Lately, I've been watching the Black Lives Matter movement and I have been dismayed and horrified by how many white, Christian, males, are completely missing the point. When Black protesters chant, "Black Lives Matter" and "Hands Up Don't Shoot", white commentators rush to claim the moral high ground by saying, "Well, of course, All Lives Matter". This is true, in an abstract general way, but it is not fitting in light of the particularities of the situation.
The Patristics understood that things were true not merely as a function of their correspondence with reality, but also because they were fitting and beautiful. Fittingness (often described as coherence in modern truth-theory dialogue), is a useful category to rediscover as it provides us with a moral framework for understanding how to best serve Truth (in a correspondence sense).
Let us accept for now that the general truth "All Lives Matter" is really true, and True in an absolute correspondence sense. In a situation such as we have in the United States of America, we see a people group that for the last 4 centuries have suffered under slaver, Jim Crow, and the prison industrial complex. The reality for Black Americans is that their lives do not particularly matter, and have never mattered. Because they agree that indeed "All Lives Matter" is really true, they raise their voices in a prophetic corrective to proclaim, "Black Lives Matter".
It would not be good enough for them to say, "Black Lives Matter too", as this softens their prophetic claim to the above-mentioned general truth. They must explicitly say "Black Lives Matter" because for so long it has been implicitly said, "No they don't!" When white people seek to relativize their particular claim that "Black Lives Matter" with the general claim "All Lives Matter" they actually make themselves liars. The context of slavery, segregation, and oppresion put the lie to any notion that "All Lives Matter". General truths are too abstract to mean something in a context that has given the lie to the universality of their claims for too long. Only when the particular truth claim, "Black Lives Matter" has been recognized and actualized can the statement "All Lives Matter" be affirmed.
General, universal truths are real and important, but they become irrelevant and supremely unfitting when said in a context that reveals the lie of the claim. Sometimes, to serve a big, all encompassing truth, what is left to us to actually vocalize is the smaller truth that has been denied by the people who like to pretend that the the larger truth is being honoured.
