"Love One Another" v. "Black Lives Matter"

[smac97]

Just saw this story in the Deseret News:

Quote

BYU: The top 10 football team spreading a message of healing in 2020
‘We’re promoting the words of Christ,’ says BYU coach Kalani Sitake.
By Tad Walch@Tad_Walch  Nov 6, 2020, 10:41am MST

No. 9 BYU’s players always believed they were going to have a great team this season, but football wasn’t foremost in their minds when team leaders called a players-only meeting one day this summer on the Provo, Utah, campus.

George Floyd was dead. A pandemic had killed hundreds of thousands worldwide. American politics were divided.

“We just wanted to get together here at the facilities and just kind of talk about how we were feeling, let players express their feelings, their emotions,” said co-captain Troy Warner, a senior defensive back.

Black players, Polynesian players and white players took turns. They had seen NBA players wearing social justice messages on their uniforms. WNBA players were wearing the names of Black victims of violence.

The BYU players decided they wanted to send a message, too, one they hoped would be visible to the millions expected to watch broadcasts of their games over the course of the season, like their showdown tonight with No. 21 Boise State on FS1.

“We had an open forum about what we thought should be the message,” junior wide receiver Dax Milne said. “We really tried hard to make it a message that was not controversial at all, and someone mentioned ‘love one another,’” a teaching of Jesus Christ that resonates deeply with members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns and operates BYU.

The team unveiled T-shirts that said “We Are One” on the front and “Love One Another” on the back for their Sept. 7 opener against Navy. Since then, they’ve learned about sales, trademarks and licensing and leveraged their message to provide funding for scholarships to multicultural students.

That message is that everyone should love one another “regardless of their skin color, culture or background,” Warner, who is Black, said in a video with other team members.

“We’ve chosen to love, and that unites us,” added co-captain Isaiah Kaufusi, a senior linebacker with Tongan roots.

The entire article is worth a read.

A few thoughts:

1. I really like this story, and the shirts, and the message.

2. I have really struggled with the "Black Lives Matter" message, both because of the violence and lawlessness that are often associated with it, and also because of the implicit and offensive and divisive accusation of racism that it carries.  I deeply resent the supposition that I think black lives don't matter.

3. I have watched dozens of videos of people chanting/screaming "Black lives matter!"  By and large, such expressions lean heavy on anger and resentment, even hatred.  Unfocused rage.  In contrast, the message "that everyone should love one another 'regardless of their skin color, culture or background,'" is beautiful, universal and true.

Kudos to BYU athletes!

Thanks,

-Smac

[Rain]

I don't see them as a "verses".  They are 2 different things to me.  One is focusing on poor treatment of a specific race.  The other is showing love for all.  Both good messages.

The problem with the divisiveness is separate to me from the message.

 

[Tacenda]

1 minute ago, Rain said:

I don't see them as a "verses".  They are 2 different things to me.  One is focusing on poor treatment of a specific race.  The other is showing love for all.  Both good messages.

The problem with the divisiveness is separate to me from the message.

 

Thank you! Coming from me, I don't think it'd be respected, like it is coming from you. 👍

[CV75]

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

Just saw this story in the Deseret News:

The entire article is worth a read.

A few thoughts:

1. I really like this story, and the shirts, and the message.

2. I have really struggled with the "Black Lives Matter" message, both because of the violence and lawlessness that are often associated with it, and also because of the implicit and offensive and divisive accusation of racism that it carries.  I deeply resent the supposition that I think black lives don't matter.

3. I have watched dozens of videos of people chanting/screaming "Black lives matter!"  By and large, such expressions lean heavy on anger and resentment, even hatred.  Unfocused rage.  In contrast, the message "that everyone should love one another 'regardless of their skin color, culture or background,'" is beautiful, universal and true.

Kudos to BYU athletes!

Thanks,

-Smac

I think this is an excellent initiative on the part of the team, I think it would be incredible if they could have a dialogue with BLM to leverage the principles of good will with principles of good social policy. Both organizations working on both aspects would be a great blessing to all.

Granted, that is a lot to ask for a sports team, and perhaps for BLM's bad rep, but perhaps they could find someone with whom to partner, or who can pick up the ball so to speak (  ) in taking this initiative to the next level of influence.

Edited November 6, 2020 by CV75

[CV75]

1 hour ago, smac97 said:

2. I have really struggled with the "Black Lives Matter" message, both because of the violence and lawlessness that are often associated with it, and also because of the implicit and offensive and divisive accusation of racism that it carries.  I deeply resent the supposition that I think black lives don't matter.

