Why Black Lives Matter? Why not …

… African-American Lives?

To understand the split-title of this post, I have to take you on a time-machine, to sometime in the late 1980s. That was when Justice Thurgood Marshall, striding the Supreme Court of The United States (SCOTUS) as a colossus both physically and intellectually, thought that “African-American” rather than “Blacks” was a more suitable collective noun. He said that the former evokes cultural connection to the land of the Black, nay African-African people whence they came.

I did not agree. As a budding (and never flowering) writer, I wrote in the student newspaper that a location does not establish any stronger cultural connection than skin color does.

Then came a response from a fellow traveller on the journalism track (I am not sure about this, but her language sort of hinted at it); she wrote that people looking through a window into a house may miss seeing corners, or some such thing. Basically, being an outsider, I had no business commenting on the issue. I did not let the matter go, but nothing came off it.

I do not know what the late Associate Justice of SCOTUS Marshall would have said about Black Lives Matter, not the movement but the name. What cultural connection was established or diluted in the protest movement, now that the collective pronoun is Black and not African-American?

Here again, I am looking at a house through windows and must be missing corners. But then, my vantage point has not changed since the late 1980s. Indeed, I am situated much farther away now.

Let us look at it from a different vantage point. Could African-American Lives Matter have resonated in Bristol, UK? Would the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston have been brought down?

I think not. African-American is so local. Black, on the other hand, has come to signify something much more than mere slave trade originating in west Africa and across the Atlantic. It is now about the very idea and morality of holding another human as a slave.

When I criticized Justice Thurgood Marshall for his advocacy in favor of African-American, I had brought in an expanded concept by taking reference to why India is called India. I was talking about how names, however they came about to be associated with a specific incidence in history – the narrative goes that the Macedonian (not Greek, please note) king Alexander saw the land beyond Indus (then possibly called Sindhu) and called that land Indus – the name does not become a slave to that association.

Like now, India is Bharath.

Similarly, Black has gone beyond any particular sinful act of some human agents at a particular period in history. To my mind, any human being held a slave is entitled to call for a rebellion in the name of Black Lives Matter, time and place are no parameters.

The above in no way dilutes the original sin of slavery, supposedly started in Biblical times. Yes, of course, the specificity is lost, but universalizing the moral principle is towards personal and social morality assuming their defining roles is to be noted in the credit side of the morality ledger. Indeed, Blacks can be justifiably proud of universalizing a moral by lending their collective pronoun.

Now, the next thing is to identify Apartheid anywhere in the world, as Desmond Tutu did, calling it so!

Black Lives Matter is a movement against subjugation to any degree and in any form of a human being by another. There is only strengthening of the idea Thou shalt not…

Raghuram Ekambaram