Her name is Zhuri, she’s 3 years old, and draws “Black Lives Matter” in chalk, on the sidewalk in front of her mom’s home. Then along comes “Jim” with a bucket of water and erases “Black” every time she does. Or did until neighbors intervened. Read story here.
We’ve seen this before, and I’ve posted about it, for example here and here.
But erasing a little girl’s messages? I haven’t run across that before. Why does a grown man feel so threatened by this little girl’s words that he feels compelled to silence her? He must have one heckuva thin skin. Touch it and he bleeds.
Look, white lives matter, too. So much, it goes without saying; and therefore doesn’t need to be said. When it comes to black lives, though, other people need reminding.
That’s because white people aren’t treated as black people are, so they don’t know what it feels like. They don’t fear for their lives every time they see police. They aren’t thrown down stairs, taken to an alley and beaten, then dumped in a ditch like this guy was. (In his case, the cops had the wrong guy; the domestic violence call came from across the street and six houses down.) They get treated with more, shall we say, solicitude … like this white guy who had to really work at getting a cop to shoot him, and was only wounded, and is expected to recover. As a general rule, white people simply don’t have to deal with the trigger-happy cops and other problems in our society that black people do.
Maybe if they changed the slogan to “Black Lives Matter, Too,” it would be better understood. But I’m skeptical it would be better received. People like “Jim” act the way they do because they like things as they are. They like being special.
Photo: Zhuri’s chalk art
Video: “Jim” defending being an “All Lives Matter” vigilante