An #AllLivesmatter Guide Guide to Logical Fallacies

Unless you live in a bubble, you’ve probably had a conversation about race recently. In fact, it might be the thing you talk about the most, after Hamilton on Disney Plus, and the pandemic (right… there’s a pandemic happening right now). 

It’s very easy to get lost in the arguments that people are making, and I’ve noticed some of the same logical fallacies popping up over and over again. So, I’ve made a list of the most common ones with explanations and how they often appear in this conversation about race. 

A bit of a disclaimer- this article has mostly to do with the fallacies made on the side of someone arguing against Black Lives Matter. This isn’t to say that those who support the movement don’t make illogical arguments- they definitely can and do, but the focus of this particular post is focused on this side of the debate. 

Let’s start by reading this brief dialogue between a Person A and Person B. 


It should be fairly clear from reading this conversation that it’s not really going anywhere productive. Let’s go through this brief dialogue and see where the issues are. 

A: The disparities in the system reveals the way we are handling crime isn’t working. We need to fix the system, or create a new one that works better. 
B: So what you’re saying is we need to abolish the police and establish some free-for-all society? Where murder and theft is deemed okay? 
A: That’s not what #AbolishThePolice means. There’s no lawless society, it means shifting what we think the role of the police are to other better crafted systems. 
B: But that’s literally what it means. Its main proponent is Black Lives Matter, a Marxist organisation whose main goal is to uproot all systems of government- that’s in their manifesto. And by the way, most of the supporters of Black Lives Matter are white. 
A: Not everyone who supports Black Lives Matter is a Marxist. It’s both a statement and an organisation. 
B: I agree with the statement “Black Lives Matter.” But where does it end? We are going to see a shift towards a black supremacist society, where there is minority rule and white people are silenced. 
A: My main point is that the system we have now isn’t working. Mass incarceration includes some of the greatest disparities to exist- black men are locked up at a rate of 6 times that of white men. 
B: But that’s their fault, if they commit a crime. You need personal responsibility. We can’t just let people get off scot free. 
A: The disparities in the statistics reveal that there is some sort of underlying cause. If black and white people were equally treated in the system we should expect to see numbers reflect population, but they don’t. 
B: That’s not a problem with the system though. That’s a problem with the culture. There’s a lack of personal responsibility, no emphasis on education, absent fathers… Why does the problem have to be with the system?

Person A begins with a few clear claims. These are that 1) there are disparities in the system, 2) they reveal that the way we are handling crime isn’t working, 3) We have two choices- to fix the system, or create a new, better one. 
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In response, Person B assumes Person A supports #AbolishThePolice, which they define as “establishing some free-for-all society” where “murder and theft is deemed okay.” There are a few problems with this. First, Person A’ did not say they supported #AbolishThePolice. Even if they did, Person B has carelessly defined the campaign according to what they thought it was rather than giving Person A an opportunity to explain. 

​This is an example of a straw man fallacy, in which one defines their opponent’s argument in a way which is easier to attack. Obviously, no one wants a “free-for-all” society where murder is deemed okay, so if that's what Person A believes, Person B would easily win the argument. 

The problem is, Person A didn’t say that. In fact, Person B only responded to a very small part of A’s larger claim- they responded to only half of one of these claims. Realistically, in order to have a proper debate of this claim, Person A and B should go through each of these 3 claims and see where their differences lie. Instead, we don’t really know what Person B thinks about whether there are disparities, or if they way we are handling crime is working. But hopefully, that’ll clear us as we go along. 

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A: That’s not what #AbolishThePolice means. There’s no lawless society, it means shifting what we think the role of the police are to other better crafted systems. 
B: But that’s literally what it means. Its main proponent is Black Lives Matter, a Marxist organisation whose main goal is to uproot all systems of government- that’s in their manifesto. And by the way, most of the supporters of Black Lives Matter are white. 

Instead of further defending their large claims, A responds to what B has just said, and the argument becomes not about what A believes, but about what B thinks about what other people say. We still don’t know whether A supports #AbolishThePolice, and yet they feel the need to defend it since it has been so carelessly defined. 

In response, Person B argues that he is right about what #AbolishThePolice means, even though, as I’ve noted, we STILL don’t know what Person A thinks is the solution to the theoretical problem she has claimed. First, he brings up the organisation of Black Lives Matter, one proponent of #AbolishThePolice, and says they are “Marxist” and “mostly white.” At a glance, this might even seem like a good argument- if the organisation is Marxist, surely the policies they support must be as well. If they are mostly white, surely they don’t represent what black people actually want. However, these are examples of the ad hominem fallacy, attacking the person making the argument instead of the argument itself. (Strictly speaking this example is actually a genetic fallacy, the sibling of the ad hominem men fallacy where the only difference is attacking not the person in front of you making the argument, but another source of the same argument). 

