This article aspires to explain how it is possible that “white lives matter,”“blue lives matter,”
and, ultimately,“all lives matter,” can sound, feel like and act as responses to the claim that
“black lives matter” for so many Americans by approaching the political sequence as both a
historical (situated, epistemological, and ideological) problem and a philosophical
(metaphysical and ontological) question. By way of general history, the first part of the article
specifies how a statement (vital but otherwise unqualified human life), a political rationality …