I am totally unqualified to write this. If I am wrong, please correct me.
I’ve never been pulled over for driving because of my color. I’ve never had to have “the talk” with my sons. I’ve never been watched suspiciously while shopping.
I am not black. If I were, I wouldn’t be able to say the things I wrote above.
To me, “Black Lives Matter” is an attempt to make the first very tiny step to address 400 years of inequality, oppression, and cruelty.
It’s about damn time,.
sfnowak 
Thank you, Steve, for your compassionate post on behalf of Black Lives Mattering. Yes, they do, and so do their unjust deaths. Life, living, being and doing is essential for all human beings inside the skin irrespective of color. You speak of “400 years of inequality, oppression, and cruelty”—as if there has been no progress on the part of America as a country or a people, or the Black community insofar as their own assimilation into the American dream. Our emotions and feelings are important, and so are facts.
One fact is that whites are the overwhelming target of interracial violence. Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white interracial violent victimizations (excluding interracial homicide, which is also disproportionately black-on-white), according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That works out to 540,360 felonious assaults on whites.
Whites committed 14.4 percent of all interracial violent victimization, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks. Blacks are less than 13 percent of the national population.
If white mobs and rioters were rampaging through black business districts, assaulting passersby and looting stores, we would have heard about it on the national liberal biased news every night. But it is not happening.
The wrongful death of George Floyd by a policeman—a “white” policeman while in custody—we are told by liberal democrat politicians, was no aberration. They are politicking it was part of something systemic— “systemic” being the word that undergirds the many arguments that have rattled around the media these past few days. They call it “genocide.” African-American men, mostly unarmed, being murdered by police officers: in 2019, ten African-American individuals—nine men and one woman. What’s more like genocide is how a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male.
The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald noted that even when you look at the shootings of armed suspects, factoring in the crime rate, black individuals are less likely to be killed.
“In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015,” Mac Donald wrote.
“That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
“The police fatally shot 9 unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines ‘unarmed’ broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”
Steve, I believe you’re right that we all should feel something, like care, concern, empathy and compassion for our fellow black brethren and citizens, yet not guilt. We must discern as our Lord says “the poor among us” as the unfortunate vs. the unmotivated. And we must certainly SEE (understand) empty rhetoric about systemic racism as merely excuse to take from others without working for it.