Context matters when considering ‘Black Lives Matter’

“Black Lives Matter.” Across our land these days, apparently, “Them’s fightin’ words.” Rudy Giuliani seems convinced. He claims that as a movement, “Black Lives Matters” is “inherently racist.”

His logic might hold if he’s reading between the lines and taking it as an absolute statement: “Only Black Lives Matter.” But one would think a big time lawyer like Giuliani would understand something about context. However offensive the claim may sound to Giuliani, the slogan and the movement are a defensive response to a long, unrelenting history of white supremacy and black denigration in America.

Because of what America’s history has said to the sons and daughters of Africa, there is great need for the nation to be reminded that black lives do indeed matter. Scan America’s history and only the depths of national self-deception can sidestep this tragic conclusion: From Jamestown to Baton Rouge, St. Paul and Dallas, in many times and places and in every way possible, white America has told African Americans that their lives mattered less than those of whites, if they mattered at all.

The truth, said Jesus of Nazareth, may make you free, but in America it has a way of making truth tellers unpatriotic. If telling this truth out loud and in public is unpatriotic, the problem is with popular definitions of patriotism, not with the truth tellers. Dare we white Americans look in the mirror and reflect on the history we see? We shall first see a 1640 Virginia law that punished white runaway indentured servants with three to five extra years of servitude, but forced black runaways to serve durante vita or for the duration of their lives.

Or consider the antislavery clause in a certain 1776 Declaration of Independence that could not stand up to the southern delegations’ economic interests or to Thomas Jefferson’s eraser. Why? Because the lives of southern slaves mattered less than the need for 13 unanimous votes for independence.

Eleven years and a revolution later, the Constitution’s framers could not muster the moral courage actually to use the word “slaves.” For purposes of representation in Congress, however, they compromised their way into counting these “other Persons” as three-fifths of a human being.

Within another three years, the first Congress under the Constitution passed the Naturalization Act of 1790, which limited citizenship to “any Alien” who was “a free white person” — in effect defining blacks outside the very category of “American.” In 1857 the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling declared that blacks had “no rights which the white man was (legally) bound to respect.”

Congress later passed the Homestead Act of 1862, which enabled citizens to procure up to 160 acres of lands in the western U.S. for the price of an application fee and living on the land for five years. Since only citizens were eligible, however, black efforts to take advantage didn’t matter. After the Emancipation Proclamation, when Lincoln finally allowed free blacks and former slaves to fight in the Union armies, black soldiers were paid less than their white counterparts.

Then came 50 years of lynching, including the murder of Mary Turner in 1918 near Valdosta. After her corpse was burned, her midsection was slit open. When her unborn baby dropped to the ground and made two cries, someone stomped the child’s head into the Georgia clay. Adult or infant, black lives didn’t matter.

After World War II, Veterans Administration loans and the GI Bill, federal programs to help veterans, moved thousands of white families into the middle class, but administrative policies effectively excluded all but a few black Americans from participation. Even when white America stepped over to the right side of history, we still couldn’t get it exactly right. When Lyndon Johnson addressed the nation to announce the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he alluded to the murder in Selma, Alabama, of white minister, Rev. James Reeb. He neglected, however, to mention the earlier murder of black civil rights worker Jimmie Lee Jackson.

Then followed the Rodney King video, trial, and acquittal and our current series of young black men killed by police officers or in the case of Trayvon Martin, by a wannabee cop. If white America had not implied in all of the above instances that black lives mattered, very little if at all, no one would feel compelled to say that, despite what white America has said to blacks since the 1600s, even black lives matter.

In her novel, “Beloved,” Toni Morrison’s character Baby Suggs, a black female preacher, tells her black congregation: “Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. . . . So you got to love it.”

It is high time white America heard that message and got converted.

This story was originally published July 12, 2016 at 9:00 PM with the headline "Context matters when considering ‘Black Lives Matter’."