For decades black Americans have been killed by police at a statistically disproportionate number than whites in similar circumstances. A year ago the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO broke the camels back leading to protests and riots and the rise of the BlackLivesMatter movement. For these many decades white Americans have predominately remained silent, those who have been vocal usually are quick to offer many reasons why those who died deserved what happened; they shouldn’t have been doing something wrong or disobeying the police.
Now here come the logic gymnastics. A white teenager is killed during a drug bust and instead of outrage with more excessive policing and another possibly unnecessary death; the anger turns towards the BlackLivesMatter movement because THEIR SILENCE is racism. Because they are not having protests in the name of the white teenager, then they are the problem.
So decades of silence by the majority of Americans was OK but if black Americans want to stand up against the violence then they have to carry the torch for everyone.
I just don’t get it, I really don’t. What I do think though is that if you respond to BlackLivesMatter with AllLivesMatter then you damn sure better put your money where your mouth is and be protesting every killing that occurs not just complaining when another group just joins in your silence.
For a good explanation of BlackLivesMatter please read the following, original is at the following link
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3du1qm/eli5_why_is_it_so_controversial_when_someone_says/
"Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don’t get any. So you say "I should get my fair share." And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, "everyone should get their fair share." Now, that’s a wonderful sentiment — indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad’s smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn’t solve the problem that you still haven’t gotten any!
The problem is that the statement "I should get my fair share" had an implicit "too" at the end: "I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else." But your dad’s response treated your statement as though you meant "only I should get my fair share", which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that "everyone should get their fair share," while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out.
That’s the situation of the "black lives matter" movement. Culture, laws, the arts, religion, and everyone else repeatedly suggest that all lives should matter. Clearly, that message already abounds in our society.
The problem is that, in practice, the world doesn’t work the way. You see the film Nightcrawler? You know the part where Renee Russo tells Jake Gyllenhal that she doesn’t want footage of a black or latino person dying, she wants news stories about affluent white people being killed? That’s not made up out of whole cloth — there is a news bias toward stories that the majority of the audience (who are white) can identify with. So when a young black man gets killed (prior to the recent police shootings), it’s generally not considered "news", while a middle-aged white woman being killed is treated as news. And to a large degree, that is accurate — young black men are killed in significantly disproportionate numbers, which is why we don’t treat it as anything new. But the result is that, societally, we don’t pay as much attention to certain people’s deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don’t treat all lives as though they matter equally.
Just like asking dad for your fair share, the phrase "black lives matter" also has an implicit "too" at the end: it’s saying that black lives should also matter. But responding to this by saying "alllives matter" is willfully going back to ignoring the problem. It’s a way of dismissing the statement by falsely suggesting that it means "only black lives matter," when that is obviously not the case. And so saying "all lives matter" as a direct response to "black lives matter" is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.
TL;DR: The phrase "Black lives matter" carries an implicit "too" at the end; it’s saying that black lives should also matter. Saying "all lives matter" is dismissing the very problems that the phrase is trying to draw attention to."