Jim Kenyon recently covered a growing demonstration in Canaan to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement. On the Valley News website, his July 12 column was headlined “Dueling efforts in Canaan address matters at hand.”
The organizers of this effort have been very clear in their desire for these demonstrations to be peaceful, to hold space for our Black friends and neighbors, to show them that they do in fact matter in our spaces, even when they do not in others. What I see in these participants is loving effort to both become educated allies in private and to publicly show support.
I was uplifted to hear of the Black man who happened upon the vigil and joined the crowd to photograph it. In that moment, he was able to take the space intended for him.
That is the story. There is no violence. There is no conflict. No “Dueling.”
There is a group of individuals lovingly, peacefully and humbly learning, working at, and in, whatever way they can, tipping the societal scales toward equality. But that’s not newsworthy, I suppose.
I was disappointed to see the column then turn to the All Lives Matter “movement.” I put “movement” in quotes because it was demonstrably nothing. A man promised a counterprotest. Instead, no one showed up, yet the headline of the column gave him the microphone anyway (ironically demonstrating the concept that some lives matter more than others). The headline might as well have been: “White man’s concept movement falls flat,” and covered what he had for dinner instead.
This is not the story and not worthy of a hat-tip in the headline.
ELAINA BERGAMINI
Grafton
I was appalled at the comments of Bruce St. Peter in his recent Forum letter (“The fact is that all lives matter,” July 16). I also am an old man, but I get it. Black Lives Matter is telling us that they want to breathe. The data on racial equality is in and it isn’t equal. It is final. Black Lives Matter.
Since their kidnapping and forced immigration to America, Black people’s lives have not mattered. History does not need to be changed; it needs to be told accurately. Our history is about 400 years of brutal oppression by white people, which continues today. All white people need to stop trying to explain it and to take ownership of their white privilege and become part of the solution.
All lives will not matter if we don’t include Black lives in the mix.
JAMES CONTOIS
Claremont
I am an old (white) woman (also 77) responding to Bruce St. Peter’s recent Forum letter (“The fact is that all lives matter,” July 16). He totally misses the point of Black Lives Matter.
Since the founding of this country, Black lives have not mattered as much as white lives. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, discrimination — all imposed on Black people by us over the past 231 years. Surely St. Peter remembers, as I do, the “whites only” signs in public places throughout the South, the images of law enforcement beating and fire-hosing civil rights demonstrators, the laws against “mixed” marriages, injustices too numerous to name. And now someone puts up a sign that says “Black Lives Matter” and white people start complaining?
I am willing to bet that the people whining “Don’t our lives matter too?” have never been arrested for driving while white, haven’t had police storm into their house because they thought there might be drugs there, and haven’t been considered “suspicious” for walking down the road. And yet there is outrage because people are waking up (hopefully) to the understanding that we as a society need to value Black lives.
White lives have always mattered. Now it’s time that Black lives matter as well.
BETH DINGMAN
Norwich
In his July 16 letter, Bruce St. Peter asked, “Don’t all lives matter?” and argued that slavery is an ancient “part of human nature.”
Yes, all lives matter. But in America, it is Black (and brown, and Native American) lives that are treated as though they don’t. We have all the statistics we need to prove it — from mortality rates to income levels to inferior schools to the disproportionate number of people of color jailed for nonviolent offenses — or executed by police on mere suspicion. This is “slavery by another name.”
The North profited from Southern slavery — through bank loans to slave traders, insurance policies on enslaved people treated as property, and shipping the products of slavery. Meanwhile, those who fought to defend slavery are celebrated with statues. The Confederate flag is displayed (even in Vermont) as a reminder of the “good old days” when Black people were treated as animals.
No white person can begin to understand what it must be like to be a person of color in America, living every day with this history and its frequently fatal effects. But we can at least be willing to recognize that — even though there is plenty of white crime — our whiteness allows us to walk, jog or drive through any neighborhood at any hour without being pursued and shot by vigilantes or arrested and choked to death by police because someone thought we “looked suspicious.”
Slavery in the ancient world was not based on any theory of racial inferiority. Slaves were spoils of war, and they were treated more like political prisoners with certain rights and legal protections. Slavery was not a lifelong condition. It was nothing like the enslavement of Africans in America from 1609.
There is nothing in human history that can excuse how our supposedly Christian European ancestors treated the Africans they imported or the Native peoples whose lands they stole. Or for how we treat refugees at our borders today.
All lives matter, but yours and mine and our fellow white Americans are not inherently at risk.
JANICE PRINDLE
South Woodstock