I spend a decent amount of my free time watching the great minds of our time give lectures to small auditoriums of academics. It's not entertainment, per se, and I would not typically review these videos in the pages of Entertainment Matters, but the current moment demands that we gather and share the best information we have in the fight against the devaluation of black lives in America.
In the clip above, Judith Butler, discusses our ability to, at once, fully ignore or, in fact, glorify the violence that States enact on people during war, while at the same time abhor violence that non-state actors enact against people. At around 36:55 Butler says, and I quote selectively (the lecture is actually a snippet of an essay entitled, "Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect" published in a collection called "Frames of War," Verso 2009)
The critique of violence must begin with the question of the representability of life itself: what allows a life to become visible in its precariousness and its need for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way? The problem concerns the media, at the most general level, since a life can be accorded a value only on the condition that it is perceivable as a life, but it is only on the condition of certain embedded evaluative structures that a life becomes perceivable at all.
…An ethical attitude does not spontaneously arrive as soon as the usual interpretive frameworks are destroyed, and no pure moral conscience emerges once the shackles of everyday interpretation have been thrown off. On the contrary, it is only by challenging the dominant media that certain kinds of lives may become visible or knowable in their precariousness. It is not only or exclusively the visual apprehension of a life that forms a necessary precondition for an understanding of the precariousness of life. Another life is taken in through all the senses, if it is taken in at all. The tacit interpretive scheme that divides worthy from unworthy lives works fundamentally through the senses, differentiating the cries we can hear from those we cannot, the sights we can see from those we cannot…
When I heard this, all I could think was, "This is why "Black Lives Matter" is such a relevant rallying cry." My next thoughts was, "Wait, why aren't Judith Butler quotes dominating my Facebook feed right now?"
Then I come to find out, that on January 12, 2015 (18 months ago), Butler was interviewed by the New York Times for a piece entitled, "What's Wrong with 'All Lives Matter?" where, among countless clearly articulated statements she says,
Perhaps we can think about the phrase “black lives matter.” What is implied by this statement, a statement that should be obviously true, but apparently is not? If black lives do not matter, then they are not really regarded as lives, since a life is supposed to matter. So what we see is that some lives matter more than others, that some lives matter so much that they need to be protected at all costs, and that other lives matter less, or not at all. And when that becomes the situation, then the lives that do not matter so much, or do not matter at all, can be killed or lost, can be exposed to conditions of destitution, and there is no concern, or even worse, that is regarded as the way it is supposed to be.
Followed quickly by,
So it is not just that black lives matter, though that must be said again and again. It is also that stand-your-ground and racist killings are becoming increasingly normalized, which is why intelligent forms of collective outrage have become obligatory.
I could go on quoting Butler and that's my point here. If you are struggling to articulate why the term "All Lives Matter" makes no sense in the context of the current moment, stop struggling and quote someone who thinks for a living.
And spend your time participating in "intelligent forms of collective outrage" so that one day black lives can become lives.
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