I was snapping pictures of the fireworks in Michigamme, Michigan earlier this month, when I decided to zoom in on the crew setting them off.

Holy crap. I have a whole new respect for the folks who don protective gear, light their flares, and make sure everything goes off safely and according to plan.

Click for larger images.

I’ve been getting into a number of discussions and arguments lately, and wanted to put my thoughts and some links together in one place to refer back to.

Black Lives Matter was created by three queer Black women: Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza after the killing of Trayvon Martin. From the BLM website, “Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.” BLM’s principles include diversity, empathy, and the affirmation of black women, black trans folks, and black families.

11 Major Misconceptions About the Black Lives Matter Movement. Including misconceptions like “The movement hates police officers,” “The movement hates white people,” and “The movement doesn’t care about black-on-black crime.”

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But Don’t All Lives Matter?

Sure. And nobody has suggested otherwise. It seems like when (mostly white) people hear “Black Lives Matter,” they imagine a silent “Only” at the beginning. Or maybe they’re imagining a silent “More Than Others” at the end, I’m not sure. But these sentiments are imaginary. Perhaps they’re a projection. Perhaps it’s simple fear. Perhaps it’s just a lack of understanding.

When I say fundraising and research for diabetes matters, I’m not suggesting that other diseases don’t deserve research and funding. But as a diabetic and the son of a diabetic, one who’s seen diabetic friends suffer severe complications from the disease, this is something I think it’s important to work on.

The problem with “All Lives Matter” — one of the problems, at any rate — is that it came about as a response to Black Lives Matter. Here’s a Google Trends search showing the popularity of the phrases “Black Lives Matter” (in blue), “All Lives Matter” (in red), and “Blue Lives Matter” (in yellow):

There’s no Google traffic on “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” until after the BLM movement began gaining popularity. In other words, the evolution of “All Lives Matter” hasn’t been as a simple affirmation that yes, all lives do matter — something nobody has been arguing. Instead, it’s a direct response to the BLM movement.

To be blunt, it’s people who hear someone saying, “Black lives matter!” and rather than agreeing that yes, this is a true statement, people try to change the focus of the conversation. I don’t know where this knee-jerk attempt comes from, but the effect is to make it harder to talk about the problems facing black people. In other words, you are making yourself one more obstacle to progress.

Because right now, in our society? All lives don’t matter. We don’t treat all lives as equally important. Hell, even our judicial system is more likely to execute a black defendant than a white one, when all else is equal.

If you really want all lives to matter, then you need to join the effort to make black lives matter too. Otherwise, your cry of “all lives matter” is just empty words.

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What About the Police? Blue Lives Matter Too!

Again, nothing about the Black Lives Matter movement states or suggests that police lives don’t matter. From BLM’s official statement after the shooting of Dallas police officers, “Black activists have raised the call for an end to violence, not an escalation of it.”

There’s a narrative that we have a war on the police here in the U.S., but the data don’t seem to back that up.

Preliminary data show that we’ve seen the exact same number of police deaths in 2016 as we had by this point last year.

None of this means those deaths are acceptable, or that they shouldn’t be mourned. None of it means police lives don’t matter. They do, and Black Lives Matter isn’t saying or suggesting otherwise.

There’s a great deal of fear, distrust, and anger toward the police in this country. That’s not equivalent to a war on police. Nor is it a suggestion that police lives don’t matter.

To be a good police officer is a difficult, stressful, and at times dangerous job. I think it’s possible to acknowledge this, and to mourn those officers lost in the line of duty, without coopting or undercutting another movement.

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But Racism is Over!

2015 Data on Police Killing of Blacks. “Whites make up a disproportionally smaller portion of those killed by law enforcement compared to their portion of the general population – 11.3% less. Blacks on the other hand make up a disproportionally larger portion of those killed (26.5%) compared to the general population (13.2%) – 13.3% more or double!”

Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011–2014. “The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average … the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.”

