I know folks, including black folks, who disapprove of the Black Lives Matter messaging and try to redirect BLM conversation towards specific issues while promoting the use of 'all lives matter'
Your statement
> Placed in the context of BLM, it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
simply doesn't reflect the actual beliefs of many people who use the term. I, for one, am absolutely certain that racism exists and gets people arrested or killed. However, I have seen people become fed up with the narrative being promoted by BLM that frames the issue as being a 'black only' problem. To keep those people on the side of progress it's important to make sure we're not excluding them from the discussion.
It's also worth noting that BLM is not just a movement, but there are organized entities operating under the brand. [1]Many people disagree with those organizations for reasons that have nothing to do with racism or police brutality. Nonetheless, those people are called racist and accused of using dog whistles.
When you use a catch-phrase associated with racists, and you are trying to be an effective communicator, and you are not a racist: then you use a different phrase next time.
If you're not trying to communicate effectively, or if you are trying to communicate your sympathy with racism, you keep using that phrase.
Everyone is responsible for their own heuristics to judge other people. Other people are not responsible for behaving in accordance to your heuristics, it is your error if you misjudge them.
Therefore, if someone uses a phrase also used by racists/communists/some other baddies, and does not fall into that category, it is your error to guess that someone does. It is just victim-blaming for error of judgement.
Words are tools of communication. They have meanings. Those meanings shift over time, and according to context.
In the context of a programming discussion, "Just hash the string and see if you get a match" is a reasonable and meaningful thing to say. In the context of cooking breakfast, it's meaningless drivel.
Reasonable people try to use words that their current audience will understand in the current context. If they make a mistake, they learn from it.
Unreasonable people insist that they are being victim-blamed.
> Words are tools of communication. They have meanings. Those meanings shift over time, and according to context.
This is exactly correct. Not everyone's experiences are the same, leading different people to wrap a situation or a statement in different context.
When some people hear BLM they wrap it in the context of the ideology of the founders, or in the riots they see on television, or in the intense anti-[insert group] hate on social media. Those people aren't racists, and they would happily work with you to combat corruption in our politics and policing. They want the world to be better, they simply disagree with how the movement is organized.
> Unreasonable people insist that they are being victim-blamed.
People who said 'All lives matter' early on were labeled racists and attacked mercilessly on social media and television. I don't believe these people are all unreasonable.
There’s an interesting corollary of that: multiple “Black Lives Matter” organizations believe in ending capitalism and dismantling the family. By your argument, nobody should use the phrase “black lives matter” either unless they, like the founders of that BLM org, actually are literal Marxists.
Maybe you are a Marxist and you think it’s a grand idea to abolish capitalism and the nuclear family. But actually, effective communication is a little beside the point here. If you effectively communicated that you wanted to abolish capitalism and the nuclear family, nobody would care or pay attention. If you instead hid those ideas under a slogan specifically chosen to be as undeniable as possible, you can sneak a lot of things in pretty fast.
Your statement
> Placed in the context of BLM, it denies that anything unfair is happening to people because of their skin color.
simply doesn't reflect the actual beliefs of many people who use the term. I, for one, am absolutely certain that racism exists and gets people arrested or killed. However, I have seen people become fed up with the narrative being promoted by BLM that frames the issue as being a 'black only' problem. To keep those people on the side of progress it's important to make sure we're not excluding them from the discussion.
It's also worth noting that BLM is not just a movement, but there are organized entities operating under the brand. [1]Many people disagree with those organizations for reasons that have nothing to do with racism or police brutality. Nonetheless, those people are called racist and accused of using dog whistles.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdpIIiBe7Wc