- 1 The post ended with “Black people I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”
1The three words “Black Lives Matter” were initially part of a declaration of love1 for Black people in a 2013 Facebook post, pronounced in a moment of great emotion and outrage, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. Indeed, before it became abstracted into a hashtag used on social networks in reference to the unifying theme of “racial justice,” it was a personal outcry from Alicia Garza which was both a response and a call for mobilization:
Btw stop saying we are not surprised. that’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. stop giving up on black life. black people, I will NEVER give up on us. NEVER. (qtd. in Khan-Cullors and bandele 180, my emphasis)
- 2 In their fine-grained study of tweets containing #Blacklivesmatter over time, Freelon, McIlwain, an (...)
2It was only after it was used on the street in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of 18-year-old Michael Brown’s death that the phrase began to spread widely (Biesecker 410).2 The birth of the formula that came as an answer to it in the US public discourse, All Lives Matter, is less clear. It rose at the same time as #BLM started getting momentum on Twitter. The use of #ALM increased sevenfold in the 20 hours following the announcement that white police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for the murder of Michael Brown (Edgar and Johnson 11). The first occasion an answer to the BLM movement occurred on prime-time television was during the 2016 Republican National Convention, with Milwaukee County sheriff David A. Clarke opening the event with the declaration: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to make something very clear: Blue Lives Matter” (Biesecker 411).
3In this context, All Lives Matter, as used by Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates in 2016, sounds like a dog whistle (Saul), that is, coded language for voters and supporters. It also appears to be a sanitized version of the same oppositional stance, denying Black rage, though taking the appearance of absolute inclusivity. Joshua Paul recalls that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Texas Senator Ted Cruz used ALM as a corrective to “a new anti-police culture” attributable to President Obama and his Justice Department’s “vilification of police officers” (4). President Trump’s security staff ejected a BLM protester with Trump declaring “Folks, You’re going to hear it once: All Lives Matter, All Lives Matter,” echoed by a “boisterous Radford University crowd” in Virginia in March 2016 (Dearden). Studies of tweets using ALM reveal the tag is most often used to discuss the lives of law enforcement officers, as shown by Gallagher et al. through a multi-level analysis of over 860,000 tweets:
The word shift graphs and topic networks reveal that the only other lives that are significantly discussed within #AllLivesMatter are the lives of law enforcement officers, particularly during times in which there is heavy protesting. Although the notions of “Black Lives Matter” and “Police Lives Matter” are not necessarily mutually exclusive, we see that the conversations within #AllLivesMatter often frame Black protesters versus law enforcement with an “us versus them” mentality. (11)
4What I would like to do in this article, as a linguist, is to offer an analysis of the two formulas from a pragma-linguistic perspective in order to evince how such an approach can contribute to understanding the way language shapes and is informed by public debate. In the particular context of polarization and culture wars leading to the first Trump presidency, pragma-linguistics can offer some help in assessing how the formulas have been (mis)interpreted and to what effects. The first part proposes a very close semantic analysis of both three-word formulas as they came to be used as slogans in public protests or as hashtags on social media, including their prosody, the way they have been pronounced or the way people have chosen to pronounce them. I will demonstrate that ALM is a condensed version of what has been well established by critical race theorists as color blindness. Section 2 focuses more specifically on people’s attitudes toward the use of ALM and BLM in public discourse. Analyzing both US politicians’ and ordinary people’s reactions will highlight the (deliberate or unconscious) miscommunication between ALM supporters and BLM champions who in turn have had to justify their BLM formulation. Finally, I will emphasize the alignment that the two formulas generate: solidarity versus polarization, taking an interview of then Vice President Mike Pence as an illustration of all the pragmatic elements I will have pointed out in the first two parts.
- 3 I’m using Toni Morrison’s words from the following sentence: “In the US Americans means white, and (...)
