The theory behind the objection seems to be that black people must help white people fix problems that white people experience before we can even talk about the problems that black people experience. That seems crazy to me.
Even if the US hadn't uniquely maltreated black people for centuries, black people are just 12% of the population. Why shouldn't they be able to call attention to the problems they experience without white people saying, "But what about meeeeeeee?!?"
Yes, there are a lot of things wrong that we should fix. But when somebody tries to discuss problem A and somebody else immediately leaps in to say, "Why don't you care about B?" I often suspect that the point is not to fix problem B, it's to stop the discussion of problem A.
And I think we immediately stopped seeing eye to eye right here "The theory behind the objection seems to be that black people must help white people fix problems that white people experience before we can even talk about the problems that black people experience. That seems crazy to me." No white person is saying "help me fix my problems first". They're saying, this is a single problem we all face and we should all work to fix it. They might even go further and say race is a bullshit social construct used to oppress and separate people and that their is no "us" and "them" only us.
Your proposal is not a slogan that "concerns itself with all problems at once", or even "all the problems that BLM addresses, plus some other problems". It is one which overlaps the problem domain addressed by Black Lives Matter, but does not encompass it.
BLM isn't just about law enforcement. In fact, the proximate trigger for its creation was the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin killing, it just happens to have come to wide attention through the movement's responses to police killings.
"Black Lives Matter ... goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes.... to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state." [0]
And sure, the American notion of race is a bullshit social construct, but it is one that white people created, put into law, and enforced. And of course used as a tool to gain power. So if white people would like race not to be an issue anymore, they should get other white people to stop making it a thing. Telling black people to stop noticing the racial bias directed against them by white people will not actually end the bias, it just hides the evidence.
Also, it's not obvious at all that there's a messaging problem. I get that a bunch of white people don't like the message. But a bunch of white people will dislike anything black people do to push back against a system that harms them.
For decades white people have been telling black activists that they're doing it wrong. And their main cited evidence is that white people are uncomfortable. MLK got a lot of that, and he responded to it here:
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
I certainly agree that the "Black Lives Matter" slogan makes me, a white person, uncomfortable. But as far as I'm concerned, that's just what it should be doing. If other people are being maltreated by a system that I have the power to change, that shouldn't feel warm and fuzzy.
Sorry? If they want to create political change in a democratic society, it is their job to convince him.
Think about the technology adoption curve, as seen in Crossing the Chasm. It's not the job, or even the goal, of a person creating a new technology to convince everybody. At any moment, a small portion of people are open to changing their minds on a given thing. Mostly, they do what they grew up with, or what the people around them are doing.
The same is generally true socially. Consider this graph:
http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod...
Now subtract the death rate from that graph. If you do, you'll see that a relatively small number of people changed their minds at any given point. Much of the change comes because old bigots died off, taking their retrograde opinions to the grave with them.
So basically, an activist who wants to change minds, like a technology marketer, shouldn't focus their efforts on convincing everybody. Persuasive efforts are best spent on the people who are most ready to change. Which in my experience is generally the person listening carefully, not the guy who runs up to shout, "No, you're doing it all wrong. Do it my way."
That's not been my experience. To the extent that ALM has been accompanied by any substantive clues about peoples broader views, in my experience, its been coupled with dismissal of the seriousness of the specific incidents BLM have complained about, and suggestions that other concerns, most often specifically violence against white police officers, are more important than the issues BLM addresses.
The BLM group don't hate non-blacks. But they believe the disenfranchisement of blacks needs to be re-prioritized. While it's not a zero-sum game, sure, in the short term, tradeoffs are made...if next year's recruitment is 20% black...that 18% had to out of some other demographic.
So, in my rosy-lens world, the two groups aren't in conflict, but it's realistic to recognize the tradeoffs. But what isn't acceptable, in my opinion, is for either group to make this into a false-dichotomy...that's why I like Zuckerberg's message...it's not an easy topic, but just crossing shit out escalates discord in a way that is not warranted, as if the people writing "Black Lives Matter" were just one step away from drawing swastikas.
To your point about poor white people being just as disenfranchised as the average black person...I don't disagree with that. I grew up in the Midwest to refugee parents and in my lesser moments was annoyed that I got grouped in with the affluent Chinese and Korean families, as if all Asians had equal opportunity to get great grades and live out the stereotype of the golden minority. On the other hand, I realize that while I may not have started off financially well, there were far fewer barriers for me in terms of other people throwing up obstacles...and that was probably because the Asian community, overall, has positive stereotypes associated with it (in terms of general society...obviously not so much in other areas). This was not the case for the few blacks I knew. You could come from a well-off family and still be followed around in stores or targeted for a stop-and-frisk. I'm not sure growing up middle-class but in what might feel like a surveillance state is better than growing up poor, yet encouraged.
So I wouldn't say the BLM people don't care about the other kinds of disenfranchisement. They just believe they need to focus on one kind to be successful. Think about Occupy Wall Street...a lot of their general ideas were things many people would like, but because its organizers didn't want to be exclusive, that meant casting a very wide umbrella and attracting people whose goals did not gel well with OWS, making the group seem very diffuse. And so OWS was mocked for being weak and daydreamy.
The most successful groups are the focused groups. Ask the unions and the gun rights groups.