Is saying “minority lives matter” considered racist [closed]

Question

There have been a few popular posts about why saying white lives matter is considered racist. What I am asking is if saying “minority lives matter” would be considered racist.

This doesn’t detract from BLM (but it might be considered as distracting from it), as African Americans are a minority in the United States, and it also highlights the problems other minorities face. (I’m not here to argue about whether other minorities face problems, but if you really want to do so, provide a link to chat in the comments)

So, would it be considered racist to say “minority lives matter” in the US?

Answer 1

Full disclosure, I am a white dude.

As a statement in a vacuum, no it would almost certainly not be considered racist per se.

"All lives matter," in a vacuum, is not a racist statement - it's a moral postulate.

HOWEVER

If someone says, "Black lives matter," and you respond with "minority lives matter," then you're still performing the erasive, silencing act that "all lives matter" has come to represent: refuting a claim by attacking its syntax.

The problem is with the use case, not the wording - attacking the syntax is still an attempt to refute the claim.

For Black communities this is especially sharp because enforcement of "proper" rules of English and debate have a long history of being tools of discrimination in forms usch as literacy tests for voter registration, or more recently SAT scoring (I used to work for The Princeton Review as an SAT prep instructor).

Basically the rule is this: if someone opens a conversation with you by saying "Black lives matter," then the topic of conversation is Black lives. Any linguistic maneuvering to try and alter that scope is, necessarily, an attempt to deflect attention away from the issue the person who started the conversation came to discuss. Eliding racism is racism, so in that case it doesn't matter what words you use.