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Whenever someone says the phrase “dogs are a man’s best friend” you can do either of two things with this statement. You can either agree with it or disagree with it; anything else that you can do is derived from one of those two options, a combination, or an absence of either. You can say that the phrase is degrading to people, saying that man is man’s own best friend or something along the lines. Possibly you think that the statement is offensive to people who like cats. But at the end of the day, there are only two sides of the fence.

The phrase “black lives matter” proposes the same situation on a much larger scale. I am in no way equating the lives of black men and women to that of a dog, but rather comparing the two arguments. When a person says “Black lives matter” you are faced with two choices in front of you. Either you choose to agree, black lives do matter, or you can disagree, black lives do not matter. Any other thing that you could possibly say just proves your point on what side of the argument you are on, but does not provide an alternate third option.

With the rise of this movement, many people have been using doses of their own ignorance and racism to convince people that there are many choices to this so called “argument”, when in reality they just don’t want to face the fact that they believe the latter side of the argument, that black lives do not matter.

Along with this movement, a stream of negative comments and opinions have surfaced, especially those of the Republican Party. In a valiant effort to stir racism in the hearts of all Americans, politicians have been convincing the people that “Black lives matter” is synonymous with “white lives do not matter.” This has made an amazingly large dent in the current civil rights movement because unfortunately the American people have been eagerly devouring every morsel that the media can possibly feed them. They especially enjoy feasting on controversial topics that can give them a chance to release their inner 1850’s plantation owner, spewing derogatory comments and comparing their own slurs to the popular phrase “black lives matter.” In reality, I believe that the large majority of the populous is simply ill-informed on the topic and without thinking, screams its own opinion into the jumble, causing it to grow into the gargantuan mass that it has now become.

Now we as a country have a very large blob of racism consuming us, and it all started out with people of color trying to protest the murder of a black teenager.

Now you may be thinking, that’s a very antagonizing statement, and I’m sure that someone will think that I’m calling America stupid and saying that I’m better than everyone else. I just think that people need to research things before they give their opinions and this is just one case where that did not happen. As I mentioned earlier, people are interchanging the phrase “black lives matter” with “white lives do not matter.” According to the description of the Black Lives Matter movement on Wikipedia, “Black Lives Matter is an activist movement in the United States that began in the wake of the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Florida shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin. The Black Lives Matter movement campaigns against what it calls police brutality in the United States.” Now, if I were to tell someone who had never heard anything about this movement the previous statement, I highly doubt that the point they would get out of it was that white lives do not matter. They would understand the movement for what it is, a movement of equality and justice. Black Lives Matter is a genuinely good and necessary movement that is being misunderstood and mislabeled in an attempt to make it seem invalid.

Recently a similar situation occurred in Biology class. We had a competition to see who could make the best poster including the most characteristics of living organisms. My team was presenting and we said that all living things are made of a cell or cells. My classmate Jack, in an attempt to prove us wrong, said that dead things are also made of cells. This is a completely valid point, and I couldn’t refute it, but Jack’s statement was independent of mine and completely irrelevant. Yes, dead things are made of cells, but that doesn’t change the fact that living things are also made of cells. Whenever someone says black lives matter, someone could easily say that white lives matter too in an attempt to disprove the former statement as Jack did. But something that people don’t seem to realize is that this movement is not saying anything against white lives but is instead just promoting black lives. Saying that white lives matter is a lovely thing to do, but it doesn’t make the phrase “black lives matter” any less true.

In addition to turning this back onto white people, politicians are also trying to get others on the “let’s make all people of color look bad” bandwagon and say that this movement should instead be named All Lives Matter. Now, in my opinion, this is just an attempt for people to get validation because for once no one is talking about white people. Yes, it is true that all lives matter, yet that’s not what this movement is about. This movement is about innocent black people – youth in particular- being killed. This isn’t just some publicity stunt that is trying to make black people look good. So if the movement was called All Lives Matter it would still be equally true but it would reflect the cause less.

In conclusion, the movement known as Black Lives Matter is a very strong movement with a very simple slogan. In every case, people are trying to turn it into a hate-phrase against white people in an attempt to shut it down. As for why they are trying to put an end to this, I don’t know, but it is blatantly obvious that that’s what’s happening. In every corner you see people either pelting the protesters with hateful comments based off of “white lives matter too” or “all lives matter” or reversing it to make a completely innocent phrase seem like it is against someone. Either way this is similar to the saying about the dog in that there are only two sides. You either believe that black lives do matter or that they do not. Which side do you fall on?