Ken Cuccinelli Says 'Black Lives Matter' Insults White People
A panel discussion on CNN got heated Sunday when former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) argued that "Black Lives Matter" is a poor message because it makes white people feel less valued.
After former South Carolina Rep. Bakari Sellers (D) explained that as a black man, he was "the only person at this table whose next interaction [with law enforcement] may cause them to be a hashtag," Cuccinelli suggested that the "Black Lives Matter" slogan and hashtag should be amended, according to CNN footage shared by Raw Story.
"Adding t-o-o at the end puts it in a context that makes sense," he argued. Sellers answered that message is already implicit in the slogan.
"Well, you may say that," Cuccinelli told Sellers. "And there’s plenty of reason to understand that. But I don’t think every American hears it that way. They hear, 'Here we are. Yes, we have this political motivation that we're separating out this one category of Americans and saying they matter more than everybody else.'"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ken-cuccinelli-black-lives-matter_55b51821e4b0a13f9d18d863?
It is very sad that Cuccinelli and others like him are so dense not to realize that the reason the BLM slogan is highlighted, is because African American lives have meant less than White American lives for some time now in America, and it is time for that to change
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I mean, you must know more about what they feel than they know, what their true motivations are and what they should be.
Written words have no stress, no emphasis. We can change typefaces to show it, but it's still a pale reflection of how natural speech contours go.
That said, read the following:
Black lives matter.
Black lives matter.
Black lives matter.
Yeah, yeah, there are other options. These are the easiest and working through a stripped down paradigm for just these three's going to take a while. (Linguistics tries to view sentences not just in isolation, but as part of a paradigm. That points out differences, makes clear(er) what's relevant, and often provides understanding. For verbs we do this all the time. Take "Aren't I right?" You might conclude that "are" is the first person non-past singular of 'to be'. Then you'd conclude "I are right!" Produce the paradigm, and you see that it doesn't work. "Aren't I" is a knee-jerk effort to avoid saying ain't I.) Back to the three sentences.
For each, you can add certain additional propositions. You can't add others. * means "anomalous," the meaning of the sentence as a whole is off kilter. You may not like the meaning, but that's a different thing. *? stands for "I think it's off, but not by much." There are lots of cases where judgments vary slightly from person to person; often when they vary and you have the people with varying judgments read the sentence out loud there's a real difference in how they're reading. It also takes some training, I guess we'd call it "mindfulness" these days, to be able to figure out what, exactly, you're judging. This may not work.
*Black lives matter, not their possessions.
Black lives matter, white lives don't.
Black lives matter, not just white lives.
*Black lives matter, white property does, too.
For the first, if you emphasize "black" you're drawing a contrast with something. You leave it up to the good will of the listener to figure out what you likely mean. No good will? They'll assume you mean something they find insulting. In the first sentence, the contrast is "black" and "possessions." Apples and nudibranchs, not apples and apples. For the second and third, the contrasts are felicitous (meaning they're perceived as okay). And while there's a black/white contrast in the fourth, nonetheless we're back to comparing race and possessions.
Black lives matter, not their possessions.
*?Black lives matter, white lives don't.
*Black lives matter, not just white lives.
Black lives matter, white property does, too.
Notice that the judgements for the second sentence are pretty much flipped. In the first sentence we're comparing their nouns. In the second, we're comparing lives and lives, but while the sentence says "I'm going to contrast 'lives' with something else," it actually contrasts it with "lives." If you let the contrast spread over "black lives"--a small change--then it's felicitous. The fourth is back to clearly contrasting a noun with a noun.
*Black lives matter, not their possessions.
*?Black lives matter, white lives don't.
*Black lives matter, not just white lives.
*Black lives matter, white property does, too.
Cross-linguistically, a contrast or emphasis on the verb either means you're going to contrast the verb or you're emphasizing the entire phrase. So "black lives matter, don't just throw them away" is fine--you're contrasting the actions or drawing a conclusion. "Black lives matter, you can't ignore them" makes the entire proposition relevant. But in each of the sentences I judged, there's a contrast between parts of the propositions (so the entire thing isn't being contrasted as a single thing) and it's not the verb that's up for contrast.
