Chick-Fil-A recently announced plans to add “#BlueLivesMatter” to their products to promote police officers in the United States. Generally speaking, hashtags like #BlueLivesMatter are used to promote white supremacy and a police state where people of color are actively harassed from birth until they are old enough to be put into the prison-industrial-complex, where capitalists can make money off of human beings at a very low cost, perpetuating the toxic line of American capitalism that can be traced back to slavery.
It’s not necessarily the best course of action to merely assume that because a person goes to Chick-Fil-A they are siding with white supremacists; in many cases, they may just like chicken. In the same way, there are at least some people who, in good faith, believe in the superficial sentiments of #BlueLivesMatter without agreeing with the white supremacist underpinnings of this message. Generally, these people have not realized one or more of these things:
 1. Blue Lives Don’t Matter Because Blue People Don’t Exist
This seems obvious, right? However, #BlueLivesMatter is a reaction to #BlackLivesMatter, the current social movement happening in the United States. Even though the police are referred as the boys in blue, they are not a race of people. Any association that police officers have to deal with, good, bad, or otherwise, was brought upon by their choice to become a police officer.
2. Blue Lives Matter Doesn’t Support Police Officers
In fact, there hasn’t been much movement by the white supremacist core of #BlueLivesMatter slactivists other than reproducing racist memes on Twitter and making profile pictures for Facebook. If the hashtag had any real consideration for the enhancement of police officers, it would be working for safer working conditions for all officers, a reduction of racism within the police system, resolving the toxic ‘blue line of silence’ that creates unhealthy dynamics within police and communities, and a way to get rid of corrupt and aggressive police officers that choose to escalate situations with violence.
3. “Blue Lives Matter” Is Racist
The reason that Blue Lives Matter is so popular among white supremacists is because of its racism. The purpose of Black Lives Matter is to say that the United States devalues the lives of Black individuals, and a statement that Black Lives Matter is in direct opposition to that belief. Offshoots such as “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” are ways of opposing that statement in itself because those statements in response to Black Lives Matter position themselves as dialectic arguments against it.
While a boycott of Chick-Fil-A over the holiday break is effectively useless due to its dominance in states that employed the “Southern Strategy” of conservatism (where the GOP would appeal to racist Democrats in the South in order to take a hold on those electoral college votes), next time you order chicken nuggets at your preferred fast food establishment, you can think about how strange it is that we live in a world where a corporation decided to advocate white supremacist views with fatty food!
Or you could think about barbeque sauce. Whichever works for you.