I'm a black man and from America. I think your gut feeling from the social media campaigns is totally understandable. I can never bring myself to participate because it's totally pointless.

Most of my non-black friends are nice liberal people and they usually take part in these things. The way I see it, for the most part they're just as powerless to do anything about these huge society level problems as anyone else and they feel bad and want to do SOMETHING. I focus on the thought behind the deed rather than the deed itself. It's pointless, but it comes from a good place I think.

I can imagine from your perspective we must all look insane. There is a TON of racial baggage in America and it's never REALLY been addressed in a meaningful impactful way. Just like I don't know shit about the history of Finland and I'm sure you wouldn't expect me to, a huge chunk of the world(including Americans) doesn't really know a detailed history of from slavery to now in America.

All this insanity actually makes sense in that historical context.

From my perspective, I can't believe it took this long for things to erupt as they have. I've never in my entire life seen the police as anything except another gang to avoid. Every person that grew up where I grew up has some horror story of dealing with police. Seeing the dozens and dozens of videos I've seen of police clearly violating people's rights and the law since this whole thing started, I'm not at all happy about that or the chaos that's come about because of it, but I am glad that it's waking people up to the reality that black people have known all along when it comes to police.

It's impossible to start working on solutions when you don't know you have a problem. I hope it's clear to people now that we have a problem.

Quick word on white privilege since you all were talking about it:

I think about white privilege as just being informed of context. As was said above, while African Americans have their shit to deal with, of course there are others that have it FAR worse. In the context of the whole world, I'm still enormously privileged. It's not to make anyone feel guilty, or to suggest that you had things easy, didn't work for what you have, are responsible for slavery, or anything like that. It's about being informed of historical context, psychological and cultural bias, and the impact all this has on everything.