5These three words, “Black Lives Matter,” deserve a pragma-semantic analysis if one is to understand what is said and meant in the counter-protest formulation “All Lives Matter.” First, semantically speaking, BLM takes as the topic of the sentence a plurality of lives that are not marked by “ethnicity and hyphens”3 in the form of “African-American Lives Matter” but incorporates the materiality of the color black within the phrase. The topic of the sentence is a claim for the existence of Black bodies. The third word is the verb “matter” that both echoes the materiality of the color “black” (the body matter) and is also a call for attentiveness. The nuclear accent of this sentence falls by default on this very verb in the end-focus position: Black Lives 'MATter.
- 4 I’m referring to Austin’s distinction between three aspects inherent in each speech act, the locuti (...)
- 5 As Caleffi underlines, hashtags are effective speech acts with different pragmatic functions like c (...)
6We’ve known since Benveniste that every utterance, as a “physical entity,” always issues from “a particular person at a particular time in a particular place” (Clark 11). The circumstances of the birth of BLM are therefore essential to grasping its intended meaning and illocutionary4 force. The hashtag designed by Patrisse Khan-Cullors as a response to Alicia Garza’s Facebook post takes up what was initially an indirect exclamative clause “how little black lives matter” (Khan-Cullors and bandele 180, see introduction). With this specific origin in mind, one sees that “Black Lives Matter” is not a statement designed to give information concerning Black lives, but a formulation meant to recall how little Black lives matter in the face of recent deaths of unarmed Black teenagers, evidencing that what should be taken for granted (Black lives matter as any other lives matter) cannot in fact be presupposed. Turned into a hashtag, the wonder about how little Black lives matter becomes a call for future action, urging people to refuse resignation and cry out the value of their lives by reclaiming public space. In its “compact and pre-packed format,”5 #BlackLivesMatter is endowed with a stronger illocutionary force oriented to a particular perlocutionary effect such as political affirmation and demonstration but it is also a truncated sentence severed from its original text.
- 6 On Twitter ALL is often capitalized to render the contrastive stress in a written version.
- 7 In pragmatics, an implicature occurs when information not present on the surface of the text needs (...)
- 8 In their empirical study, de Carvalho et al. come to the conclusion that “the stronger words in a s (...)
7The proponents of the All Lives Matter formula seem to purposefully focus on the mere semantics of the BLM hashtag as uprooted from the context it emerges from, reducing its meaning to the informational content of the proposition rather than its pragmatic and emotional force. Moreover, because ALM is a response to BLM, ALM is to be read with a contrastive stress on “all.”6 With such a pronouncement, BLM is not read as it was intended with the default nuclear accent on “matter,” the focus being phonologically transferred from “matter” to “the people” (Black Lives). BLM is thus phonologically misread as BLACK Lives Matter as opposed to other lives, as if there was an implicit adverb at the beginning of the phrase: “only Black Lives Matter.” Semantically, what the sentence does is to substitute the materiality of the color black with the all-inclusive totalizing pre-determiner “all” that encompasses lives without individuating or differentiating any. ALM supporters focus on the words themselves in BLM, not taking into account the context of its very existence, deriving local meaning on the basis of the “Black Lives” linguistic trigger. This trigger is seen as implying a lexical scale calling for the derivation of a scalar inference7 made by comparing it with what the utterer of Black Lives Matter did not say but might have said. In other words, they interpret “Black Lives” in comparison to a stronger term in the scale: they said “Black Lives” meaning “not all lives.” We could thus say that BLM is interpreted by ALM defenders according to lexical scales, through which a scalar implicature is derived from the topic “Black Lives,” computing it as meaning “some lives” and therefore “not all lives matter,” with the weaker term “some” priming the strong term (“not all”).8
8By depending on the words used themselves, ALM proponents foreclose the context around the BLM pronouncement, preventing them from drawing an implicature of the type: if BLM proponents express the need to explicitly state their “markedness,” it must be because the value of their existence is precisely not taken for granted. It is because the ALM generic formula presents as “self-evident” something that is not experienced as such by Black people that what Zerubavel calls the “semiotic battles over what ought to be marked and what should remain unmarked” (28) occur. Examining the critical relation between semiotics and politics, Zerubavel opposes the unmarked, that is the default or given, and the marked “which implies deviation” (15) from our cognitive defaults. In accounting for Black people’s specialness, BLM makes their markedness explicit in a way that the generic formulation tends to present as taken for granted (for all lives), denying them the specificity of their (painful) situation. As we will see in the second part, ALM proponents see as obvious that All Lives—including Black Lives—Matter but seem blind to the fact that the obvious is not obvious for Black Lives: the disagreement about what is obvious and what is not has thus political implications at the heart of the BLM/ALM semiotic battle. ALM interpreters refuse to grant the BLM proponents explicit salience, “backgrounding” them in a purposefully universal slogan. In von Münchow’s terms, it could be said that the ALM formula determines what is “sayable” and what can or cannot be overtly acknowledged in US public discourse.
