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| 'Slave Trade' by John Raphael Smith, after George Morland's ‘Execrable human traffick, or the affectionate slaves’ |
Recent events have brought back to wider public consciousness that
rallying cry, “Black Lives Matter”. It comes from the United
States of America, but its resonance is felt around the world. As
we see from the incidents that prompt outcry, it is most easily
associated with excess deaths of black people – but it’s about a
lot more than that.
Now, most
Quakers in Britain are white. Not all of us, by any stretch, but
definitely most. We’re also mostly relatively educated, with a much
higher incidence of post-graduate qualifications than
the general population, and there’s a definite tendency towards
being culturally middle class. This has a lot of results, some of
which I’ve written about before, but one of them is a real
difficulty in engaging with the deep issues that underlie the
statement that Black
lives matter. I’ve seen
Quakers in public on social media respond to that simple statement
with one of the most problematic responses that we see everywhere –
that “all lives matter”.
Why
is that statement a problem? After all, don’t we – with our
pacifist tradition and believe in a sort of universal divinity –
really fundamentally believe that all lives matter? Yes, of course we
do. It would be silly to suggest otherwise. In fact, especially among
Quakers, it’s so obvious that it doesn’t even need saying. So why
do we need to say that Black lives matter?