Hi, first I want to take the chance to thank you for not being offended by my disagreement with your core thesis and by responding civilly to my arguments. I find that's often rare on the internet, but when someone does respond with counterpoints rather than emotion-based attacks, it is a refreshing sign that there's the possibility for rational debate.

You've presented a lot of counterarguments and it would take more time than I'm willing to commit to adequately address them all right now, but I'll at least try to summarize a few of the key points that lead to my continued disagreement with your thesis (edit: ok, that didn't work out as I hoped, I'm afraid I spent too much time thinking on just two points, so few now equals two, sorry about that).

When a minority group is attacked by a majority group, it is almost inevitable that the minority group will band together, and if they don't, they will probably suffer worse.

Yep that is because of the identities. If you don't identify as a group and instead identify as a human then there are no such thing as minorities and majorities. Just equality.
There will always be minorities and majorities in ANY group as long as you are CHOOSING to see them and segregate by them. It is a choice.

I interpret the above to mean you believe that minorities decide to be a group because they share a common characteristic (or really for any reason at all) and outsiders then attack them for some aspect of the group's nature. If so, I will agree that this is sometimes the case. Such attacks could even be warranted in some cases, depending on the nature of the group's actions.

But I think you're ignoring this important fact: racial minority members don't have to identify as members of that minority in order to be treated as such by a majority. That's basically how racism functions. If you are a black man and you're dealing with a member of the KKK, it doesn't matter if consider yourself "just a man, not a black man". The KKK guy is going to disagree.

"brief" thoughts on All Lives Matter vs Black Lives Matter debate

On the face of it, I believe a a truly disinterested observer would probably start by thinking that the ALM/BLM "debate" was total nonsense, just a random miscommunication between the two groups on each side that for some obscure reason hasn't been resolved.

But if you do a statistical study of the core beliefs of the proponents of this particular semantic argument, it's my firm belief you would find a correlation in political beliefs among most of the members on each side of this debate (there would be some outliers, of course).

Before I dive into that point more, I'll explain how I personally view this entire argument:

You can potentially interpret the statement "Black Lives Matter" in two different ways. The simplest interpretation is to treat the meaning as being confined to the core predicate being expressed (i.e. black people's lives have value). This is how an unbiased inference engine would treat this statement. It would not then infer "non-black lives don't matter". That would simply be a separate predicate that may or may not be true.

But, humans being humans, there will be some people that infer that by not expressly saying "all lives matter", the slogan was meant to say that "non-black lives don't matter (or at least not as much as black lives" because otherwise, why did the slogan creator not just say "all lives matter".

The non-racial equivalent of this kind of thinking could result if you complement the appearance of another woman to your wife, and forget to tell her she looks great tonight, then she thinks "he doesn't think I'm pretty". It's not what you said, but she may infer it (erroneously or not).

From my own perspective, I don't infer the extra predicate. It is my strongly held opinion that it was meant to express this idea: "black lives matter too".

But slogan creators often favor three word slogans, maybe because that works better on the human brain or maybe just because they are easier to chant during a protest demonstration. Don't believe that silly sounding idea? Then consider how many politically charged three word slogans you can conjure up in a few minutes. Then try the same for four word slogans.

Ok, so maybe you're thinking now: Ok, sure, I can agree that "black lives matter too", but then why didn't they just pick my awesome three word slogan, "all lives matter". The reason is simple, that absolutely doesn't really capture the core point the slogan maker was trying to make. The point here is that black people are often treated much worse by police than white people (not an issue I want to debate, just clarifying the point of the slogan). And this point would be very difficult to infer from "all lives matter".

Ok, this took way more time to write than I originally hoped and I'm not going to have time to cover some other points I wanted to make, but to avoid leaving a point dangling, I'm going to go back that correlation I posited earlier between the members of the two groups in this debate (i.e. BLM vs ALM debaters).

Without a shred of hard data to back me up, I think you would find that the BLM group consists primarily of people who are either black or support political changes to reduce the number of black people who die at the hands of the police.

On the other side of the debate, I believe you'll find that that most either believe black people are killed by police more often because of their own actions OR they are simply not black and are inferring that the slogan literally means "black lives matter more than other lives" and therefore find it offensive. Obviously, I'm simplifying a bit here, as you'll probably also find some anti-BLM members who will debate that police kill black people on a disproportionate basis to white people as well.

But here's what interesting about such a correlation (if true). The actual statement "black lives matter" really does not, on its face, mean "other lives don't matter". When someone adds that extra meaning to the statement, it is the result of internal bias. It is equally true that my adding the word "too" to my interpretation of its meaning when I hear the slogan is a result of my own internal bias.

Who's internal bias is right in this case? There's potentially no one perfectly correct answer here, because many people make the same statement and they can each mean different things (e.g. some proclaimers could mean the "silent part" that some people are inferring). So our interpretation of the meaning conveys more information about us, than any meaning conveyed by the basic statement itself.

Oh, one final important point, that I realized I hadn't mentioned. There's also another case of internal bias that can come into play here. When someone chants "all lives matter" in response to "black lives matter", the person chanting "black lives matter" can do some inferring of their own. And it can go like this: that guy is chanting this trite truth that doesn't need saying in order to dilute the issue I'm trying to highlight and thus sabotage my cause.

Now the ALM guy may just be trying to express his own belief that all these problems are being caused by group division and we just need to stop identifying as groups. My interpretation of your arguments is that you fall into this camp.

But if that's the case, in my opinion, the ALM guy has made a poor choice of ways to communicate his meaning, because it's very easy to see what may be inferred by the BLM chanter in this case.

Just in the same way that if you complement the appearance of another woman in front of your wife, you should probably think strongly about quickly clarifying your deep devotion to her before she makes the wrong inference.