‘White Lives Matter’: Understanding a Sign
This piece was originally published on 27/06/20
Life over the past few months has been dominated by two slogans: ‘Stay Home/Protect the NHS/Save Lives’, and ‘Black Lives Matter’. The first has provoked not so much opposition as frustration and incomprehension. However, the responses to the second, and in particular the ‘White Lives Matter Burnley’ banner flown above the Etihad Stadium on the 22nd of June, invite us to think carefully about what BLM is and what it means. This essay will argue that much of the confusion around BLM derives from whether signs are treated as being arbitrary.
Banner flown on 22/06/2020
The study of signs owes a lot to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in the early twentieth century. He came up with a new way of seeing signs, of which words and phrases are one type, which is foundational to the way I think we should understand BLM. The basic idea is that words do not relate directly to things, but rather relate to some intermediate mental impression; you can find a brief introduction here.
The phrase ‘black lives matter’ can denote a number of different ideas; indeed, it denotes different ideas for everyone who reads it, can denote more than one idea for any given individual, and all these ideas depend on context for their meaning. One possible interpretation is the ‘literal’, which sees ‘black lives matter’ as denoting the ‘dictionary definitions’ of the three words. Compared to most political slogans, the literal interpretation of BLM is anodyne and almost meaningless; in contrast, a slogan like ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’ is almost impossible to interpret in a way that isn’t politically powerful, because it’s very difficult to imagine a context in which those words do not imply some demand about how we should order society. But when signifiers denote more than one signified, these interpretations run parallel to and separate from each other. Take the example of the word ‘mouse’: it signifies both a mammal and a piece of computer hardware, but while there is an etymological link in this case, the two interpretations don’t really affect each other.
A more useful interpretation of the sign would be that BLM denotes a set of political beliefs. These political beliefs are a mental entity in the mind of the reader or listener, rather than anything in the physical world; but crucially, they need not actually have anything to do with the literal meaning of the words ‘black lives matter’. In fact, the link between signifier (‘black lives matter’) and signified (political beliefs) is arbitrary: just as there is no particular reason that the syllable ‘mouse’ should refer to the impression of a small fluffy animal, there is also no reason that a particular phrase must refer to a particular idea. I’m reminded of a scene from The Office:
Michael Scott’s confusion here stems from the fact that he is taking ‘negative’ literally, rather than understanding that the literal interpretation is parallel to and separate from the medical meaning. In fact, he isn’t just conflating the two signifieds; he is refusing to look past the literal interpretation to other, more pertinent interpretations. Looking more specifically at movements against police brutality illustrates this point. Many different slogans have become popular: ‘Defund the Police’; ‘Fuck Tha Police’; ‘Fuck 12’. But while their literal interpretation may differ, a given individual might use all of them to denote the same set of political ideas; the political ideas and the literal meaning have to be treated separately.
That brings us to ‘all lives matter’. Taken literally, it is self-evidently just an extension of ‘black lives matter’. Many responses to people saying ‘all lives matter’ attempt to point out this relationship of subsetting rather than contradiction: suggesting that “yes, all lives matter, but black lives are particularly in danger now”; using analogies of a single house in a terrace being on fire; or pointing to the historical fact that all lives have not mattered equally, and so BLM is needed as a corrective. These responses seem to me to miss the point, because they assume a non-arbitrariness of the sign: that the literal meanings of these slogans are connected to their other meanings. When people say ALM, they often don’t intend to extend BLM, but rather to contradict it: the phrase denotes opposition to the political views which the speaker believes BLM to denote.
Denotation is a useful concept here. It was discussed by Roland Barthes in his 1957 book Mythologies, where he used it to describe the relationship between a signifier and a signified, a vocal and a mental entity, which creates a sign. But Barthes also talks about connotation: the relationship between a mental entity and other mental entities; perhaps between political views on race and political views on sexuality. Each sign is part of a bigger myth system, and takes its meaning not just from denotation, but also from the other signs which it connotes. In our example, ALM connotes BLM; it derives its meaning from its (oppositional) relationship to the other sign. In this sense, there isn’t actually a difference between ‘all lives matter’ and ‘white lives matter’; the literal meaning, which is significantly different, is much less important than their oppositional relationship to BLM. ALM and BLM both relate to wider mythologies as well: one only needs to think about ‘performative’ activism on Instagram to realise that having BLM in posts, stories and bios is linked to ideas of popularity, influence and fashion. Both signs can denote much more than their literal meanings.
Why, then, do people say ‘all lives matter’? It doesn’t seem plausible that any but a tiny, sheltered minority intend to use the phrase in its most literal sense. Rather, I’d suggest two possible explanations. First, alienation. Alienation as a concept derives from Marxism and inter-war critical theory; it’s become a popular way of characterising post-2016 populist reactions against a ‘metropolitan liberal elite’, of ‘Somewheres’ against ‘Anywheres’, whether that reaction take the form of Brexit or Trump. People, especially white and working-class people, feel alienated from their country’s leaders and culture, as well as from their own histories and geographies. ALM, then, is a cry for help from a struggling class; those who espouse it see BLM as connoting immigration, diversity, multiculturalism, and so on; their opposition to BLM stems from a broader opposition to a whole structure of ideas and a whole group of people.