RE: #2, with love and unity (or trust), examples of racism (from both a personal and policy standpoint) can be effectively pointed out and received. In this way, the BYU Team can get involved with practical matters involving "skin color, culture or background” while Church members and others adopt the sentiment (per President Oaks) that Black lives matter while being open to policy measures that address more general problems with racism through due process, civilly and peacefully.

Edited November 6, 2020 by CV75

[InCognitus]

1 hour ago, Rain said:

I don't see them as a "verses".  They are 2 different things to me.  One is focusing on poor treatment of a specific race.  The other is showing love for all.  Both good messages.

The problem with the divisiveness is separate to me from the message.

I think the only "verses" is the lawlessness and violence that is sometimes associated with the message.  I understand that there is frustration that leads to the lawlessness and violence, but the end result of that completely undermines the true message in my opinion, and it is in fact contrary to the message and works against it (and thus the "verses").  (Martin Luther King Jr. did it the right way).

Edited November 6, 2020 by InCognitus

[Ahab]

I have 2 responses when I hear someone say "Black Lives Matter".

My first and usual go-to is: I know

My second is:  and so do white and red and yellow and brown and every other color there is.  All lives matter.  

[longview]

1 hour ago, Rain said:

I don't see them as a "verses".  They are 2 different things to me.  One is focusing on poor treatment of a specific race.  The other is showing love for all.  Both good messages.

The problem with the divisiveness is separate to me from the message.

It is really wonderful to be able to express the universal language of love (brotherly/sisterly kind).  Along with this is the admonition to go the extra mile.  Which will motivate peace seekers to find ways of removing barriers and misunderstandings and overcoming insensitivity in certain cultures.

On the other hand, the message of bLM is stridently angry and demanding.  Its use of the clenched fist icon is too closely associated with militant communism.  There are too many instances of "protesters" walking by sidewalk cafes and telling (ordering) patrons to chant various slogans in support of their demonstrations.  A few have refused even though it is obvious they are NOT racists, white supremacists or anything like that.

[longview]

1 minute ago, Ahab said:

I have 2 responses when I hear someone say "Black Lives Matter".

My first and usual go-to is: I know

My second is:  and so do white and red and yellow and brown and every other color there is.  All lives matter.  

The problem is that the "protesters" will get violently angry if you were to say "All lives matter."

[Ahab]

12 minutes ago, longview said:

The problem is that the "protesters" will get violently angry if you were to say "All lives matter."

I don't hang around protestors so that is not my problem.

[CV75]

1 hour ago, Rain said:

I don't see them as a "verses".  They are 2 different things to me.  One is focusing on poor treatment of a specific race.  The other is showing love for all.  Both good messages.

The problem with the divisiveness is separate to me from the message.

BLM is undermining its effectiveness as an agent of policy change through the promulgation of contention. The sport team is not (yet) engaged in policy change as it encourages brotherhood. When the "v" keeps the focus on rage vs love, policy gets lost. Too many good people fall prey to anger and shoot themselves in the foot in seeking fair redress, and just as many good people think that love is enough as they unwittingly maintain the status quo that facilitates the offences that frustrate their fellow beings.

[Kevin Christensen]

"Often associated with" BLM by whom and how accurately representative of the general case?   Most of the protestors and protests were peaceful. Yes, some cars got burned in some places and windows broken, and looting happened.   But nothing like Watts in the 1960s.  Watching George Floyd being suffocated with such banality, such casual cruelty, was not just tramatic for itself, but because of how it resonated with so much else.  While browsing through Amazon books a few decades back, I ran across books with accounts of the public lynchings that occurred at least once a week, somewhere in the US from the end of Reconstruction in 1873 to the Mid-1950s.   These were often very public affairs (unlike the 50s Emmett Till murder), announced days or weeks in advance in the papers that worked to stir emotions and arouse wide interest and large audiences.  Whole communities would gather to watch as black men were hauled from jail, tortured, hung, dismembered, displayed, and had trophies taken from their bodies.  One particularly chilling account had a pregnant black wife protesting the injustice of what was happening to her husband, and she was disembowled, set on fire, and an attendee publically stomped the still living baby taken from her body.  And this was done in public, in front of a community of friends and neighbors and church goers and newspapermen and government.   Until recently most Americans had never heard of the Tulsa Massacre from 1922 where a whole community was destroyed, with hundreds killed, owing to the fact that the black WWI veterans in the prospering community decided to show up with weapons to try to prevent such a lynching. The response was not a recognition that black lives mattered, and the courts should provide justice, but to go ballistic, and the governor called in the National guard.  And besides Tulsa, there was Rosewood in Florida.   I recall with some dismay reading about a lynching in 1920s or 30s Price Utah, where I had cousins.  I recall in th 1960s as a boy over-hearing an uncle from Price telling a story of how a black man came to the polls to vote and was given a Poll test (a common voter suppression tool), to prove he could read.  His response, "I know what it says.  It says this (unprintable term) is not voting this year."   My Uncle laughed as he told the story.  It's been over fifty years and I cannot see the joke.  Part of US history is the slave trade, the Civil War, and then the Jim Crow Era.  I remember being shocked that I learned from my private reading, not in school books, about how swiftly blacks in the South were disenfranchised from voting so quickly and completely at the end of reconstruction.  (What about the Emancipation Proclaimation, and the reverence accorded to Lincoln?) And even the story of how in the 1970s when an upcoming Real Estate tycoon (and future President of the USA) in New York City  had the managers of one of his apartment buildings caught on camera falsly telling black applicants that there was no room at the inn, part of a company wide policy of discrimination.

