Before we get to Sherman on the record comments, note that he decided to talk about this because of a random comment that was attributed to him on a website after a meme of him and Marshawn Lynch started to spread around the internet.
Sherman denied writing the comment and frankly anyone can pretend to be someone when giving a comment on a website, so no reason not to take him at his word. Here is what Sherman had to say about the post and the Black Lives Movement via Sporting News.
“As a black man I do understand that black lives matter,” Sherman said Wednesday in a wide-ranging and passionate interview. “I stand for that, I believe in that whole heartedly. But I believe that there is a way to go about things and there’s a way to do things.”
“I dealt with a best friend getting killed, and it was by two 35-year-old black men,” Sherman said, his voice cracking slightly. “Wasn’t no police officer involved, wasn’t anybody else involved, and I didn’t hear anybody shouting black lives matter.”
Sherman argued that African Americans should focus on their internal issues before addressing systematic ones, such as police brutality.
“If black lives matter,” Sherman said, “then they should matter all of the time.”
The All-Pro cornerback also acknowledged that there are good and bad officers, and said that police should also do their part into bringing about change.
“Some of it is being brought to light because of video cameras; everybody has a camera on their phone,” he said. “These are things a lot of us have dealt with our whole lives.”
Sherman is an educated guy and is entitled to his opinion, but this has always seem to me as a very simple concept that even educated people have a hard time grasping.
Of course ALL LIVES MATTERS, the problem is when those lives are not treated equally. If all lives mattered then there wouldn’t be a need for Black Lives Matter. But we see every single day black lives aren’t as valued as white lives, that is why there is a need for it to be said.
To his point that black people are killing black people, that is true, but it is no different from white people killing white people. Criminals should be in jail and if that criminal is black there is a high probability he will be hunted until he is indeed put behind bars especially if he does harm to a white person or police officer.
Cops aren’t supposed to be criminals, they are supposed to be the people who protect and serve ALL LIVES, but history has shown that for various reasons they fear black people more than anything on the planet and value black lives a lot less than anyone else’s life.
The difference between them and a criminal white or black, is they have a license to kill. When they do kill people they are told to go on vacation not put behind bars. Unless there is visual evidence of the wrongdoing (and even then it is 50-50) they are going to go free. No one is going to believe a white officer over a dead black man or woman.
So, while Sherman is right, we definitely as a community can do better, but it is the systematic issues that leads to drugs, poverty and violence. Until there is a time that our lives meaning black lives are seen on an equal playing field, there will be no such thing as All Lives Matter, because we are being shown daily they don’t.