Thank you for choosing to write this article and also in choosing to say that Black Lives Matter. You are absolutely right when you express the idea that Black Lives Matter is not an attempt to undermine the value of other lives. It is a statement that aims to bring up the idea that Black lives haven’t mattered as much as other lives, historically and in the present.

Followers of Martin Luther King Jr wore signs that said, “I am a man” and I took this to mean something very similar. They weren’t saying that other men were not men. They were saying that they were tired of being called “boys,” by racist white southerners and wanted to be accepted as men, deserving of equal rights and justice.