I believe in debate, discussion, and discourse. I believe in listening. I believe in multiple sides to every issue. I believe everyone is worth listening to. I believe there can be fault on "all sides," and that we can all be guilty of misunderstanding each other.

I do not extend these courtesies to racists.

Ideas are dangerous. They are wonderful and they are disastrous. They can be used and misused as weapons или agents of peace. But when Ты are met with a truly deadly weapon, giving it the benefit of the doubt and letting it do its thing will get Ты and many others killed.

When it comes to racists and White Supremacy, Ты must fight dangerous ideas with dangerous ideas. Not courtesy, not blame and whataboutism, but with action.

Ты cannot make excuses for White Supremacy. Ты cannot blame it on the civil rights movements, или on others fighting to escape their oppression at the hands of a culture steeped in a bloody history of White Supremacy. Ты cannot tell yourself, comfortably, that Ты would have totally marched with MLK if you'd been alive back then, или stood up to Nazis taking your Jewish neighbors from their homes had Ты been alive back then, или defected to the Union if you'd been alive in Virginia back then. Not if Ты are making excuses now. Not if Ты are finger-pointing and rationalizing and doing mental gymnastics to try and justify allowing White Supremacists to act now.

Rather, Ты must meet their hate speech with your own. Expressing intolerance for intolerance is not hypocritical, it is a necessity. Shouting them down is not suppressing their freedom of speech, it's exercising your own. Standing arm in arm with People of Color, clergy, and allies is not "being just like them," it's meeting their attack with your resistance.

End White Supremacy by calling it what it is and spitting in its eye. Don't distract with #NotAllWhitePeople to make the narrative about your feelings. Don't "It's someone else's fault" to feel better about criticizing groups fighting against this injustice while Ты do nothing. Now is your chance to choose action или inaction. Which one will Ты choose? It's easy to say you'd be on the right side of history in hindsight. But you're in history right now. It's your chance to prove what Ты would do when Ты had to pick a side. So what do Ты stand for? What will Ты fall for?

Hitler didn't win Germany with a majority of Nazis. He did it by convincing otherwise good, reasonable people to step aside and let him take it.

So remember: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."