The following is from a friend. He posted this on Facebook on June 17, 2020. Please read the whole thing. It very much mirrors my own feelings.

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The truth is that when I first heard the slogan, the chant, the catchphrase, “Black Lives Matter” it struck a chord with me mentally… the chord was off, flat, it felt… wrong. I have developed a sense of morals over my lifetime that includes honoring the sanctity of human life, all of them, every last person, so I thought “don’t all lives matter?” But that wasn’t it exactly, it was more. I thought “why are they saying that, in that way? Do they think black lives matter more?” and that caused me concern, because, I am white. Did my life not matter? Why am I being excluding from the equation of lives that matter? That extreme level of an emotion impinges on logic heavily — being devalued as a person can cause one to be irrational about the subject.

It took time and effort to overcome my mental objections to “Black Lives Matter” as a concept. It took an examination of my feelings, investigation of facts, it took a willingness to change my mind, to keep it open to accepting the Truth of the mental conflict, because, even though I felt like I was being excluded, it was logically a True statement, “Black Lives Matter.” I followed the logic and used set theory to help me understand that in the greater set of [All Lives Matter] the sub-set [Black Lives Matter] is a True set. Stating that does not make the larger set untrue. But that was not enough. It took more research, more exposure, more data…

I don’t know when I first heard “black lives matter” — historically, it was first a trending hashtag after the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. I recall having confused emotions over that incident — the audio recording was sketchy, the eyewitness accounts were inconsistent. Was Martin a sweet boy who dragged his father from a burning building at nine years of age, or was he the gangsta wannabe who was at the time of his death on suspension from school for having a pot pipe, an empty baggie, and in his locker a backpack with a screwdriver and some suspected stolen jewelry? Was George Zimmerman a concerned citizen on patrol standing his ground or an armed hothead spoiling for trouble? Any way those chips fall, that death should not have happened.

Then there was the death of Michael Brown, and the protests and riots in Ferguson, and Black Lives Matter, as a group, as a movement, came to the fore in the media spotlight.

This was a flashpoint — the protests and riots were not only about Michael Brown — this was not an isolated incident, but a culmination of a succession of highly-profiled abuses. The pot was boiling and the initial report of Michael Brown’s death was all the stoking the flames needed for the withheld rage to boil over and burn Ferguson.

Later, it turns out, many eyewitnesses corroborated the officer’s story — Michael Brown was shot while he was aggressively running towards the officer after he ran away from a struggle for the officer’s gun. Because BLM gained so much notoriety from the Ferguson protests, some people have latched on to the details of the Michael Brown death as an excuse to never accept BLM as a legitimate movement, because it was based on a false premise. It is convenient for those people to fix this in their mind, and ignore the dozens of other completely legitimate cases of police killing innocent, unarmed people, because then they can oppose BLM and feel they are not being racist, in their own estimation.

If Michael Brown is not a legitimate martyr for BLM in your mind, then what about Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Matthew Ajibade, Eric Harris, Paterson Brown Jr., William Chapman, Walter Scott and literally hundreds of unarmed black people killed by police in the last decade?

Then Colin Kaepernick knelt, and people lost their minds. When asked about his kneeling, he said it was a silent protest against police killing innocent black men. How can any right-minded person think that is a bad thing to protest? Easy, just create a lie, a different truth, for your small-minded sheep — tell them he is protesting the American Flag, the National Anthem, the military — all things Amurikkkan, dadgummit! How dare that overpaid <racial slur> sumbitch!

I had no objections to Kaepernik kneeling, none. I recognize that expression as a freedom, inalienable, and supported by the Constitution. A long time ago I watched the movie “Billy Jack,” and one scene affected my young self. At the “free college”, they put on a skit, where people were sitting on stage, and then the National Anthem started playing. All rose and put their hand on their heart but one of the players. The others got irritated, kept trying to get him to stand, but he wouldn’t. They ended up beating him unconscious (playing) and they continued with the anthem. It made me realize that America is free and so free, I should be able to sit through the anthem if I decided to. I did that as an experiment, in school, at assemblies, etc., got into a little trouble for it, but not as much as expected, and no one threatened to beat me up. A person expressing their freedoms does not lessen anyone else’s. Demanding respect of the flag or anthem of a nation smacks of fascism.

Eventually, I did change my view, and accepted BLM for what it is, and support its mission statement “Black Lives Matter” with zero qualms or qualifications. I understand its focus and agree with the desired end result — elimination of discriminatory police abuses against black people. I am also, at the same time, fully behind eliminating ALL police abuses, but hey, that is a larger fight, and “Black Lives Matter” is part of the same fight. Let’s hypothesize that someday change is affected and the police no longer abuse their powers to kill black people — do you think that behavior might also extend to other people too? I do.

-Tim Lam
June 17, 2020