Some people are telling me that if black people just obeyed the police they wouldn’t be harrassed, beaten, and arrested so much. Here are the stories police officers tell—of being harrassed, beaten, and arrested by their fellow officers—because they are black.
The stories you are hearing, the protests you are seeing, are coming from somewhere: they are coming from the very real lives of people in America who are treated as suspects, as thugs, as criminals simply because they are black. When we say “#BlackLivesMatter” it is because it is a hope, not yet a reality.
The way to fix the problem isn’t to tell the protesters to stop protesting. The way to fix it is to get at the root: to make it a reality that #BlackLivesMatter.