wager, though, that it had a lot to do with pairing Africa with America. Imagine: African-American.

Like the examples above, the Black Lives Matter movement is being demonized because the word "black" is in its name.