Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter? Color-blindness and Epistemic Injustice*

Abstract

ABSTRACTThose who take ‘All lives matter’ to oppose ‘Black lives matter’ take the latter to mean something like ‘Only black lives matter.’ Those who regard this exclusionary construal as mistaken hold the error to be due to an ideology of color-blindness. It has further been argued that the ideologically-motivated suppression of racial discourse has resulted in an epistemic injustice, blinding objectors to the fact that ‘Black lives matter’ really means ‘Black lives matter, too’. I will argue that attempts to make sense of this interpretive response in terms of color-blindness are mistaken. As I will discuss, the interpretive debates surrounding the words ‘Black lives matter’ are reminiscent of those surrounding ‘Black Power,’ which unfolded long before color-blindness could be said to have been a prevailing ethos. Critical affirmations such as ‘Black Power’ and ‘Black lives matter’ have proved difficult for many interpreters to understand because of the way that they manifest resistance to white supremacy, eschewing both racial exclusion and racial inclusion (the latter fact being masked by inclusive reconstructions such as ‘Black lives matter, too’). As I argue, however, the critical function of these statements calls into question the applicability of standard accounts of epistemic injustice.