Quote

From 1973, when Cohn started representing the Trumps after the Department of Justice sued them for racist rental practices at the thousands of apartments they owned, through the rest of the ’70s and into the ’80s, when he served as an indispensable macher for Trump’s career-launching maneuvers, Cohn became for Trump something much more than simply his attorney. At a most formative moment for Trump, there was no more formative figure than Cohn.

Tyrnauer and Zirin remind viewers and readers that Cohn imparted an M.O. that’s been on searing display throughout Trump’s ascent, his divisive, captivating campaign, and his fraught, unprecedented presidency. Deflect and distract, never give in, never admit fault, lie and attack, lie and attack, publicity no matter what, win no matter what, all underpinned by a deep, prove-me-wrong belief in the power of chaos and fear.

Trump was Cohn’s most insatiable student and beneficiary. “He didn’t just educate Trump, he didn’t just teach Trump, he put Trump in with people who would make Trump,” Marcus, his cousin, told me. “Roy gave him the tools. All the tools.”

“He loved him,” early Trump Organization executive Louise Sunshine told me.

Why?

“He was ruthless.”

 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/19/roy-cohn-donald-trump-documentary-228144

I think BLM is important and inspiring.  Especially because so many communities, even in predominately white areas of the US, and even overseas, got on board.  A few weeks ago, I talked to our black neighbor about her son going to a Pittsburgh march against her wishes, since she feared the potential for violence.  He explained that this was historical and important to participate and not wait on the sidelines.   John Lewis had recently died, and I imagine that Lewis's story from the 1960s was on his mind.

2 Nephi 26:33 famously makes the point that "he inviteth all to come unto him and partake of his goodness: and denieth none that come unto him black and white, bond and free, male and female, and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile."  That is, BLM is in the Book of Mormon, as though we might actually need to have it spelled out for us.

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

 

Edited November 8, 2020 by Kevin Christensen

[CV75]

36 minutes ago, longview said:

The problem is that the "protesters" will get violently angry if you were to say "All lives matter."

A level-headed person would explain why/how Black lives matter in an immediately unique way, just as Mormon lives mattered in the Governor Boggs era and telling a Mormon in that crisis that "all lives matter" would be downplaying the particular problem at hand. In either case, successful dialogue is ideal and yields the best chance for resolution.

[CV75]

18 minutes ago, Kevin Christensen said:

I think BLM is important and inspiring.

Hopefully they will adopt a posture and strategy that "inviteth" white people to critically look at the policies that create inequities along racial lines. If they are getting bad press on a national scale from small local samples, they need to borrow some privilege from their white allies to get more objective coverage. The reputation is bad for a reason; either the news provides an accurate representation (in which case racial equity needs to get another sponsor), or the representation is manipulated to maintain the dominant power structure, which is white whichever party is involved.

[Rain]

 

 

42 minutes ago, CV75 said:

A level-headed person would explain why/how Black lives matter in an immediately unique way, just as Mormon lives mattered in the Governor Boggs era and telling a Mormon in that crisis that "all lives matter" would be downplaying the particular problem at hand. In either case, successful dialogue is ideal and yields the best chance for resolution.

I think this is correct that a level headed person would explain this, but that doesn't mean that others will understand it.  Sometimes our own obstinance or blindness gets in the way no matter how well it is explained.  Sometimes we lack the experience to understand it.   That's why you often get the "all lives matter" line.  It's definitely a 2 way street and I'm not sure how to get people to do that.  Maybe the message of the BYU sports team can help people to do their part in expressing or understanding the BLM message. 

