Marley, most of the people tearing down this article are ostensible supporters of racial and social justice. But you paint with such a broad brush that your valuable message is lost - and with your condescending responses, it seems like it's by design.

If your condescension weren't harmful enough to your message, you fill this piece with absurd errors. White people aren't fighters? It also remains to be seen what the action in Portland will come to. Results matter here, right? I fail to see how burning a courthouse to the ground will foment any kind of positive change.

But your greatest error is a blindspot for the movement as a whole.

You either are unaware that MORE white people are killed by police than black people, or you are ignoring this fact. If you're a raceologist, I can't imagine you AREN'T aware of the statistics.

There are plenty of studies discussing police violence, and the data they reveal shows that America has a police violence problem. Some of the victims of that violence are black - and some of those victims are likely to be racially motivated.

The overwhelming common denominators of people killed by police have nothing to do with race, however. Almost all of the people killed by police are poor men who are armed when they catch the attention of the police. Most of those poor armed men are white. We can certainly notice that a greater proportion are black given the proportion of black people in America - and again, that's a problem.

But as someone who opposes the whole gamut of policies that have led to our police/prison/surveillance/war state - policies that you and I would agree disproportionately affect black people - I think you're missing an opportunity to build a real coalition between all victims of police violence. You talk about division - well, your piece is very divisive and it ignores a huge swath of people who are victims of the exact system that BLM protests against.

The problem is not JUST about racially motivated police killings. If we expected the police to kill all people proportionate with their population distribution, we'd still have hundreds of people murdered by police every year. Hundreds of them would be black. That doesn't sound like a win - but if we take BLM's stated goals at face value, the only real problem with police violence is that it is disproportionate. I argue that the problem with police violence is that it's violent.

One last point to hammer this home: we all know the long list of black victims of police violence. Anyone on the street can rattle them off: Michael Brown. Philando Castile. Eric Garner. And on and on.

There are too many! But you and I don't know the name of a single white person killed by police. Their names don't register in the media. And I argue it's because the narrative of police violence is being co-opted and shifted ONLY to talk about black victims precisely because that focus does divide people. We could have a larger portion of white people taking action against the police state if more of them were aware that police violence is not just a problem black people face. I think we have a choice to make: do we want an effective movement, or a divided one?

I made this same argument back when metoo was trending: why are we only focused on female victims of sexual assault and abuse? There are hundreds of thousands of male victims. Wouldn't a bigger movement be more effective? I was shouted down by women telling me to stay in my lane. Telling survivors to clam up about their own history of abuse based on their gender or their race seems like the definition of divisiveness.