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From my friend Isa Rogue: "Some people seem to think that there is an invisible "only" in front of Black Lives Matter. There is a difference between focus and exclusion. If something matters, this does not imply that nothing else does. The Black Lives Matter movement arose in a context of evidence that black lives don't matter. When people are receiving messages from the culture in which they live that their lives are less important than other lives, it is a cruel distortion of reality to scold them for not being inclusive enough. There are some implicit words that precede "Black Lives Matter" and they go something like this: Because of the brutalizing and killing of black people at the hands of the police and the indifference of society in general and the criminal justice system in particular, it is important that we say that..... Black Lives Matter is about focus, not exclusion. Black Lives Matter isn't a statement about white people. It does not exclude white people. It doesn't accuse white people, unless you are a specific white person who perpetrates, endorses, or ignores violence against black people. To assert that the Black Lives Matter movement is about violence against police is to ignore (and invert) the causal reality that the movement arose as an effect of police violence. The movement is about the subject of violence, but it is not about violent retaliation. Ascribing a negative meaning where none exists does not bring that meaning into being. Unless you speak for the Black Lives Matter movement you have no authority to say what those words mean to the people in it. Your interpretation of something and your reaction to it based on that interpretation are not the same as what something actually means."