This kind of reasoning would be contingent on a factually problematic – and morally dubious – hierarchy of global suffering, where racial inequality in the US would always come out on top.Īside from the empirical difficulties around ranking different forms of human misfortune, this hierarchy is particularly counterproductive for a movement with a global appeal.
The only scenario where the “I Will Never Understand, But I Stand” slogan would stand to logic is if the plethora of racial injustices in the US (anything from police brutality to socioeconomic inequality) could be definitively proven as unrelatable to other forms of human injustice around the world. The Trap of Constructing Racial ‘Hierarchies of Suffering’ By juxtaposing the alleged inability of non-black BLM advocates to grasp racial injustice with their support for the BLM cause (“ but I stand”), the slogan implies that these individuals cannot be driven by palpable comprehension of – and sympathy with – racial injustice, but rather by an axiomatic embrace of anti-racist activism. By contrast, this increasingly popular slogan definitively precludes the possibility (and therefore the utility) of understanding (“I Will Never Understand”) as a driving force behind non-black activism against racial injustice. During its recent boost, however, following the heinous murder of several unarmed African Americans by police officers, the movement seems to have complemented its signature “Black Lives Matter” motto with a parallel slogan for its non-African American supporters: “I Will Never Understand, But I Stand”. In the current ideological climate, many non-black BLM supporters seem more at home with using a slogan that not only highlights their cause, but also delineates them from African American proponents of said cause by explicitly stating their racial background.įor Aristotle, the means of persuasion could differ (reason, trust, or emotion), but the goal was always the same: understanding. Recently, however, some of the rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has taken Aristotle’s de-monopolization of the persuasive potential of reason one step further, but not in a direction Aristotle would have been likely to approve of.įounded in 2013, the BLM movement was originally associated with its namesake slogan. Two millennia later, we have overwhelmingly maintained the broader Ancient Greek notion that reason is not the only channel through which we understand things (and each other). Therefore, to understand something, you must think, trust, feel – or engage in any combination of the three. In this school of thought, reason ( logos) was only one of three–often equally important–modes of human persuasion, alongside with credibility ( ethos) and emotions ( pathos). One of the major legacies of the Ancient Greek intellectual tradition (most famously articulated in Aristotle’s Rhetoric) is the three-layered theory of persuasion: logos– pathos– ethos.
At least since Ancient Greece, humans have recognized that they are not always rational.
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