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Black Lives Don’t Matter as much as Charlie Hebdo Lives Matter
A Few Words Before:
This essay is a re-print from a piece written following the Charlie Hebdo terror attack in Paris four years ago. We all remember that one, right? Of course we do. Twenty people were killed during that horrific spasm of violence.
You also remember, of course, that during that same week in January, 2015, over 2,000 Nigerians were killed during a highly organized and co-ordinated terrorist attack by Boko Haram, right?
Of course you don’t.
And that’s the point of this re-print — to remind us of just exactly how little black lives actually matter, especially when juxtaposed to, compared and contrasted with competing traumas experienced by white people. This phenomenon is all too familiar to black people worldwide. Immediate and saturation media coverage begin before confirmation of anything occurs. And then comes the outpouring of sympathy, empathy, and automatic and massive material aid for white victims of any given atrocity anywhere on earth.
Yet black death, black pain, black suffering, even on an industrial scale, is hardly noticed, let alone addressed with a view or determination to end such future horrors.
