Hi everyone - I'm somewhat new to Reddit, so apologies if this would be better submitted to a different subreddit.

I was at the Bernie Sanders event in Seattle that Black Lives Matter demonstrators interrupted and eventually shut down. As you likely know, they referred to the crowd as "white supremacists" when they were booed, asked for 4.5 minutes of silence for Michael Brown, and when that was complied with, they continued to refuse to let Mr. Sanders speak. I also saw them shove Mr. Sanders, which bothered me.

I think we can agree that Mr. Sanders was an... interesting choice of target, but I was very surprised to learn that he is a Polish Jew whose parents were immigrants and whose father's side of the family was enslaved and murdered. The man is not a WASP.

This also got me thinking about BLM in the larger context of immigration. My parents are South Asian immigrants and I've worked a lot with the community. I can attest that South Asians, Asian and Pacific Islanders and Latina/os suffer from much of the same social discrimination as Black people do (though it does seem to be more pronounced in their case.)

Many in the crowd the demonstrators called "white supremacist liberals" were older immigrants (largely latino/a or Asian Pacific Islander) who genuinely felt that Social Security and Medicare (the original intent of the event) had made a positive change in their lives.

I have also seen, with horror, black lives matter leaders pointing rioters toward Chinese- and Arab-owned stores (Second paragraph from bottom), demonstrators attempting to set an Arab-American pizza store owner on fire and targeting Asian-American owned stores for "destruction"

In light of this information, and speaking as an advocate for immigrant and refugee rights, I would like to know where black lives matter stands on immigration. I have not heard any BLM representatives apologize for the attacks on immigrants during these demonstrations (I'll go out on a limb and assume there were more than what I linked above.)

Instead, I've heard references to the anger in the community due to the young black lives being killed in police encounters at an alarming rate, and that social change doesn't happen without "getting loud" and "shutting it down." Which is fine, except it seems that my community is getting victimized as a result.

Or I'll hear that "these people don't represent BLM." But who gets to decide that? These crimes occurred at BLM-sanctioned events, as far as I can see. Certainly the women who interrupted Mr. Sanders appeared to have BLM's full support.

I would be interested to hear the community's views on BLM and how we can better engage with the movement, or even if we should.

Thank you for reading!