This is a response to the Sept. 3 letter “Hate in America” by Jessie Watkins. We both share concerns about the animus and rancor in society. Hate has been used throughout history by privileged minorities to divide, confuse, stratify and separate people from their mutual well-being and common goals. Let’s not fall for this ploy.

The letter lists Black Lives Matter with the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy groups as a hate group. This is a false equivalence. A 28-year-old white supremacist named James Harris Jackson stabs a 66-year-old black stranger to death in Manhattan. The white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine Bible study scholars in a church.

No one was murdered by Black Lives Matter, and the organization should not be demonized because someone wants to shift blame.

Black Lives Matter was created in 2012 after Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted, and 17-year-old Trayvon was posthumously put on trial for his own murder.

Black Lives Matter is a call to action and a response to virulent ant-black racism in our society.

There is profound disagreement about Obama and the Democrats causing division. It was Mitch McConnell who stated the goal of limiting Obama to one term and led the obstruction of legislation that would have improved our national well-being.

Need one say the reason Obama was hated so much for eight years? Should we ask for the real reason Trump championed the birther movement? It’s Trump who worsened the national divide through his vitriolic rhetoric and mean-spiritedness.

We don’t see eye-to-eye on most Confederate monuments. They were erected to rewrite history and celebrate a cause that was lost at the expense of the poor Southern soldier who was tricked or coerced to fight against his best interests.

These icons of treasonous traitors belong in museums.

— Reginald Brown

Salisbury