"There is no rage. "

Phew. That's a relief. I had the odd feeling that you were mad at me, and I couldn't figure out why.

I'm pretty sure my initial comment began with two statements that Black lives do matter. It's not unusual for people to stop reading at the first paragraph. But most people do not simply pretend the first paragraph isn't there.

I expect that my returning your fire is frustrating. Treat it as an admission if you must. But you cannot stop me from wishing you well. You can try, but facts are facts. Black lives matter enough for me to not deny Black people good ones. That's all Black people will ever get out of most White people, whether or not they can get a handful to fall publicly on their swords on Medium.

Meanwhile, I don't see you denying anything I wrote. You dismissed my suggestions as "not having anything to do with" what you wrote, but you did not explain why either of my thoughts was wrong. What shall we infer from that? Admission? Honesty?

Instead, you went off on my fear of Marxism, as if the founders of BLM had not stated that they were Marxists. Then you followed with a Marxist rant that ends with the usual denial that the Soviet Union was not a good test, when it is an excellent example of what happens to an ideology that makes no damn sense. OF COURSE, the Soviet Union was not what Marx envisioned. But it is what Marxism wrought. Some of us find that instructive. Some don't.

There are basically two kinds of anti-racists: plus-sum and zero-sum. Plus-sum anti-racists recognize that Blacks were excluded from life's goodies because those goodies were scarce, and racism is just a veneer intended to make being among the sharers palatable. For plus-sum anti-racists, the emergence of productive technologies has made racism economically obsolete, so now it is psychologically obsolete. Minds must, therefore, be changed so that Black people can participate in the goodies and, in the process produce more of them. (Plus-sum racists are quiet these days, perhaps because they understand how White feminism was given priority over Black equality, and we don't like to talk about that...)

Zero-sum anti-racists believe that White people have hogged all the goodies and the only thing to do is to take some of those goodies from them. Maybe they're right, maybe not. I think not, but then I'm most decidedly a plus-sum guy. Point is, the zero-summers have a much more difficult political row to hoe, because they are dangerous and, as far as plus-summers are concerned, unnecessarily so.

The suggestions in my original comment are plus-sum suggestions, messages of inclusion rather than confiscation. Apparently, the author of this piece does not agree.

But at least there's no rage.