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 or agents of peace. But when you are met with a truly deadly weapon, giving it the benefit of the doubt and letting it do its thing will get you and many others killed.

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

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

Rather, you 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 por 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 you do nothing. Now is your chance to choose action or inaction. Which one will you 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 you would do when you had to pick a side. So what do you stand for? What will you fall for?

Hitler didn't win Germany with a majority of Nazis. He did it por 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."