August 31, 2020

It's true that Black voices have been shunted to the side.

That's exactly the point of my post. I was able to find this piece from about two weeks ago, from Oregon Public Broadcasting, where they talked with Black Portlanders. This quote jumped out at me:

“It happens so much that the things that we care about get hijacked and get put on the back burner. And that just gets put into a big barrel with everything else,” said Neil Anderson, a Black business owner. “We all want the same thing. But so often we get drowned out.”

Pretty much what I'm saying. Black voices and concerns are not considered in a poll about "protests." The protests are about something near and dear to the literal lives of millions of Americans. This entire subthread could have been avoided by asking if the violence at the protests hurt or help. The protests themselves are not the problem, and wording the question that way shifts the conversation away from both the human and Constitutional rights violations that BLM seeks to raise up. It literally recenters the BLM protests on white people getting shot.