Two Thoughts on Ferguson. A blog post I did two years ago, gathering data to show that the percentage of people killed by police in the U.S. is significantly higher than in other countries, and that from 1999 to 2011, the statistical likelihood of being killed by a police officer in the U.S. was about three times higher for black people than for whites.

Black and White in the U.S. Another blog post with additional data. Here are some highlights:

• Blacks comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population, and are consistently documented by the U.S. government to use drugs at similar rates to people of other races. But blacks comprise nearly one-third (31%) of those arrested for drug law violations – and more than 40 percent of those incarcerated in state or federal prison for drug law violations.
• A 2012 study found that unemployment rates “were highest for Blacks (13.8 percent) and for American Indians and Alaska Natives (12.3 percent).“
• On average, blacks receive almost 10% longer sentences than comparable whites arrested for the same crimes.
• The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households.

These problems aren’t new. It’s just getting harder for us to shut our eyes and plug our ears and pretend it’s not happening.

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Misc:

All Houses Matter: The Extended Version – This comic by Kris Straub does a nice job (in my opinion) of creating an analogy to help people understand why the “All Lives Matter” response can be so frustrating.

I obviously don’t know first hand what it’s like to be black in America today. I’ve been working to read and better understand, but that understanding is always going to be imperfect and second-hand. There’s a lot I didn’t get into here, and there are doubtless many things I’ve simply missed or overlooked.

I reserve the right to come back and add and update this post as my understanding evolves, or as I discover new data and resources.

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We got back from vacation late last night. It was nice to get away, but of course now I get to spend the next few days catching up on email, going through mail and paying bills, unpacking, cleaning up the house, and processing some of the 500 pics I took while we were in the Upper Peninsula.

Here are a few of my favorites.

Zoey took her first boat ride. She was a little freaked out at first, but I think she ended up enjoying it.

We had a pair of bald eagles hanging out at the lake. This is one of the better shots I managed to get.

Sunset over the lake.

We stopped at the Kitch-iti-kipi spring on the ride home. This is the raft you take out to look through the water.

The Ironworkers Statue and Memorial at the Mackinac Bridge.

Larger versions over at Flickr. I’ll be adding a lot more over there, and probably blogging a few more of my favorites here as well.

Getting ready for a conversation with my editor about the SF trilogy I’m working on. (Apparently they want this first book to have a title. Sheesh. So demanding…)

In the meantime, here’s an interview I did with Amazing Stories about the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop.

So, um … anyone have any brilliant title ideas they’re not using?

Wow. A lot of great comments and other responses to yesterday’s blog post that genderswapped scenes from Heinlein, Asimov, and Anthony.

Some preliminary thoughts:

• My goal was not to say or suggest these three authors were HORRIBLE HUMAN BEINGS and if you ever liked anything they wrote then YOU’RE A HORRIBLE HUMAN BEING TOO! Pretty much everything we love is problematic in at least some respect. (But please don’t take this to mean we should ignore or excuse sexism, etc. either.)
• Yep, I started with older, classic/popular works. It would indeed be interesting to see how more recent and current bestsellers looked when put through the same genderswapping process. I’m hoping to get to that.
• “What is seen cannot be unseen.” I hope so. One of the most powerful aspects of this kind of exercise, in my opinion, is that it helps us to see things we’ve gotten so used to we might not even notice it. Hopefully, that awareness continues beyond the immediate examples.

In a way, yesterday’s exercise grew out of an experience I had writing — and then rewriting — my story “Spell of the Sparrow,” which eventually appeared in Sword & Sorceress XXI. I’d originally drafted the story, a sequel to “Blade of the Bunny,” from the male character’s point of view. Then I saw the call for S&S, and I thought this story might be a good fit. But S&S stories have to be from female characters’ PoVs. So I rewrote it.