If an organisation identifies with a particular ideology, that does NOT indicate that every policy they are in support stems from that ideology or is in opposition with other ideologies. For example, The Black Panthers were another organisation deemed Marxist, and among many other things, supported desegregation. But this doesn’t mean that desegregation is a Marxist idea, or that people who aren’t Marxist can’t logically agree with desegregation.

What we also find is that the term “Black Lives Matter” is an example of an ambiguity fallacy. Person A hints at this when they say that it is both a statement and an organisation. I’d go one step further and say that it is a statement, a movement, and an organisation. If you heard someone say, I support “Black Lives Matter,” you wouldn’t be able to tell whether they are referring to agreeing with the word-for-word definition of the statement, the sentiment of the movement which believes that there are problems of systemic racism in our society, or the organisation, which believes in the first two but also includes additional beliefs about how best to solve all of these issues in a more practical policy manner. Please note, we STILL don’t know where Person A stands on this, even though Person B already assumes it is the latter! 
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Then Person B adds in that “most of the supporters of Black Lives Matter are white.” This is also an example of an ad hominem, since its focus is on what kind of people are making the argument rather than what the argument actually is. But to some extent, in an understanding of racism as a personal experience lived by many black people, it does make a bit more sense that we should be listening to black voices on these issues (you just can’t claim that anyone is right because of their race). However, there is another fallacy going on here- that is a statistical fallacy. It is true that a majority of BLM supporters are white, but that’s mostly because most Americans are white. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, ⅔ of Americans support Black Lives Matter, with only 31% of white Americans supporting it compared with 71% of Black Americans. Person B is using this statistic as if to say, it’s the white people who want these policy changes, not Black people. When we look closer at the numbers though, that seems to be far from the truth. 

A: Not everyone who supports Black Lives Matter is a Marxist. It’s both a statement and an organisation. 
B: I agree with the statement “Black Lives Matter.” But where does it end? We are going to see a shift towards a black supremacist society, where there is minority rule and white people are silenced. 

This next part of the conversation is a textbook example of the slippery slope fallacy. In this fallacy, someone proposes that A will lead to B, and therefore we shouldn’t believe A. This fallacy does the job by distracting the conversation away from the validity of A, and to the validity of the thing it supposedly leads to. Strictly speaking, even if A WILL cause B, and B is unfavourable, that still isn’t enough to disprove A. But a key part of this fallacy is that “A will lead to B” is usually an unsubstantiated claim, used more for rhetorical purposes (don’t believe in BLM, or else all this bad stuff will happen) than is productive in actual discourse. 

.A: My main point is that the system we have now isn’t working. Mass incarceration includes some of the greatest disparities to exist- black men are locked up at a rate of 6 times that of white men. 
B: But that’s their fault, if they commit a crime. You need personal responsibility. We can’t just let people get off scot free. 
A: The disparities in the statistics reveal that there is some sort of underlying cause. If black and white people were equally treated in the system we should expect to see numbers reflect population, but they don’t. 
B: That’s not a problem with the system though. That’s a problem with the culture. There’s a lack of personal responsibility, no emphasis on education, absent fathers… Why does the problem have to be with the system?

This blog post is long enough already, so we will look at this last bit of dialogue in a “Part 2” to this post- and tackle some of these larger ideas there. 

But let me wrap this up with a question- why did this conversation start in such an unproductive way? The answer to that is at the root of what a fallacy is- and that is distraction. Instead of addressing the actual argument, it can be an easy tendency to attack other things surrounding the argument (like what kind of people make it, what it might lead to, etc.) instead of addressing the claim head on. In fact, what I’ve done today can even be interpreted as a fallacy- that’s right- the fallacy fallacy! Just because someone’s argument contains a fallacy does not mean that their claim is wrong, merely that they don’t have the proper reasons to support that claim. This is why it’s so important to stay on topic in a conversation- to address what a person is actually claiming and why they are claiming that rather than what we think they are claiming or why they believe that. It’s only by truly understanding what a person is saying, that we can truly agree or disagree with them, and hopefully get somewhere helpful. 

Thanks for reading and learning along with me! If you're interested in more of what I have to say, give me a follow on my Twitter @AGKytka.

Alexandra Kytka