Dear White People,
I understand (as a fellow white person) where you’re coming from. Us white folks prefer universal and abstract moral claims that relieve us of any responsibility for social change and keep us on the moral high ground. We also prefer to ignore historical particularity in our theologies/philosophies (we just cannot help ourselves, we love the “pure” rationality of the Enlightenment) and so “All Lives Matter” appeals to our sense of universality. As a white theologian, I even agree with you that at a level of a universalized and abstract theology it is true, all lives do matter (including those of the police). God loves everybody. Everyone is made in the image of God.
All that being said, “Black Lives Matter” is a particular statement born in a particular time in which Black lives have NOT been mattering (in part shown in the way Black people have been shot down by the police in numbers far beyond that of white people, and in part through additional systemic racism in our political, economic, and cultural lives). In this particular time and place all lives, therefore, are not mattering. So, if you want “All Lives Matter” to be universally credible, then join with the “Black Lives Matter” movement to help make it credible in this particular time and place in history.
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