“Focus versus Denial: A pragma-linguistic analysis of the Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter slogans”

This talk will focus on the force of the hashtag and slogan Black Lives Matter in the light of what came as a repudiation to it, All Lives Matter (ALM). My aim is to evince from a pragma- linguistic perspective to what extent ALM is an act of (conscious or unconscious) misinterpretation. Indeed the gap could not be wider between the illocutionary force of the slogan as intended by the BLM movement advocates (Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi) and its perlocutionary effect on certain Americans that felt compelled to brandish the universalist ALM. While the powerfulness of the BLM slogan precisely lies in its inclusive potential, some members of the Republican Party conversely construed it as a form of ‘bullying’ (Ben Carson cited in Paul 2019, 4) and even went as far as saying ‘when you say BLM, that’s inherently racist’ (Rudy Giulani cited in Chan 2016), in ironic reversal of the claim made by BLM demonstrators.

I will show how a linguistic and pragmatic analysis of these three words can help explain the diametrically opposed interpretations. Gathering the scientific research published so far on the two formulations and the public reactions about them, I will add my own contribution to the racial implicit and the violent denial that the All Lives Matter ‘response’ embodies. I will try to evince that the interpretation of BLM (as divisive and confrontational) issues first from the way the utterance is potentially prosodically read and secondly from the entailments and implicatures that are drawn from the utterance itself, as some choose to focus on its informativeness (the utterance as information) rather than grasp the emotional outcry it incarnates, which points to the fact that the way one is affected by a slogan strongly reflects the racial ideology that is ours. While the verb ‘matter’ in end-focus in BLM draws attention to the necessity of opening our eyes to systemic racism, its apparently all-inclusive de-historicised counterpart (ALM) marginalizes BLM, violently erasing its specific birth and meaning. My take is indeed that All Lives Matter sounds like a positivist universalistic statement that does nothing less than dismiss concrete reality and foreclose affects that are at the heart of the BLM pronouncement.