9From BLM to ALM, one goes from a concrete context to abstract decontextualization. “All Lives Matter,” in its very form, has the seeming neutrality of a saying taking the moral high ground through a totalizing homogenizing formula. The use of a dehistoricized present tense confers some authority to it, in an implicit appeal to universality or possibly some religious creed, as authoritative sources. In the absence of any identifiable agents, the slogan dilutes any form of responsibility. Indeed, what ALM achieves pragmatically is not merely to broaden the focus to the totality of lives but to reach such a high perspective referring to humanity entirely (and even all forms of life?) as to dilute meaning and specificity. Such a global scale can but leave aside or erase all details. ALM is thus decontextualizing in its very form, which makes it particularly effective. Indeed, it is very hard to counter as it drapes itself in a seemingly noble principle of universal inclusivity and neutrality.
- 9 Paul refers to the seeming suppression of identity politics from ALM as “anti-identity identity pol (...)
10Pragmatically speaking, the ALM slogan is highly problematic though, bordering on a pragmatic contradiction. ALM does not stand on its own. As Paul rightly puts it, “What would an affirmative program valuing ‘all lives’ contain?” (12).9 When ALM is used as a rebuttal to BLM, it is pragmatically inconsistent. ALM would work as a successful rebuttal if it offered a completely different alternative. As Clapp demonstrates in pragmatic terms, ALM appears to negatively challenge a claim “that it logically entails” (346)—if All Lives Matter, then Black Lives Matter as well—which renders ALM infelicitous as a repudiation: “a repudiation of a target assertion is felicitous only if it proposes an alternative pragmatically incompatible proposition” (354). To say it differently, for it to work as a rebuttal, it would need to offer a pragmatically incompatible new content, but as “All Lives” includes “Black Lives,” the use of ALM as an answer to BLM does not make pragmatic sense.
11When using the slogan as a rebuttal to BLM, ALM proponents practice what Galasiński calls “covert evasion.” Covert evasion consists in pretending to be relevant when one is not: this is part of what Galasiński labels “metadiscursive deception” (71). The deception does not lie in the words used—we can hardly disagree with the words “All Lives Matter”—but in their pragmatic function. The general objective of covert evasion is to “make the addressee believe that the utterance the speaker is issuing is cooperative whereas in fact it is not” (Galasiński 71). This is a tool often used by politicians who provide an answer that bypasses the question they are asked, while making the avoidance of topic invisible. In ALM, this deceptive evasion is covered/concealed by semantic cohesion, the very same structure is repeated with a mere change of predeterminer, making the addressee believe that the speaker is answering a previous utterance through this echo while redirecting in fact the flow of conversation and the attention of the addressees. For Galasiński, covert evasion has this “controlling function” (70). This control is at work in the “semiotic struggle” over who can be focused on or not, evoked above (Zerubavel).
- 10 In a similar way, Havercroft and Owen take up Cavell’s notion of “soul blindness”: “By this term, C (...)
- 11 In his book on Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why We Should Care, Ray provides many examp (...)
