The things I've seen on Facebook

Everything in italics is a direct quote pulled from a post I saw on Facebook, with explicit language removed. No other edits were made there.

This is why people stereotype.

No, but this is a blatant endorsement from you and your privilege to continue to slaughter people of color in the streets for their nonviolent existence. You called them animals, used more explicative language than correct grammar regardless of the fact that English is your only language. You want to talk about animals? Go to the zoo. These are human beings who deserve to live in peace. These are human beings who for far too long have been unsafe in their own neighborhoods, their own vehicles, their own skin.

Still doesn’t Change my mind just like I won’t try to pointlessly argue and change yours and I won’t think any less of you either…probably can’t say the same for you tho.

1. Yes, I copied and pasted part of your post because you exemplify the exact kind of racist white rhetoric I needed to address.

2. For once, you're right. I will think less of you for your opinion. I will look you in the eye knowing you don't care about your fellow citizen, and it will affect the way I see you. It has to. I cannot stand silently by while you spew your hatred to the world. It's the sad number of people who back your viewpoint, who scream it from the rooftops of our tiny hometown, that makes me so unwillingly to claim this place.

3. Sometimes, I get it. I understand that you went to school with less than a dozen black kids so you don't see people on the other end of your words. I get it to the extent that I understand children's confusion at new concepts, but I will never understand your absolute unwillingness to learn the beauty and importance of diversity. I will never understand the hatred that you have now decided not hide just below the surface.

But then I see something beautiful. Scroll past the #BlueLivesMatter posts that ignore the fact that blue lives do not exist, and there are people who see this for what it is. There are white people amplifying black outrage because they see the platform or privilege they have, and they are not staying silent this time. There is poetry. There is a thirst for justice.

There are people who see George Floyd as yet another breaking point instead of pretending he is just one death. There is anger. For him, for Tamir Rice, for Eric Garner, for Sandra Bland, for Mike Brown, for Trayvon Martin, and those are just the names that we remember off the tops of our heads.

If you want to sit back and pretend that this is fine, say it louder. Say you're okay with state-sanctioned lynchings. Look up that picture of Emmett Till's open casket, and say it as loud as you can that you're fine with repeat after repeat as the decades go by - just as they have.

Make it known to everyone around you that you would have been in the crowd screaming at those little black girls just trying to go to school all those years ago instead of hiding behind your out of context idea of what Martin Luther King Jr. was preaching as he fought for civil rights the black community still doesn't have.

Dig up every memory you have of February history lessons and claim that history as your own. You just told everyone which side of the story you would've been on, so yeah, I think less of you.