Do black lives really matter in America? Indeed, have they ever mattered, in our sordid racial history? And what, if anything, can we do to make sure that black lives matter today? These are just some of the questions we address on this week’s episode that we are calling “Race Matters.”

现在，作为一个黑人，我不得不说，我觉得很沮丧，我们在这里，已经进入了21世纪，仍然有一个问题，黑人的生命是否真的重要。我承认也不全是坏消息。我们消除了住房方面的正式歧视。我们已经消除了许多投票的旧障碍。Sure, our schools and neighborhoods may still be segregatedin fact, but at least they are not segregatedby law. We’ve come a long way since whites could openly and brazenly band together to use the coercive powers of the state, first to enslave black people, then after the Civil War in their collective rage, anger, and nostalgia over lost empire, to all but re-impose slavery by another name and to effectively nullify the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the US Constitution.

当然，这是真正的进步。任何看不到我们与曾经噩梦般的种族隔离国家已经不同的人，都是在蒙住双眼生活。然而，向种族和谐和公正的天堂迈进还远远不够。想想我们所谓的刑事司法系统中的种族不平等。以警察枪杀黑人青年而不受惩罚为例。或者我们把棕色和黑色的尸体塞进监狱的事实。大多数人都没有意识到监狱里的年轻黑人比大学里的还要多。

Of course, independently of race, the prison system is a moral disaster. And not only for black people. It's a disaster for poor white people too. The rate at which we incarcerate young white men seems tolerable and reasonable to us only in comparison with the rate at which we incarcerate brown and black men. We incarcerate more people, for more crimes, for longer period of times, and under worse conditions, than any other advanced, democratic, wealthy country in the world. This suggests that that perhaps one way to get white people on board with fixing racially problematic institutions, like our broken criminal justice system, is to show them that it’s their problem too... and not just a problem for black people.

One problem with this approach, though, is that it seems to suggest that instead of insisting that “black lives matter” in response to the moral disaster that is our criminal justice system, it would be better to say that “all lives matter.” But many black people will hear such a suggestion as a demand that blacks must kowtow to white sensibilities to get the racial justice they deserve, because whites are just so tired of dealing with black grievance!

But you don’t really have to see it as black people kowtowing. You can see it as a matter of getting all people—black, white, brown—to recognize that we’re all in this together and that these are common problems. That may sound suspiciously like trying to adopt color blind solutions to problems that are deeply colored by race. No doubt the ideal of color blindness is a grand ideal. I mean, who could deny that race shouldn’t matter nearly as much as it does? But unfortunately, color blind solutions don’t have a great track record for solving our racial problems.

But despite that fact, it would be a mistake to dismiss the strategy of focusing on common problems as some head-in-the-sand form of color blindness. Tactically and strategically speaking, focusing on shared problems is probably the only realistic way forward. For example, suppose that you concede that the criminal justice system disproportionately affects the lives of black people. Suppose you go even farther and allow that it may have been explicitly designed to work that way, as many believe. That still doesn’t mean that the best way forward is to frame criminal justice reform as an explicitly racial issue. You just make a case for replacing the current system—which, again, is a nightmare for everyone—root and branch, with something more just, more equitable and more effective. And not just for black people, but for all people. And once we do that, you know what will happen? Black people will disproportionately benefit, since they are disproportionately harmed by the current system.

那么，是什么阻止我们采取这样的策略，阻止我们绕过种族分歧，专注于团结我们的东西，而不是分裂我们的东西?一个问题是，如果我们走“昆巴亚”路线，我们可能会忽视黑人面临的紧迫而特殊的问题。历史已经充分证明，美国需要有人不断提醒，黑人的生命是重要的。但历史也告诉我们，当我们美国人用明确的种族术语来描述我们的问题时，我们最终会让一个种族群体与另一个种族群体对立。当那发生时，我们都输了。

Now saying that black lives matter isn’t saying that other livesdon’tmatter. The Black Lives Matter movement isn't necessarily aboutexcludingothers. It can be about finally and fullyincludingblack people in the collective “we,” in which we all matter to each other. What we really need to fully realize the tru nature our problem is a way to combine passionate pleas for focused racial justice with a full-throated acknowledgement of the simultaneous importance of justice for all. But a twofold challenge stands in the way of our achieving that combination. Given how racially divided Americans are, emphasizing race is a risky strategy. But avoiding race is a risky strategy too, because getting black people on board with a broad-based multiracial strategy requires that they hear themselves included in the refrain “All lives matter.” But given that that refrain is too often insincere and uttered as a retort to the claim that black lives matter, that’s a hard slog. One question we might ask is whether the Black Lives Matter movement be the vanguard of a social justice movement for all, or is it just about black people.