12To conclude this first section, we could say that ALM is an abridged version, in three words, of the color blindness ideology, as analyzed by specialists (Medina; Sullivan and Tuana; Ray). Medina sees color blindness as blindness to the reality of other lives: “the complete refusal to see color in a racist society involves implicitly the refusal to acknowledge the force of racist prejudices and their insidious impact on interpersonal dynamics: ‘I do not see you as affected by racial prejudices, and my social perceptions and social relations are unaffected by them’” (40). He adds that color blindness, as “inattentiveness not only to social marginalization, but also to privilege they do not see” (41), is an incapacity to see what racism does in real lives, how it affects its targets.10 In its agent-less, abstract, and universal formulation, ALM transforms multiplicity into a “fictitious unity ‘we are all humans’” (Bailey 85), through an apparently neutral language that is in fact meant to “accomplish color-coded outcomes” (Ray 104).11 Although appearing formally as a noble argument of universality, ALM is semantically inclusive but pragmatically exclusive. As Bailey puts it, color blindness is “an agreement to misinterpret the world” (86).
13After analyzing the pragma-linguistic signatures of the two formulas in the first section, I will now highlight how both formulas have been received. We will start with the reactions of Republican politicians to the BLM slogan, before showing that ordinary Americans have found fault with the formulation for being too “divisive.” Seeing how their hashtag has been (purposefully or unconsciously) misinterpreted, BLM champions have felt the need to justify the initial intention of the movement. This section thus deals with the miscommunication at the heart of the semiotic struggle.
- 12 Even presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, when confronted with BLM protesters at the 2015 Netroot (...)
14That emotions preside over the stating of ALM is nowhere clearer than in the reaction to BLM by Republican politicians. Then Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson calls it a “sickening” slogan coming from a “bullying” interest group politics. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul also saw BLM people as “bullying,” advising a change of slogan to All Lives Matter or Innocent Lives Matter (McCarthy), through associative logics, connects Black people with the stereotype of criminality and the (disproportionate) number of incarcerated Black people in American prisons. For former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, “when you say BLM, that’s inherently racist. Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives matter. Hispanic lives matter. That’s anti-American and it’s racist” (Lim), which can only be read so if one blindly restricts oneself to the scalar interpretation mentioned in the previous section. In other words, these interpreters re-read what is the transcription of pain and heart-rending emotions after the death of unarmed Black people as “elevating” some lives above others. While interviewed on CNN, Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee declared: “When I hear people scream, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ I think, of course they do… But all lives matter. It’s not that any life matters more than another… That’s the whole message that Dr. King tried to present, and I think he’d be appalled by the notion that we’re elevating some lives above others” (Ehley). By ironically positioning themselves as the victims of racism and using the legacy of Dr. King to their advantage, reversing interpellation, the presidential candidates adopt a paranoid rhetoric. At the very least these emotional reactions betray the seeming neutrality of ALM. Reading “Black Lives MATter” as “BLACK Lives Matter” is to enrich words with ideological motivation through inference that says more about who receives the slogan than who produces it. Whereas BLM is a way to talk about endangered Black Lives and no other lives, people like Carson or Giuliani make it about white people, in a “boomerang” posture that speaks about how they relate to such a statement by bringing the topic back to themselves.12
15That high-ranking Republican officials should commit to such misinterpretation can be considered a predictable political move but as Edgar and Johnson show by interviewing ordinary people that are either ALM or BLM sympathizers, the picture is more complex. ALM defenders, they show, see it as a moral necessity to maintain national unity by promoting all lives. Many of them seem to genuinely advocate ALM for its inclusiveness—hence the strength of the inclusive saying. As the authors put it, many participants have in the end the same objective as BLM proponents, that is to end racism. For them, only the adoption of a post-racial attitude, refusing what could fragment and weaken the American identity, can work against division and disunity. As the authors note:
many of our participants were raised to believe they are not supposed to see race and that they should be inclusive and promote diversity. This belief, then, prompts them to advocate for equality not by advocating for a particular group like BLM, but only through advocating for equality as a general and abstract idea. (188)
Saying BLM is seen as offensive in a politically correct post-racial world.
- 13 I’m using Sullivan and Tuana’s terms here in their edited book entitled Race and Epistemologies of (...)
