The “debate” (inverted commas because murder is murder) is raging as to which lives matter. No need to summarise the context as we all know what racially charged events are currently afoot in the US. Although it’s nothing particularly new though, in this case, it has taken on a global magnitude not seen until now. The #BlackLivesMatter movement is being met with a chorus of #AllLivesMatter, inexplicably presented as BLM’s apparent antithesis.
Does Black Lives Matter mean that black matter to the exclusion of other lives?
With a return to our CXC Mathematics exam we are about to see how the contestation against BLM – including here in Trinidad and Tobago – is at best misplaced and clumsy and, at worst, disingenuous and insidious.
We all remember the Venn diagram, right?
For example, this one here compares apples and oranges (IKR), showing what sets them apart but – more importantly – what they have in common the the overlap of the 2 circles.
Here are a few more irrefutable examples:
And here are 2 Trinidad-specific example:
Ok, so now that I’ve reeled you in and that you see that all of these are valid, then take a gander at this:
Notice this has no separate circles with overlap; it’s circles inside of circles going from most small scale to most broad or general. Why can people not see that #BlackLivesMatter is actually an automatic subset of #AllLivesMatter and not its antithesis?
BLM is the one of the necessary corollaries of ALM. For the sake of comparison, it would be the same if I said Indigeoous Lives matter – which I would scream at the top of my lungs – in Canada, where the government recognised in 2019 that “state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies” facilitated the disappearance of thousands of Indigenous women and where, in 2008, the government apologised for over a century of cultural genocide consisting of kidnapping indigenous children and having them raised in white families to become “good Canadians” or put into orphanage type “residential homes” where they were abused.
So to sum up, if all lives matter then black ones must as well. It all adds up. Simple as that.
Anyone who can’t get this point really needs to sign up to resit O Level Maths.
PS Ministry of Education is not on Alexandra Street next to QRC again eh….
Politics868 