This is what white people can do to support #BlackLivesMatter

by Sally Kohn

''One year ago this coming Sunday, Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Mo. Since then, the collective anger and devastation of the black community has become a powerful national movement. Black Lives Matter has worked to transform everything from social media to social consciousness.

In his searing new book, “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates implies that it’s not his job — or, by extension the job of other black voices or leaders — to coach white folks, let alone worry about their feelings. Which it’s not. The whole point is that we white people should be the ones thinking more about black people — their feelings, their experience and their reality, which can be dramatically different than our own. But at the same time, Coates concludes his text noting that structural racism won’t change until white people change...''