16In this context, ALM is the abstract utopian idea of a world without race whilst BLM expresses the actual concrete experience of racism as lived out by real Black people. The contrast between the nobleness of an abstraction that inevitably separates from felt bodily experience is telling of the gap between BLM and ALM. For some, ALM expresses the supposedly depoliticized and acceptable way of not talking about race in post-racial America, concealing its inherent political message. The ALM formula effectively reinforces for some individuals an “epistemology of ignorance”13 that is predicated on the denial of race. Whether unconscious or deliberate, miscommunication between the two formulas points to ALM as defocusing embodied experience through abstraction. Behind the truism that All Lives Matter represents, there is a denial under the guise of fake equality erasing difference. As Alicia Garza puts it, with a clever use of the first-person pronoun in the plural, avoiding a we-them polarizing rhetoric, “When we deploy ‘All Lives Matter’ […] we perpetuate a level of White supremacist domination by reproducing a tired trope that we are all the same. […] and consider whether or not when dropping the Black you are, intentionally or unintentionally, erasing Black folks from the conversation or homogenizing very different experiences.” She continues with a plea against covert evasion and boomerang perception: “please do not change the conversation by talking about how your life matters, too. It does but we need less watered-down unity and a more active solidarities [sic] with us, Black people, unwaveringly, in defense of our humanity. Our collective futures depend on it” (Garza, 2014). Garza makes a plea for consideration of Black Lives’ “markedness” (Zerubavel) that should not be watered down in an ALM generic formulation bringing the matter back to oneself. She asks for solidarity with Black Lives’ need to “articulate” specificity that would not be countered by a rebuttal of passive unity.
17Such (conscious/deliberate or unconscious) misinterpretation of the message has led Black people to defend their slogan and the intention behind it. Many videos have been posted in defense of the spirit behind BLM, as Black people have felt compelled to account for an emotional outcry, to provide an answer to their response to outrageous murder and justify themselves. Among the many instances of public figures expressing themselves online, I have selected two examples from a video broadcast by CBS News in July 2020 in which Black individuals are being asked why “all lives matter” in fact meant for them that their (Black) lives didn’t matter. This video shows pragmatical attempts to grasp to what extent ALM could be an answer to BLM.
18Among the people taking part in the video is for instance Bryce Michael Wood, the fitness influencer hosting the Zoom series “For Your Discomfort,” who directly addresses ALM advocates: “so you really don’t get it. […] Like, how is that your response to me saying ‘Black Lives Matter?’ Because before Black Lives Matter, before that movement, no one was saying ‘all lives matter.’ No one felt the need to position themselves that way” (Capatides 0:41). Wood’s question points to the improbability of a formula (ALM) that could not exist before the appearance of BLM, showing that it is merely meant to relegate Black lives to the background as it can hardly function as a slogan on its own. To make the general public understand their outcry for Black lives and how far BLM is from what ALM supporters read as its intention, various commentators have resorted to analogy. Indeed, comparison becomes an explanatory method, making it more concrete or graspable, and is better able to defy the controlling effect of a generic saying that seems to be neutral and all inclusive. For example, in the same video from CBS, New York Times best-selling author and activist Sonya Renee Taylor calls on her addressee to imagine their wife asking them if they’re pretty and them responding “all people are pretty” or “I think everyone is beautiful.” As she laughingly explains,
It’s probably not gonna go over well in your family, right? Your wife’s probably gonna have a problem with that because what she wants in that moment is specificity. What is desired in that moment is to be seen in her unique experience with you. And that’s what Black people are asking for right now: to be seen in our unique experience in the world. To actually be seen and valued. (Capatides 1:11-1:47)
19What Taylor is highlighting is the call for specificity that BLM embodies. As Zerubavel puts it quoting political commentator Van Jones’s formula: “‘When you have a specific pain, you want a specific slogan,’ that is, a specifically marked one” (30-31).
