Like many Bangladeshis, I live and breathe cricket, and after four long months without hearing the sound of a bat hitting the ball, we finally got to see West Indies take on England in a test match.
Before the first ball was bowled, however, players and management from both sides took a knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Cricket players and fans and across the world praised the gesture of solidarity. However, many reacted by commenting on social media that “all lives matter.” I was taken aback by these words.
Of course, all lives should matter. The problem is that historically, black lives haven’t mattered to white societies around the globe.
In the American South before the Civil War, black Americans were property; white Americans had no intention of setting their property free. White supremacists in the South before the Civil War justified slavery by arguing that the Bible (which was regarded as the final authority in matters of morality) did not forbid slavery.
The book of Leviticus allowed Israelites to hold and bequeath slaves from “other nations,” which was taken to imply that Christians were doing the will of God by enslaving non-Christian races and converting them to Christianity.
Southern churches preached that slavery was the will of God, and that abolitionists were akin to atheists, as they willfully disregarded the Bible on the matter of slavery
In the North, on the other hand, slavery was considered abominable. The best selling novel of the 19th century was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe; the story of a slave family which was broken up when their owners decided to sell some of the family members.
This was commonplace in the south; Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave turned famous orator, wrote that he was separated from his mother when he was young and had no memory of her.
The Union victory against the Confederates in the Civil War in 1865 ensured the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, abolishing slavery by federal law.
“Slaves were “free,” but many of their rights were taken away by the Jim Crow laws passed by white supremacists in Southern states. These laws created “segregation;” black Americans in the South lost the right to vote, and were prevented from using any of the public facilities enjoyed by white people, including schools, colleges, shops, and even water fountains
Racial segregation was enforced with the threat of lynching by white supremacists. Black communities were terrorized by the masked riders of the Ku Klux Klan, who would lynch any black American who attempted to assert himself.
In 1955, Emmett Till, a 15-year-old black boy, was lynched in Mississippi for flirting with a white woman. His killers were acquitted by an all-white jury; after their acquittal, they admitted their crime to a journalist.
For many, Till’s murder was the last straw; it received nationwide media coverage and made many Americans feel that the brutality of white supremacy in the South was simply unacceptable.
Under charismatic leaders like Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the Civil Rights Movement gained widespread national support. This led to the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), and the Fair Housing Act (1968), which overturned all the state and local laws which had segregated the South and prevented black Americans from voting. De jure racial segregation in the US was a thing of the past.
Even after laws effectively ended racial segregation in the US, institutional racism by law enforcement and public policy is still common. Unarmed black men are killed by police, just as they were once killed by lynch mobs.
Private prison corporations lobby for longer sentences, and force inmates (who are disproportionately black) to work, just as slaves were once forced to work. Black defendants often plead guilty to avoid trial even when they are innocent; they know that a guilty verdict from a jury will result in longer sentences.
Black lives and black bodies have been exploited throughout history in the US, and across the world. Racism and segregation were the defining aspects of the apartheid regime in South Africa and Namibia until the early 1990s.
Bangladeshis and other (brown) Asians have also suffered exploitation, but to say “all lives matter” minimizes the crimes to which black people have been subjected: Enslavement, segregation, lynching, and now forced labour in prisons, and murder by police.
Black lives are more likely to end with a knee on the throat for eight minutes, and black bodies are more likely to be incarcerated and forced to work in a corrupt private prison system. We know that all lives matter. The problem is that “all lives” has never included “black lives.”
Aveir Alam is an undergraduate student at Occidental College, living in Los Angeles, California.