‘ALL LIVES MATTER’

By Princesa Santos

Discussed: racial violence, homophobia

“All Lives Matter” is a collaborative protest poem that takes both formal poetic writing techniques and a sample of an informative article to express the detriment of using the phrase, “all lives matter.”

I
People always ask,
“What’s wrong with saying, ‘All Lives Matter?’”

II
“All Lives Matter,”
but “the gays can burn.”
“All Lives Matter,”
but “go back to where you came from.”
“All Lives Matter,”
but “he fit the profile.”

III
“It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter.”* 
“If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, ‘all lives matter,’ then we miss the fact that [diversified] people have not yet been included in the idea of ‘all lives.”’*

IV
As I turn on the TV,
I wake up to see
another dead black body,
mocking me.
When I walk through the streets,
old men watch me.
Anxiety overtakes me.
I pray to God
I’ll get home
safely.
Whenever I walk into a store
employees follow me,
always staying behind me.
They fear that 
I 
may take something.


*George Yancy and Judith Butler. “What's Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter?’” New York Times, New York Times, January 12, 2015, nytimes.com

Performance

Process

The phrase “all lives matter” is a contemporary phrase that has been commonly used to combat the concept of “Black lives matter.” This poem is a creative way to express how detrimental and hypocritical the “all lives matter” phrase really is. The poem is composed of both rhythmical and formal writing techniques, along with a section of an informative article and answering the question “what’s wrong with saying ‘all lives matter?’” Between research on the topic of this phrase and grammatical editing, this piece took about a month to complete.