20Both Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, two of the three founders of the BLM movement, have resorted to analogies in their memoirs in order to translate abstraction into concrete, real-life events. In her book entitled The Purpose of Power: How to Build Movements for the 21st Century, Alicia Garza uses such an analogy to explain the importance of listening to the other without bringing meaning back to ourselves:
If my best friend tells me that she and her current partner are breaking up, solidarity is not interrupting her tearful testimony to say “I too have had breakups! Let me tell you about my breakup!” Solidarity is listening, asking questions, and being there for her […] and while going through a breakup is not the same as oppressed communities showing up for one another, the lessons of how to be a good friend is instructive on the broader social scale. (2021 157)
- 14 From a sign seen during a protest against police brutality in the US in Brixton, South London, on 9 (...)
21ALM represents an interruption in the call for specificity that consists in taking for granted what cannot and should not be taken for granted, refusing explicit salience to Black Lives at a given moment and for a specific reason. In her memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors compares the abstract idealized saying and a concrete actual experience of hers: “Later when I hear others dismissing our voices, our protest for equity, by saying All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, I will wonder how many white Americans are dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because they might fit a vague description offered by God knows who” (194). The dragging out of bed offers a concrete debunking of abstraction and genericity. Silencing the “exceptional” under the guise of the “common” (Zerubavel 18), ALM blankets the specificities of concrete lives. BLM protesters have never stopped debunking the false logics of ALM based on a misguided inference and (un)willing ignorance. Statements such as “If you don’t see why we’re exclaiming #BLACKLIVESMATTER… it means you’re part of the problem”14 express the force of the blindness at the heart of systemic racism.
22In this last section, I would like to narrow the focus to one interaction taken as representative of what Hunter described as “culture wars” in the 1990s. In the context of Trump’s populist rhetoric appealing to what “Americans” really want for their country, which does not include a focus on specific groups like the one celebrated by the BLM movement, the championing of all lives is a means to push to the fore universal values and moral “truths,” which Hunter defines as static and sanctioned by God, as opposed to progressive values construed as evolving and contextual (42-45). The very slogans linguistically reflect this polarization between the orthodox and the progressive views. Interviewed on “Face the Nation” (a CBS News program) in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s death (fig. 1), Vice-President Pence is being pressed to say “Black Lives Matter.” His reaction to the journalist’s question deserves a linguistic analysis that reflects his unwillingness to see the specificity of Black pain after Floyd’s demise, and his defense of a traditionalist definition of America, legitimizing a “politics of fear” (Wodak) in his perception of BLM protesters as assaulting the American nation.
Fig. 1. Vice-President Mike Pence interviewed by John Dickerson
Screenshot from Face the Nation, CBS News, 28 June, 2020.
23Here is a partial transcript of the second section of the interview:
JOHN DICKERSON: One thing protesters would like to hear is leaders say black lives matter. You won’t say that. Why?
MIKE PENCE: All my life, I’ve been inspired by the example of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When I was in Congress, I traveled to his home church in Montgomery with Congressman John Lewis. I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday. I cherish the progress that we have made toward a more perfect union for African Americans throughout our history. And I’ve- I’ve aspired throughout my career to be a part of that ongoing work. It’s really a heart issue for me. And as a pro-life American, I also believe that all life matters, born and unborn. But what- what I see in the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement is a political agenda of the radical left that would defund the police, that would…
J.D: Leave that out of it. Just the phrase.
M.P.: …tear down monuments, that would- that would press a radical left agenda that, and- and- and support calls for the kind of violence that has beset the very communities that they say that they’re advocating for.
J.D.: But the- but the- sir,
M.P.: We- I’ve- I’ve literally met- I’ve literally met with African American leaders around this country and in the national capital area who’ve- who made it clear to us they- they want law and order. They- they want peace in our streets.
J.D.: So you won’t say black lives matter?
M.P.: John, I really believe that all lives matter.
J.D.: OK.
M.P.: And that’s where the heart of the American people lies. And we’re going to continue to stand strong. We’re going to continue to stand strong with Americans that- that want to see us come together as a nation. And we’re going to carry that message all the way to November and for four more years.
J.D.: All right. Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
M.P.: Thank you, John. (CBS News)
- 15 Ray writes, “Like most effective propaganda, America’s reigning narrative of racial progress takes (...)
