Why the Black Lives Matter movement matters to us all 

“You can go back in history as far as you like, and we’ve never mattered.” Those words did not come from an enraged protester at a Black Lives Matter rally; they were spoken quietly, by my grandfather, near the end of his life. He was describing what it felt like to be an Irish Catholic fighting for the British during World War I. 

The exact words he used, as I recall, were “We’ve always been cannon fodder.” He was describing the experience of walking into machine gun fire from the German trenches at the Somme, being shot, and ending the war as a POW, all as the “subject” of an empire that couldn’t have cared less whether he existed. Those experiences, and that sense — that his life didn’t matter — persuaded him and the rest of my Irish family to leave for America.   

I have thought of that conversation often in the past few months, when the COVID-19 pandemic has made human life seem so expendable, and when life was suffocated out of George Floyd with seeming indifference, triggering the current wave of protests around the country.

The American Dream was a dream deferred for my grandfather, as for so many immigrants. He and my grandmother, who had come alone to Ellis Island in her teens, worked hard to make ends meet. They witnessed the “No Irish need apply” bigotry, and the policing based on filling the so-called “paddy wagons” with the unruly Irish. He found work driving a trolley, then a bus; she was a live-in maid, scrubbed floors and worked in a bank, at times all at once. They never owned a house or a car, and didn’t have a telephone until the mid-1950s. 

We, his descendants, have enjoyed opportunities beyond his dreams. We have worked hard, to be sure; no progress comes without real effort. We enjoy levels of education and affluence that were never open to him. We are proud of our efforts.

But let’s not kid ourselves. We are also white.

In literally one generation, my family ceased to be considered undesirable immigrants and began to be afforded the opportunity for advancement for which America has become renowned. That transformation would not have occurred, in my view, had we been of another race, specifically African American.

Over the past several years, as the subject matter of reparations has been raised by black leaders, many of my contemporaries have been dismissive of the concept. The argument goes something like this: “Our family never owned slaves; we weren’t even here when that peculiar institution flourished. In fact, we were tantamount to slaves ourselves, denied education, opportunity, the right to own real property. We were victims as well. Why should we pay for evils that were committed long before we arrived? We are not white supremacists. Besides, look at all of the progress in civil rights that has been made over the past 50 years. Our generation elected Barack Obama.” 

All of which is true and, I have come to believe, completely beside the point.

A similar response greets the Black Lives Matter movement: “All lives matter.”

Well of course they do. Or should. 

But there has been an African American community in America that has struggled to matter not for one generation but for 400 years. For the first 240 years, they were treated as chattel, property, counted as three-fifths of a person in a Constitution that afforded them no rights. Once emancipated, their freedoms were circumscribed by a legal regime that legitimized inferior status. Their right to vote was suppressed by tactics such as the imposition of taxes they couldn’t pay and literacy requirements that poorly funded segregated schools assured they couldn’t pass. They were beaten, humiliated, lynched by the thousands. Yet, like my grandfather, they fought for a nation that, for all they knew, couldn’t have cared less about them as individuals.

Unlike my grandfather and millions of immigrants, they never left. They migrated north instead, settling in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, Newark, Baltimore, Boston, in search of the better life that America has made possible for so many others. They were welcomed with white flight, redlining real estate practices and other housing policies that isolated them in poverty and left them estranged from law enforcement. Most of them are still looking for the end of that American rainbow.

Although there is no denying the progress reflected in the growth of the African American upper middle class, in the decline of the Jim Crow legal regime, and in the election of Obama, there is also no denying that relatively few African Americans have been admitted to American privilege, and that many communities are in crisis.

That crisis is reflected in the frequently cited statistics related to disparities in income, in public health mortality rates, in home ownership, in education, in arrest and incarceration rates, and in employment rates that add up to, in Michelle Alexander’s phrase, “The New Jim Crow.” It is also, for me, reflected in the less frequently cited statistics that reflect a community that has turned in despair upon itself. According to the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics Report, “Homicide Trends from 1980-2008,” during that time span, black offenders — drawn from just 13 percent of our population, 7 percent if considering males alone — committed 52.5 percent of all the murders in America and 65.6 percent of all drug-related homicides, not for a year or two but for a generation. Overwhelmingly, moreover, the victims were other African Americans; 93 percent of black murder victims from 1980-2008 were murdered by other African Americans. 

Black lives must be made to matter not just to the police, but to a larger society that has been indifferent at best, and institutionally racist at worst, content to allow poverty, education deficiency, public health failures, and even rampant violence to fester until they suppurate. George Floyd’s suffocation has become emblematic of the stifled opportunities, the smothered hopes, the treatment of a large segment of the black community as if their lives didn’t matter, as if, like my grandfather, they were being marched like cannon fodder into abbreviated lives.

Seen in that perspective, the African American community’s outsized contribution to the American military, music, literature, sports, science and other forms of culture represents a remarkable act of faith. I think that faith will prove justified, because unlike in most of the world, where individuals are “subjects” of a royal or statist elite, this country is committed to the dignity of the individual citizen as the source of ultimate sovereignty. 

We have fallen tragically short of that ideal when it has come to black lives. For that reason, nothing less than the fate of the American experiment rides on the transformation so many are now demanding. America can fulfill its promise only when it addresses the injustice that haunted its foundation and has never been cured. America will be America only when black lives matter.

John Farmer Jr. is director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. He is a former assistant U.S. attorney, counsel to the governor of New Jersey, New Jersey attorney general, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, dean of Rutgers Law School, and executive vice president and general counsel of Rutgers University.

Note: This article was edited after publication to correct the author of “The New Jim Crow” to Michelle Alexander.