Black lives matter because America tends to forget. All lives matter, you say?

All lives do matter, but not equally.

When protests and unrest erupted in the streets of Baltimore earlier this year, it happened because the people in Freddie Gray’s community were tired of constantly being shown that their lives do not equally matter.

Gray was illegally arrested for being in possession of a knife that he was in legal possession of, and was ultimately killed while in police custody. His life did not matter to authorities that were supposed to protect it, and black folks in Baltimore were fed up with that persistent reality.

All across America, statistics show that there are great disparities in the way law enforcement and the judicial system interacts with black Americans. From “stop & frisk,” to the racial profiling of motorists, to gross disparities in criminal sentencing, the evidence is as plentiful as it is clear – government sanctioned persecution of black Americans, under the guise of criminal justice, is real.

The number of black Americans in custody or under the control of our criminal justice system is egregiously disproportionate, and quite frankly a national embarrassment. In 2009, 1 in 11 black Americans were under some form of correctional supervision, according to a report from Pew Center on the States.

In her book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Michelle Alexander points out that the U.S. incarcerates a higher percentage of black people than South Africa at the height of apartheid.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, black males represent a mere 6% of the nation’s population, but according to the U.S. Department of Justice, constitute close to half of all incarcerated Americans.

For a nation that prides itself on setting the standard for liberty and justice in the free world, these facts expose hypocrisy, and cannot be justified, nor easily dismissed.

In our media and popular culture, black people are often imagined as immoral, and a de facto criminal demographic. Law enforcement and our justice system excel at making them de jure criminals.

In nearly every case of police violence against unarmed black Americans, the victim is not fully appreciated as the victim, and is typically presented as somehow complicit or responsible for their own demise.

In America, a victim’s character is often evaluated to determine whether or not they are worthy of the moral capital correlated with victimhood, and because of persistent stereotypes and pernicious narratives perpetuated in the media, race is a major factor in the judgment of character.

Just being black, you’re both consciously and unconsciously associated with latent or innate criminal predisposition and immorality. Criminal behavior, particularly street crime, is associated with being black.

Further complicating the issue is the idea of so-called “black on black crime,” which is a misnomer. Most crime is committed among people living in close proximity, and in largely homogenous communities, that usually results in intra-racial crime.

Hence, most crime against caucasians is committed by caucasians, and the same goes for black people and other ethnicities.

The idea of whiteness has always severely limited the ability of people that believe they are white, or believe in whiteness, to fully appreciate the humanity of anyone not perceived to be white or conform to its norms.

That is why black lives matter.

Generally speaking, all lives do matter, but until we can consistently remember that black ones matter just as much as white ones, the black lives matter hashtags and movement must continue.