The Black Lives Matter movement asks white people to stand with it for a society-wide cure of the forces that have concentrated blacks into pockets of poverty, enforced laws against their only neighborhood employer and by default executed a strategy of containment or incarceration.
I feel their call more than I hear it, but I am white, comfortable and too busy with matters involving my own neighborhood to get up. I would, however, stand shoulder to shoulder at their rallies if the following actions where taken.
Mainly I want to see the leadership in the black community look inward and address the thugs who kill with utter disregard for all the other lives downstream — in their families, the families and friends of their victims and those who are innocent bystanders.
But more than the stray bullets that threaten every black person living in the hood, there is the intimidation and fear that rule over any chance of justice. It is a law no one breaks: You Don't Snitch. Snitching needs a brand new word that flips this coin to heads up, not heads down.
Black lives will start mattering more when black people reclaim justice in the streets from the fear to testify. Thugs are not thugs, they are terrorists. Gangsters are not gangsters, they are terrorists. Those lyrics have to change.
What an act of empowerment that would be to all who join in stepping free of a culture tolerating, if not embracing, intimidation wherever it is found.
George Frazier, Baltimore