It was eye-opening. Sentences and phrases and individual words that had seemed completely neutral suddenly reared up like speed bumps, tripping me up as I read. It highlighted my own gender-based assumptions and threw them back in my face.

That’s a good thing.

I don’t think writing should ignore the realities and complexities of gender. I do think it’s good for us as writers — and as human beings — to be more aware of our own baggage and assumptions.

We’ve all got some. We live in a world that’s far from equal, and we’re immersed in stories and portrayals that perpetuate and normalize those inequalities. That doesn’t make us horrible, awful, evil people. It makes us human. What’s more important, I believe, is what you choose to do with that baggage. Do you double down and attack anyone who dares to suggest you’re anything but perfect? Or do you work to do better?

Here’s a genderswapped excerpt from Libriomancer, where I introduce Lena Greenwood for the first time.

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When I saw who was standing there, my body went limp with relief. Lenny Greenwood was the least imposing hero you’d ever see. His appearance supposedly changed over time, but for as long as I’d known him, he’d been a twenty-four year old Indian man. He looked about as intimidating as a teddy bear. A damned sexy teddy bear, but not someone you’d expect to go toe-to-toe with your average monster.

Wisps of loose black hair framed dark eyes, a slender nose, and a cheerful smile, as if he had walked in on a surprise party. He wore a brown bomber jacket with a Snoopy patch on the right sleeve, and carried a pair of three foot long fighting sticks made of unstained oak.

I definitely don’t think that’s on the same level as yesterday’s excerpts, but even so, there are a few bits of description that feel more jarring. For a stronger example, let’s take a look at a bit from a little later in the book.

The sky outside was dark, and the clock said it was just past five in the morning. The red glow of the clock was just enough to make out Lenny sitting on the edge of my bed. I heard Smudge stirring in her tank. At night she slept in a twenty-gallon aquarium, lined with obsidian gravel and soil. A single cricket chirped. That was a mistake. A scurry of feet and a faint spark followed, and that was the end of the cricket.

“Mm.” Lenny studied me in the faint light. “Has anyone ever considered doing a topless librarian calendar?”

I grabbed a flannel bathrobe from the floor and pulled it on. “Hauling books is good exercise.”

“Very.” He stood and stepped toward the door, his fighting sticks in one hand. “I think I need to start spending more time in libraries.”

Okay, that scene just got creepy as hell, reminiscent of Twilight.

Now, it’s true that Lena’s character is problematic in a number of ways. That’s intentional. But the dynamics of this scene feel very different, and much more disturbing than before.

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Ultimately, I think this sort of thing can be a really useful exercise for most of us, both to better see the sexism and imbalances in the stories and books we read and the world around us, and to better see it in our own writing. In our own minds and assumptions.

I’ll end this with a quick genderswapped scene from one of this year’s Hugo-nominated books, Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. Again, I think this comes out worlds ahead of yesterday’s examples…but the results are still fascinating and even powerful, at least to me.

I’ll be curious to hear other folks’ thoughts!

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[The ISS] was then in earth’s shadow, on the night side of the planet, and so all was dark otherwise, except for white light spilling out from the little quartz window beside Dan’s workstation. This was barely large enough to frame his head. He had straw- colored hair cut short. He had never been especially appearance conscious; back at the minehead his sisters had mocked him to shame whenever he had experimented with clothes or cosmetics. When he’d been described as girlish in a school yearbook he had interpreted it as a sort of warning shot and had gone into a somewhat more manly phase that had run its course during his late teens and early twenties and ended when he had started to worry about being taken seriously in engineering meetings. Being on Izzy meant being on the Internet, doing everything from painstakingly scripted NASA Pr interviews to candid Facebook shots posted by fellow astronauts. He had grown tired of the pouffy floating hair of zero gravity and, after a few weeks of clamping it down with baseball caps, had figured out how to make this shorter cut work for him. The haircut had spawned terabytes of Internet commentary from women, and a few men, who apparently had nothing else to do with their time.