Here's what some well-meaning people don't seem to understand: times change.
If you said "black lives matter" in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1860, or in Oklahoma in 1910, you were a brave soul indeed. But anti-black racism was seldom as strong in Seattle, and among evils in modern Seattle, I think others rank much higher, today. (Indeed, I don't recall ever hearing a representative of any institution doing anything other than affirming the value of black lives, often in a rather patronizing way, to audiences of whites and asians who already despised racism.) And racking my memory, it is hard for me to recall many individual expressions of that kind of racism, either, and those long ago and fairly mild. (The last I heard was in China, actually.)
The Chinese Cultural Revolution scapegoated the children of capitalists and religious believers, among other targets. That was vile, because the children had committed no crime, and indeed, all power was now in the hands of the "proletariat." But in an earlier generation, warlords, mandarins and other traditional power elite had, indeed, often abused that power. So the revolutionaries were committing the same sin as those they blamed their victims for, because they failed to recognize the concept of individual sin.
The modern BLM revolution has been influenced by the same Marxist concept of group guilt. But already Axial Age sages like the Hebrew prophets said no, a man should not be punished for what his father did.
I have never seen racism in America to rival that of Chaz. It is orders of magnitudes worse than anything I have seen publicly defended. White people are asked to abase themselves to blacks. A basketball court is reserved for African-Americans only. When did the reverse ever happen in Seattle? Certainly not in my lifetime. "Kill cops" and similar graffiti is spraypainted around the neighborhood. (And they tried, you know.) How would "Kill professors" make you feel if you saw that spraypainted all over Butler? Coupled with mobs which tried to follow that advice? That happened in the Chinese CR, you know.
Oh, but this is justified, or at least understandable, due to police crimes! I found a poster of 30 black people who have been killed by police in Washington State, hanging in front of the East Precinct door.
This excuse for hatred and rioting is like the blood libel against Jews. Google their stories, and you find men (mostly) who shot their girlfriends, clubbed people in a convenience store, took children as hostages, and the like. In other words, almost all these killings were clearly justified, and many saved innocent lives.
This is also another example of racism, because the majority of suspects shot by police in WA state, according to The Guardian, are white. If the police are brutal (an assumption I deny), why focus only on victims of a certain race?
Brutality is its own excuse. This is proven by the fact that, as sociologists have shown, hundreds of black people died due to restrictions on policing in cities like Ferguson and Baltimore where the cops backed off. Having read many of the stories, I expect many of those victims were girlfriends and wives. (Though most may have been other young black males.) Yet neither the press, nor Woke corporations, is making a fuss over those lost lives.
I see no more of value in this cultural revolution than the one that began in 1966. I deny that America was a racist nation: in fact, having taught in numerous public schools, I found the education system systematically went out of its way to affirm the value of black lives in particular, to highlight the evils of past racism, and to hold up the heroism of black leaders. (Far from smashing statues of Martin Luther King, as thugs in California smashed Ulysses S. Grant, and in Portland George Washington, we renamed our county after King!)
The wanton crimes, terrorism, and hatred of these past months have no excuse whatsoever. They are not a correction for past abuses, they are the same kind of thing as past abuses, and a perpetuation of the evil they allegedly rebuke, the use of mob power to crush innocent people.
Do we disagree? I hope not. Because I am crushed at what America has suddenly become, and at the sudden, sickening destruction of my beautiful home town. I have always stood up for underdogs. Look around you, and see who they are today, not 150 or even 60 years ago.