Men are being murdered by those who are supposed to protect them. That is not an opinion; it is a fact. To be clear, “police have shot and killed a young black man (ages 18 to 29) — such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. —175 times since January 2015; 24 of them were unarmed.” (Source) 175 times is not an isolated incident or an accidental event. 175 times is a problem, and a very serious one at that.

From these tragedies, the Black Lives Matter movement was born, and in response to the BLM movement, many people are now shouting that “all lives matter.” We, as white people, seem to think this is about us. News Flash: It isn’t.

Imagine that your grandmother is sick and dying. You say, “Pray for my grandma!” and then someone says to you, “No, pray for ALL grandmas because all grandmas are worth praying for!” Think about how rude and insensitive that would feel. Of course everyone’s grandmother is worth praying for, but yours is the one who’s dying. This is essentially the same issue that lies behind the statement “all lives matter.” Simply put, by responding to “black lives matter” with “all lives matter,” you’re trivializing the harsh reality that black lives face on a daily basis. But, that is a very simple answer, and this is a very complex issue.

In America, we say that our country was founded on freedom, but white men built this country on slavery, abuse, and murder, among many other crimes. White men crafted America on the backs of “approximately 388,000 Africans [who] arrived in the United States between the mid-seventeenth century and 1860.” (Source) White men kidnapped, imprisoned, and enslaved thousands of innocent men, women, and children, tore them from their families, shipped them across the ocean, and forced them to work in less than acceptable conditions, where they were valued at three-fifths of a person. The slave-owners said, “Three-fifths of their lives matter!”

When I learned about the beginnings of America, I was taught that the founding fathers were morally-sound, Christian men who built the nation on strong, Godly values. But, what sort of morally-sound man is at peace with the blood of thousands of innocent people on his hands? How can you be a God-fearing individual who also believes that some people are inferior to you for no reason other than that their skin is darker than yours? How can you be Christ-like and treat someone in such an abysmal manner?

I know a lot of white people who think, “Oh, well, we don’t have slaves anymore, so what’s the issue?” While slavery was indeed finally abolished in 1865, the emancipation proclamation did nothing to reform the mindset of slaveowners. Abraham Lincoln didn’t utter magical words and transform white America, and so people of color were still seen and treated as disposable. Segregation was formally outlawed in 1954, but “ten years later, more than 75% of the school districts remained segregated and one half of the black population was below the poverty line.” (Source) The law said, “Some lives sorta matter, separately, and with great distinction between each.”

It’s easy to distance ourselves from these statistics because they’re from over 60 years ago, but unfortunately, racism hasn’t gone anywhere; instead, it’s simply learned to grow in more subtle directions. It’s now often less blatant and has become an institutionalized part of society, allowing it to often fly unchallenged. No longer is racism owning slaves, or explicit segregation, but it is instead found in the exclusion and misrepresentation of people of color in media, emphasis on beauty as a function of eurocentricity, and in the way that white people call their non-white friends their “non-white friends,” but call their white friends simply their “friends.”

Racism is all too alive and well in the disparities between the white and black communities. Some examples include unemployment rates, where “in 1972, the jobless rate among African-Americans was 2.04 times that among whites. In 2013, the ratio was 2.02.” (Source) It’s seen in the individual wealth of families, as “according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Urban Institute…white families were 4.3 times as wealthy as black and Hispanic families in 2007. By 2010, the multiple had widened to 6.1.” (Source) Racism is also notably evident in arrests, as “marijuana use is roughly equal among blacks and whites, yet blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.” (Source) Even more gruesome is the death rates of black people in comparison to white people, as, “an average of 19.4 African Americans per 100,000 people were murdered between 2010 and 2012,” (Source) whereas “white people had a murder rate of just 2.5 per 100,000.” (Source)