People who completely miss the point ...

[MadameBee]

ARGH..

I have to have a teeny rant here as I cannot say anything in RL because in this instance it would be insensitive.

Friend (she is white which is relevant) on FB has “updated” her profile picture on FB with a photo of herself and her baby who very sadly died shortly after his birth, with the overlay “all lives matter”.

This isn’t what this is about 😤😤

Thanks 👍🏻

Aren't these overlays applied to profile pics to show support without a connection to the picture anyway?

Good point actually. She might be using the racist slogan generally without necessarily meaning to apply it to her baby picture.

@saraclara she's using her "friends" grief to come on here and seek support for herself. So she should leave her alone and stop using her.

Clearly the ALM movement does mean a lot to her tartan though if she feels she needs to mention it when talking about her child?
If that is what she intended, which it might not be.

All lives matter really makes me cringe. I just don't know how it can go over people's heads. Yanbu

I think it would be fair to say she has made all lives matter a personal thing to her rather than looking at the overall movement and that it's against black lives matter. I think in this instance I'd be inclined to overlook what is clearly a mother still grieving for their lost child

I agree with you OP, we aren't playing Top Trumps and we all lose people who are close to us. Post about them by all means - my family has just had a significant anniversary and posted in remembrance - but don't use ALM.

Why don't you educate her then @Madamebee ?
You say all lives matter has missed the point what is the point then because I agree all lives do matter .
I don't see what she has done that has upset you she wouldn't have meant to upset anyone I'm sure .
You say she's ignorant why ? What would you like her to do / say ?

@tartanbow

Sara you have no idea what this person is experiencing or how their grief would have affected their lives. how very callous of you

I know what deep grief is. The difference is that I don't use mine as a shield when I post unpopular opinions.

You sound nice OP. I wish you were my friend.

I completely agree with you OP. Yes it’s obviously incredibly sad about her baby and yes the baby’s life matter but to post All Lives Matter at the moment is either racist or stupid. You’re right, it’s not what it’s about.

Btw though, I hope she’s not on Mumsnet, she’ll recognise herself from this.

I agree it is misplaced.

I have lost a child. It is difficult to imagine how any other pain or difficulty is harder than this. It may be that she has experienced many people dismissing her child’s existence over the past 15 years, she feels s/he is forgotten and that his/her life didn’t matter to many people.This is the way in which many,many people respond to child loss- by pretending the child didn’t exist.

Using ‘all lives matter’ is misplaced and wrong because it is being used against the BLM movement. It seems possible that your friend isn’t being racist, she is just hurting and wanting an excuse to make her child’s presence known. It is not kind for you to post about this here.

you may know what deep grief is, this does not give you insiders knowledge on how another person will experience or cope. as I said, she honestly may be naive to how offensive it could be and has personalised the phrase to herself.

I'm not getting into a back and forth now however as we wont agree and it feels wrong somehow to debate someones grief and how it comes out. like I said, I'd be inclined to let this one go

I think people are giving OP a hard time here, she isn't saying for one second that it isn't terribly sad that her friends baby died.
I think it was in poor taste to use 'All Lives Matter' over a profile picture of her baby.... not because her baby's life didn't matter but because of the hurt that the 'All Lives Matter' causes to people who are trying to get the point across that sadly there is still so much prejudice and racism against Black Lives.

From what the OP has said, it would appear that her friend is well aware of BLM and so it doesn't seem as if it was a mistaken case of applying all lives matter, to the picture. She knew what she was posting. And that's her opinion, but I can see why that would be hurtful to people trying to support BLM.

Even if they are completely misinterpreting the point of it due to a grief addled state which makes them interpret it in terms of their loss?

It’s possible she is still grief-addled after 15 years - I know people react very differently to great loss, and some never recover from it. But it isn’t really feasible that in this specific moment, with everything going on, that she isn’t aware of the BLM / ALM movements, particularly when as OP says she has recently posted other comments which indicate that she is not supportive of the BLM movement.

thing is OP cant have it both ways - she cant have been posting various other things against black lives matter and for all lives matter yet no one called her out for it.

however apparently she has now put all lives matter on said photo which has meant she cannot be called out for her unpopular view. if she had already been posting such things, she has had a chance to talk to her friend about her views.

seems like a drip feed to me because she didnt initially get the support she was after.

My gran lost a little boy, well she lost 2 other babies as stillbirths as well but it was the one who died as a toddler that stayed with her for the rest of her life. She would never do anything at Christmas, when he died, as a child I could never understand why my gran, who I adored, never saw us at Christmas, never came to a nativity. You can't dictate how long people grieve or how they grieve.

He would have been in his 40s when she died, he was still her baby to her.

op has said shes already posted about blm in a negative way so shes not doing it in a grief addled state shes delbrately done it

OP you mention in your original post that your friend is a white witch and that this is relevant - in what way is that relevant?

I didn’t mean to enable voting

@MNHQ why is voting the default?

So many deeply sensitive issues that people really didn’t want to put to the vote end up having one.

Maybe it is the crass sensationalist nature of much of AIBU.

It’s a shame that as social worker, the OP seems to have a crushing lack of empathy.

OP you mention in your original post that your friend is a white witch and that this is relevant - in what way is that relevant?

Ahaha what

OP you mention in your original post that your friend is a white witch and that this is relevant - in what way is that relevant?

She said that she's "white which is relevant"

I am with you OP - wouldn't wish that on anyone but no BLM isn't really about that. However it shows she is still understandably upset about her child so maybe needs a bit of tlc and is reaching out in this way

Look it's not about the death of a child is it? We can all agree that's fucking horrific and she deserves every sympathy. The question is whether this 'all lives matter' motto is appropriate and it's really not. Of course nobody is going to argue with her when it involves such a sensitive subject but that doesn't make her point any less problematic or racism any less of an issue.

And it's definitely better that the OP has had a rant on an anonymous forum rather than to her friend surely.

@SunshineSusan14

My opinion is that you can't make a movement one size fits all, but you can't remove what 'all lives matter' might mean to this woman.

For whatever reason, the message 'Black Lives Matter' doesn't resonate with everyone. For some, it even alienates them. Including some people who it should include as supporters, or even passive non-objectors. That's bad for the cause.

It also has, in my opinion, an unhealthy effect on the mentality of those within the movement. It creates a space where only the issue is of importance - you can actually see that in certain media spaces. (see Buzzfeed, where there are many many examples of BLM supporters pushing out other POC's experiences, badgering non-black voices for supporting the cause in the wrong way, instructing people to 'educate themselves' without supplying referenced material etc).

Like I said upthread, you're fighting a losing battle if your cause is predicated on shutting down anything that doesn't fit with devotion to the approved central narrative (which, by the way, doesn't even exist in the first place in a single form, because guess what, we all have our own perspectives and black people are no more all the same than white people).

Life doesn't work like that. People don't work like that.

My degree and research specialism is in post-genocidal community reconciliation. Aka how to reconcile human beings who have suffered the very worst that other human beings can inflict on them. Trauma on an unimaginable scale. (Someone once asked me why I didn't brighten up my research with more images... of genocide...). And the current BLM protests and movement bear very little resemblance to any successful model of reparation and reconciliation that I have studied.