Posted on 01/13/2015 4:12:11 PM PST by Altura Ct.
This is the fifth in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of numerous influential books, including “Dispossession: The Performative in the Political,” which she co-authored with Athena Athanasiou. She will publish a book on public assemblies with Harvard University Press this year. — George Yancy
George Yancy: In your 2004 book, “Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence,” you wrote, “The question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is, Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?” You wrote that about the post-9/11 world, but it appears to also apply to the racial situation here in the United States. In the wake of the recent killings of unarmed black men and women by police, and the failure to prosecute the killers, the message being sent to black communities is that they don’t matter, that they are “disposable.” Posters reading “Black Lives Matter,” “Hands Up. Don’t Shoot,” “I Can’t Breathe,” communicate the reality of a specific kind of racial vulnerability that black people experience on a daily basis. How does all this communicate to black people that their lives don’t matter?
One reason the chant ‘Black Lives Matter’ is so important is that it states the obvious but the obvious has not yet been historically realized.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Because in Obola-world, they don’t.
Because you’re racist, that’s why - you need sensitivity realignment of your thoughts....
The most damning evidence that some lives don’t matter is the preponderance of abortions in Black and Hispanic women. If the mothers don’t believe that their own children “matter” then what other barriers are there to self destruction.
Once you say “all lives matter” some joker is going to say that includes fetuses. Right?
Those who treat their own kind as human.
Blacks do not treat each other as if black lives matter. Perhaps the slogans are to remind them, not to remind us.
Some lives matter more than others.
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