[Calm]

3 hours ago, smac97 said:

I have watched dozens of videos of people chanting/screaming "Black lives matter!"  By and large, such expressions lean heavy on anger and resentment, even hatred.  Unfocused rage.  In contrast, the message "that everyone should love one another 'regardless of their skin color, culture or background,'" is beautiful, universal and true

You might want to consider that you have chosen to put more emphasis on the negative in your own post (based on the length and number of sentences dealing with the positive nature of the BYU message compared to the same focused on your own deep resentment as well as others' anger and resentment) where the reason for doing so is rather limited...important to you, but limited as in not a big part of your life, something you might choose to confront a few minutes every couple of weeks if this board is where you primarily discuss the topic in contrast to how many of those who are chanting/screaming have to confromt this in major life altering ways on a daily basis.

[JustAnAustralian]

I think people need to stop mix-and-matching "Black Lives Matter" (the organisation) with "Black lives matter", (the mindset that the lives of Black people matter).

 

Doing that just brings links to what BLM has been know for in the past.

For instance compare the page that until a few months ago was on the BLM (organisation) website https://web.archive.org/web/20200822193504/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/ with the current version https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/

They've gone from an organisation that looks like they are putting hard divides in between them and everyone else that isn't a member, as well as some things thinks that aren't Black related at all.

They now appear to be an organisation that is more aligned with "Black lives matter" (the mindset) rather than the "Black Lives Matter" (no one else is helping so we have to do it alone in a forceful way) movement.

It now seems much closer to love-one-another than it did before.

 

[Bob Crockett]

2 hours ago, Ahab said:

I have 2 responses when I hear someone say "Black Lives Matter".

My first and usual go-to is: I know

My second is:  and so do white and red and yellow and brown and every other color there is.  All lives matter.  

When you look down your nose upon the "Black Lives Matter" movement, and argue that Red Lives and White Lives matter, I urge you to read Amazing Grace : William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery by Eric Metaxas, which discusses the end of slavery transportation in the British Empire (it went on for another 60 years in the US).  Hundreds of years of Arab slavery of Africans, resulting in the forced transportation to the US. is a remarkably difficult offense to forget. 

I suppose if there was a march to eradicate AIDS you'd be there with a "What about Diabetes?" sign.

Edited November 6, 2020 by Bob Crockett

[Ahab]

3 minutes ago, Bob Crockett said:

When you look down your nose upon the "Black Lives Matter" movement, and argue that Red Lives and White Lives matter, I urge you to read Amazing Grace : William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery by Eric Metaxas, which discusses the end of slavery transportation in the British Empire (it went on for another 60 years in the US).  Hundreds of years of Arab slavery of Africans, resulting in the forced transportation to the US. is a remarkably difficult offense to forget. 

I suppose if there was a march to eradicate AIDS you'd be there with a "What about Diabetes?" sign.

If what people with black skin want to be treated as if the color of their skin doesn't make any difference, and all they really want is to matter as much as anyone else non-specifically, they're already getting that kind of treatment from me.

On the other hand, if what people with black skin want is is to be treated as if they matter more than any other kind of people, they will probably keep protesting forever because they are never going to be treated that way by me and many other people.

[Tacenda]

2 minutes ago, Ahab said:

If what people with black skin want to be treated as if the color of their skin doesn't make any difference, and all they really want is to matter as much as anyone else non-specifically, they're already getting that kind of treatment from me.

On the other hand, if what people with black skin want is is to be treated as if they matter more than any other kind of people, they will probably keep protesting forever because they are never going to be treated that way by me and many other people.

Do you ever feel it's life or death when you get pulled over by police?

When you answer that question, that is your answer. 

They of course don't want to be treated better, they want to be treated the same. 

If you get pulled over do you get nervous on where to put your hands? 

This might answer another question.

 

[Ahab]

2 minutes ago, Tacenda said:

Do you ever feel it's life or death when you get pulled over by police?

Yes.  Ever looked like an Arab?  Walk in my shoes.

 

[Tacenda]

14 minutes ago, Bob Crockett said:

When you look down your nose upon the "Black Lives Matter" movement, and argue that Red Lives and White Lives matter, I urge you to read Amazing Grace : William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery by Eric Metaxas, which discusses the end of slavery transportation in the British Empire (it went on for another 60 years in the US).  Hundreds of years of Arab slavery of Africans, resulting in the forced transportation to the US. is a remarkably difficult offense to forget. 

I suppose if there was a march to eradicate AIDS you'd be there with a "What about Diabetes?" sign.

This!!!

And might I add, this photo that says it all. 

[california boy]

[CV75]

1 hour ago, Ahab said:

Yes.  Ever looked like an Arab?  Walk in my shoes.

At what age did did your appearance begin to cause you ethnic trouble?

[carbon dioxide]

I support the principle of Black lives matter.  Will never support the organization.