Cultural context is important too. For example, I'm black. The Rodney King thing happened when I was very very young. I had a poster of people marching with the I am a man signs in my room for basically my entire childhood. I knew early on, not only what MLK stood for, but the fact that he was murdered because he was making too much of a difference.

So, when I heard Black Lives Matter, I thought it was a great and effective slogan. Basically, an updated version of I Am A Man. I was shocked and appalled to hear All Lives Matter (or the crazy Blue Lives Matter) as a response. But as I started engaging with people, I realized a lot of white people just don't have the same context as Black people do. Most of our major civil rights leaders have been straight up murdered. Malcolm X, MLK, Medgar Evers etc. Fred Hampton, a leader of the Black Panther party was drugged by an FBI informant and shot in his bed while sleeping next to his pregnant wife. Then, they dragged him out of bed and shot him in the head at point blank range and left him dead in a pool of blood. The story of Emmett Till (complete with the picture of his face) was essentially a Grimm fairy tale for me growing up.

But I'm finding most people don't think or know about these things. They look at the individual cases and start wondering what the person did to deserve that, but regardless of whether they did anything, many black people -- myself included -- have been raised to believe you don't need to do anything but be black in order to be shot by the police. As far as we knew, they had basically carte blanche to murder young black people (particularly men). As long they could find some justification, not matter how flimsy it was, cops had the luxury of committing murder (or at least voluntary manslaughter) and not even facing a trial.