Why is this relevant?
Because what you're saying is unimportant is how the words are understood, but people really assume everybody knows what they know and sees things as they see them. Now, small children have a problem: If you have something behind a screen so that they can see it but you can't, they assume that since they can see it you must be able to see it. If they watch you put something in a drawer and close it and a stranger walks in, they assume that the stranger knows what's in the drawer--they know it's there so everybody knows it's there. Most of us grow out of that by 1st grade.
So, given the words "black lives matter" how do you pronounce it? I assume that it's not a learned phrase that has lost all internal structure so it's essentially one word for you.
I default to "black lives matter." The contrast is that they matter, they're not meaningless. It says nothing about any other lives or people. It's a simple affirmation of importance, not relative importance. (Given the right context, that could change. Language is messy, with layers upon layers. Let's assume a neutral context.) Nothing forces me to make that assumption except good will.
I find "black lives matter" to either be more complicated to deal with, or contrasting "lives" with other things blacks have. If the latter, I don't like it; if it's more complicated, it's because emphatic sentence contours for emotion get in the way of the rules concerning how we stress individual words.
Language is still messy. But the messiness can't just be ignored here, so my overall moral judgment is uncertain.
I find "black lives matter" to be offensive, because the clear contrast is that other lives don't matter. I assume that for most people who use the phrase this isn't the intended pronunciation. But again, that's an assumption rooted in good will.
There's a shitload of really, really bad ill will in circulation. Some of it is just pure racism, so that assumption would give you the reading that it's black lives that are important, not others' lives.
The problem is that when you show ill will, you really tend to get ill will thrown right back in your face. It doesn't matter if you're pulled over for a traffic stop or just protesting on the street. You show hostility, the immediate response is hostility. And a lot of #BlackLivesMatter folk are big into showing ill will. The ill will in response isn't necessarily racism. It's a normal human response.
The next phase of the problem is that if people want to be seen as a group, then you see those members' actions you want to see. If you see white people as a group, you can pick out the racist pricks and generalize; you can pick out the social activists and generalize. Both generalizations are simply and utterly wrong. But it's quick and easy thinking. But it's a common, human thing to do: you see a people as a group, you can pick out subsets and impute those actions and attitudes to the entire group. We do it with Muslims ("they're all terrorists", "they're all fine people"
. We do it with African-Americans. It's jingoist, communalist, tribal. It's how we've been for at least 10k years. We're perfectly happy to ignore most of the information if it suits us--and we're often unaware that we're doing it.
In other words, if you have ill will going into the conversation, "black lives matter" is "black lives matter." If you pick out the hostile subgroup, then that hostility is taken to belong to the group: black lives matter." If you pick out a sympathetic group, then there's no hostility, and you see "black lives matter" as a simple affirmation that they matter and have worth.
Now your job is to 'splain the one true way that all whites interpret "black lives matter." Or maybe just 'splain what it is they're actually doing and thinking.
Too much 'splaining, too little listening. Heard one guy saying that the caricature he'd draw of the body politic is a person with a huge mouth and little tiny ears and virtually no stomach. Talks a lot, listens little, digests and understands less. Instead of outrage we need to be saying, "Out, rage!"
Except that when their feelings are hurt (by say, women, or black people) they tend to shoot up movie theaters or churches. So maybe a little tip-toeing is necessary because they are so very well-armed. 
They have been on top of the heap (even if they don't personally realize it or feel like it) forever.
We are leveling the playing field (or attempting to, at least) by righting wrongs that should have been righted ages ago.
The point being is that these marginalized white males need to get over themselves in a hurry. Sure, keep voting for Republicans, a party which is full of other white guy dinosaurs.
I'm through coddling them, that's for sure. I've run out of patience for the sensibilities of misogynists and racists. Time to stop pandering to them.
"Black lives matter" is simply highlighting the fact that they are killed disproportionately killed at the hands of police, for one thing. Something that white guys do not have to worry about as much, though it does happen. It isn't creating division; the divisions are already there. Whether anyone chooses to see them or do anything about it, is another matter.
to get my point.
