I was recently replying to someone else in another thread that became polluted in racial arguments where none had been brought up initially. While replying, I re-read what I had wrote and found it to be concise enough that I think it summarizes my problems with wokeness in general and BML in particular, (below is paraphrased).
I assume that others like me are tired of racial obsession. Some of us don't need or want to place any emphasis on a person's race as any special qualifier for different treatment, because we see each other as people. Some people we like, because we like how they think and behave, some people we grow tired of because of their antics. Long live MLK! We're all basically the same, why is this so hard to understand?
There is of course the alternative, where we focus primarily on insignificant differences and place enormous importance on that, and start dividing each other on that basis, to demonize the other without regard for who they are beyond their skin colour. I wonder if we can find any examples of the outcomes of this type of thinking in history?
I'd consider carefully what far left activist are trying to achieve and the manner in which they are trying to achieve it. It's for these reasons I reject the BLM movement as a destructive, divisive movement.
Your goal of wanting people to just be people, and race not to be a big issue, isn't wrong. But you appear to be horribly ignorant and oblivious to the situation of many people, especially black people, and what's needed to get from here to there. It's like your wife was raped, and you say, 'darling, I am against you being raped, but I'm also against having to be annoyed hearing about it. So, I'm against you telling me you were raped.'
There are plenty of legitimate 'concerns' to have about a movement like BLM. It is a popular movement borne of opposing injustice; as a popular movement, there's no guarantee it will always do the right thing. It's not only fine to criticize it if it doesn't, it's right to. But your 'I'm against BLM because they talk too much about race' is quite misguided. Opposing justice because it annoys you isn't much better than opposing it because you support injustice.
What you're saying can be fine on a more personal level. For example, corporations tend to 'treat people as people' and mostly ignore race. If there is a black person in a meeting, the meeting doesn't say "this is Barack. As a black person, he cares a lot about racial justice for black people. But treat him like a person." And so on. They just do. You don't have to talk about race all the time with black friends.
But we are a society, with a history, with issues, and some of those are systemic, and as a society, we need to care about that if we don't want every group less than half the country subject to abuses, because the majority say 'hey, it doesn't affect me, I don't care'. Institutions - police, courts, libraries, schools, politicians, even private businesses - are legitimately obligated to not behave too badly, and be constrained by society as needed.
The alternative, as you say - go look at the old pictures of Bull Connor using dogs and firehoses on black children, and say, 'not my problem, don't care, the government should not care.' That's the society you make with that approach. If not that exact one - times have changed - one with more George Floyds or other problems. You should celebrate BLM as our democracy actually functioning for once, and it's ok to condemn the 1% who use the protests for crime sprees.