24When asked by John Dickerson, “One thing protesters would like to hear is leaders say Black Lives Matter. You won’t say that. Why?” Pence practices pragmatic evasion. Switching from the perspective of the protesters that Dickerson wants him to adopt to his own individual perspective, he covertly evades the question. Instead of showing some form of solidarity, he offers an ego-centered, defensive speech talking about his own record in the civil rights fight, tapping into the “mainstream narrative of racial progress” (Ray)15—the first-person pronominal form is used nine times in his response about his civil rights achievement:
All my life, I've been inspired by the example of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When I was in Congress, I traveled to his home church in Montgomery with Congressman John Lewis. I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday. I cherish the progress that we have made toward a more perfect union for African Americans throughout our history. And I've- I've aspired throughout my career to be a part of that ongoing work. It's really a heart issue for me. And as a pro-life American, I also believe that all life matters, born and unborn. But what- what I see in the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement is a political agenda of the radical left that would defund the police […]. (my emphasis)
25Pence does not “hear” the pain expressed in BLM, refusing to say “just the phrase,” but only “sees” them as danger: “what I see in the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement is […].” This refusal to adopt the phrase is a refusal to listen to the call for solidarity proposed by the BLM slogan. What he does instead is frame the protesters as ideologically marked, radical, and dangerous, putting the blame on them for the violence of the demonstrations. The personal pronoun “they,” used twice in the last utterance of the following extract, is part of an I/them rhetoric that is polarization at its clearest:
MIKE PENCE: But what- what I see in the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement is a political agenda of the radical left that would defund the police, that would…
JOHN DICKERSON: Leave that out of it. Just the phrase.
M.P.: … tear down monuments, that would- that would press a radical left agenda that, and- and- and support calls for the kind of violence that has beset the very communities that they say that they’re advocating for.
26Despite the interviewer’s repeated attempts at making him say “Black Lives Matter,” Pence can’t even utter the phrase, revealing the ideological nature of ALM that comes as a rebuttal to it, having nothing of the neutral, ideologically-free, universal meaning it formally purports to be. It is as if pronouncing the phrase would be calling for the defunding of the police and making “support calls” for violence. He concludes the interview on a pro-life belief: “I really believe that all lives matter.” What this exchange exposes is that the supposedly all-inclusive slogan (ALM) is only meant to cover up the demand for markedness by the BLM defenders. In Pence’s use, ALM is clearly predicated on an underlying “us versus them” rhetoric masquerading as a call for inclusion.
27As I have tried to demonstrate, ALM is only a pseudo-response to BLM with a message at cross purposes. By derailing conversation, it is an off-topic digression, covertly evading the issue. Miscommunication is what characterizes the two slogans. Whereas BLM is an emotional statement laden with the weight of historical injustice, ALM is a defensive and polarizing rhetoric frozen in an a-temporal static present tense. ALM seems to assume the form of a synthesis transcending polarization—some kind of Hegelian Aufhebung—but merely covers ideological polarization in the drape of abstraction. It mimics the form of a rational saying-like statement, killing in the bud all debates and violently denying the emotional content of BLM. ALM thereby numbs both the affective and cognitive faculties of those adopting and recirculating it. ALM’s pseudo-inclusivity amounts to the maintenance of the status quo. It is a reductive metonymy, implicitly referring to the dominant group, meant to reassign Black lives the position of the unseeable and unhearable. ALM numbs emotions and, by so doing, numbs the capacity to hear how racism affects real lives. Medina defines it as an “affective failure”: “it involves the inability to feel concerned and to have an array of emotions such as empathy, sympathy, compassion, etc.” (49), whereas Feagin speaks of “social alexithymia” (27) to refer to this absence of empathy, which Mike Pence’s inability to even say “Black Lives Matter” epitomizes. From a pragmatic perspective, the “affective failure” of ALM advocates lies in their defensive reading of Black Lives MATter—meaning specific lives in pain—as only BLACK lives matter in an exclusive sense. By confusing specificity with exclusivity, ALM is a (conscious or unconscious) pragmatic misreading of BLM, demonstrating “how little Black lives matter.”
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