But while putting ALM into a broader political context is helpful in some ways, we should also consider a second explanation: that it derives from traditional white supremacy. In most racist societies, it has been poor whites, rather than wealthy white slave-owners, who have been most vigorous in reinforcing white supremacy, because they perceive that they have the most to lose from its destruction. In the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, it was the petits-blancs of Haiti who were the biggest opponents of the abolition of slavery; in 1849 John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator and Vice-President under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, said that “the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black, and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” Perhaps, then, the popularity of ALM among poor whites is not a reaction to elite support for BLM, but rather support for the status quo which prevents them from falling any lower. In saying this, don’t mean to say that it’s only poor whites who are racist, or that it’s only poor whites who benefit from white supremacy, but instead to provide an alternative to fashionable theories of alienation — an alternative which may also explain Brexit and Trump.
Another consequence of the failure to treat BLM as an arbitrary sign can be seen in its adoption by corporations and other large organisations. It is true to some extent that the NFL’s u-turn on BLM, moving from proposing a ban on kneeling during the anthem as recently as 2018, to the current chorus of support, is an acknowledgement of which way the political wind is blowing; its an attempt to align its political beliefs with its customer base. But the NFL does its best to avoid political stances; it didn’t take a position on the invasion of Iraq, or on the efficacy of quantitative easing, or the Affordable Care Act. Nor did the myriad other businesses and organisations who have now come out in support of BLM. It doesn’t seem plausible that such a widespread wave of support derives from the importance of the issue per se. Fashion and some kind of institutional ‘peer pressure’ certainly plays a role, but I think part of the popularity of BLM among corporations as a signifier comes from the various possible signifieds it denotes. The best example is the Premier League; BLM has been plastered all over our TVs, from the kneeling before games, wristbands and lapel badges, to actually replacing player names with ‘Black Lives Matter’. But in 2017, FIFA attempted to ban the Premier League, as well as national teams, from wearing poppy badges for games in November, in line with their regulations preventing political symbols being used by teams. That a poppy was seen as a political symbol, but BLM isn’t, demonstrates just how shamelessly a political message can be co-opted. As we’ve established, BLM can denote a radical set of political ideas; but the banal literal interpretation makes it vastly easier for corporations to espouse than, say, ‘defund the police’, in spite of the fact that the political programmes denoted by the signs are very similar.
Arsenal players kneel while wearing BLM shirts — Photo from The Guardian
When corporations (and also sports organisations) who have failed to implement antiracist policies in the past come out and support BLM, they’re doing more than just ‘performative’ activism. They’re also assuming the non-arbitrariness of the sign, and promoting one particular interpretation over the others. Hearing a politician like Matt Hancock intone ‘Black Lives Matter’ into a television camera makes it clear that when he uses the phrase, he intends to denote only the most literal meaning; clearly, he is not indicating support for the raft of policies that BLM denotes for many activists, and he is privileging the literal interpretation over a more radical one. What makes this equivocation possible is that he sees BLM as a non-arbitrary sign: taking it literally allows him to avoid the other political ideas which BLM connotes.
It’s been argued throughout this essay that while the anodyne literal interpretations of BLM are separate and parallel to its explosive political denotations, those interpretations can create problems for the political ideas. First, they encourage BLM/ALM conversations to focus on the meaning of words rather than political ideas, and second they allow politicians and corporations to reap the PR benefits of the slogan without committing themselves to the political ideas it denotes. But why, then, did black activists settle on BLM, rather than a more explicitly political slogan? I think it comes from the way that Black rage has been treated by White people, especially in America, for the last few centuries. Anger has almost never been seen as an acceptable way for black people to express themselves: with few exceptions (perhaps Sojourner Truth), White America has policed and suppressed Black people (most notably Malcolm X) who refused to be entirely limpid and non-violent. Even Martin Luther King was wildly unpopular; but in the decades after his death, the gospel of nonviolence has been preached across America. By the 2010s, when BLM originated, assertiveness in antiracism was outside the Overton window; and so only a slogan this banal, this unthreatening, could achieve broad political support. That BLM has become the dominant sign, rather than ‘Reparations now!’, ‘Defund the police!’ or ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!’, is due not to the antiracist movement, but to white supremacy.
Understanding ALM and WLM means understanding them as signs; and this understanding shows them to be essentially equivalent. ‘Black lives matter’/’All lives matter’ should no more be engaged with as literal statements of a political position than ‘red state’/’blue state’, or ‘pro-life’/’pro-choice’. But while understanding the political ideas that BLM denotes, we need to remain aware of how a refusal to accept its arbitrariness, an insistence on taking it at its word, serves a political and economic purpose too.