To say Black Lives Matter is essentially a philosophical statement first before it is a political statement. It could be the natural progression from the shortest two-word proclaimation of Black Power of Kwame Ture and the other vanguards of African freedom struggle of the 1960s.
Looking back, the statement was a great place to start. Just consider for a minute how difficult it has been even to find an appropriate name for people of African descent in America.
How can you solve a problem that you can't define. Africans are indeed a special breed in the eyes of those in power going back to the founding of this country. Just about everybody else who migrated to U.S were only one step from being full citizens even though some foreigners received derogatory names like the Japanese and the Jews that reflected the prejudices of time. While those prejudices are still around, none is as prevalent as the prejudice against African Americans.
The term for Africans in America has moved from Africans captives, then to slaves to negro, Colored then to Black and now to African American. This is a clear indication of the tenuous conditions of African lives in the U.S.. The problem has now metastasized into a variety of problems.
Two are most obvious and pernicious.
First, the problem is that Americans created the very people that it now consideres as a problem. It is understandable why America would act in such a manner. You see, Americans were the first to spot black power. The only difference is that they didn't shout or march.
They took it and converted it into wealth and comfort for themselves. That means that for America to openly believe in Black power in its entirety, they would have to view a large part of their wealth as Black. I I don't need to elaborate why such thinking would be suicide for White America. By the way, this is a great place to remind you that Africans in America is such a problem that their citizenship is the only one that conditional. African Americans are free as long as they are not guilty of a crime. That is a crime that compounded the original crime. The first crime was to enslave the Africans and them criminalize them after exposing them to severe crime at yout.
Secondly, the African who is in transition and in an extremely distabilized condition only knows black power by proxy. Where is the example of what an African is or was. How erroneous can we be to think that we are such special people, blessed and elect of the most high, after all the suffering we have experienced at the hands of white and arab terror and still be "normal"? That's a cardinal crime. Soldiers go to war nowadays for a few years and have to be treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Yet slavery, colonialism and postcolonial stresses are somehow lesser crimes.
It's for this reason I think that Black Lives Matter has to be, by necessity, a philosophical statement. That would deal with all the exegesis and veracity of what being a captive, slave, negro and so. Only by understanding the complexity of the problem philosophically can we then proceed to deal with necessary political ramification of Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter as a slogan of protest is more or less a joke. It ignores the fact that making Black lives into something that matter is antithetical to white domination. As long as the structures of white domination remain intact, the stars can turn black in support of the Black cause but nothing will change.
Black lives matter stopped being a truism so that White lives could matter. Do you then think we can march and protest whites lives out of their dominant position? Did white people themselves march their way into power or rather marched around the proverbial wall of Jerico until they found themselves in position of power? History answers that question very clearly. Black people are the poster book example of the cost of White power.
In the exploitation of Africans, three systems had to be designed. The first to break the African system. The second system was to imbue the African with a slave consciousness in order to be a useful tool for creating white power. Thirdly, a system to keep him distracted and therefore unable to liberate himself from being a tool for the creation of white power.
It's easy to purge those things instituted in the Africans to allow for his and her exploitation. All those things promoted as solutions by those in power can't be useful in our liberation. We can't be free in Jesus, Muhammad or any the other foreign religions. We have to exist outside all those boundary set by the enslavers. If those religions had the power to liberate us and maintain our African systems, the enslavers would have never allowed such religions amongst slaved ancestors. I have first hand how religion and all other systems of education and institutions of socialization obstruct the creation of African systems.
Don't ask me how I know or why I make such a big deal out of it. The British made my people "Subjects of the queen". Wouldn't it make sense to make our selves the "subject" of Black Lives Matters?
Let all manner of political science, philosophy, rhetoric, logic, geometry and any other subject make itself amenable as tool to solve this persistent dilema of African suffering and dehumanization.