What black lives matter and the Oregon ranchers have in common: a little empathy could go a long way.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the top - Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

"ADMIT IT," documentary filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted on January 4. "If the armed Oregon militia were black or Muslim, they'd all be dead by now."

That was a popular sentiment in the hours and days after armed ranchers in eastern Oregon took over an unused facility at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Faced with the spectacle of gun-toting rural whites trespassing on federal property, many left-of-center commentators posited that the protesters were receiving racially derived special treatment--as evidenced by the fact that they were not already dead or in jail.

"Did I miss the call for the national guard in Oregon? I recall them in Ferguson and Baltimore," tweeted former CNN host Roland Martin, deploying the not-quite-accurate hashtag #OregonUnderAttack (which was nonetheless more apropos than the similarly popular #YallQaeda and #VanillalSlS). If the Oregon occupiers had been non-white, wrote Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, "I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be wait-and-see. Probably more like point-and-shoot."

Frustrated by the well-publicized police violence against 25-year-old Freddie Gray of Baltimore and 18-year-old Michael Brown of Missouri, and by the super-aggressive law enforcement response to the protests that resulted from those incidents, critics of the Oregon "militia" were quick to ask why its leader, Ammon Bundy, was being given second and third chances to explain himself and stand down, an opportunity not afforded to Gray or Brown.

The quick vitriol spit at the ranchers by supporters of Black Lives Matter--not unlike the easy disregard with which swaths of white conservatives have bemoaned Black Lives Matter's stylistic excesses--is a missed opportunity to see at least some common cause in individual rights and dignity vis-a-vis a too-powerful state.

The spark for the Oregon protests was a federal court imposing mandatory minimum sentences on two ranchers who had already served shorter sentences for arson. Black Lives Matter activists have long highlighted sentencing disparities and other injustices perpetuated under those same mandatory minimum guidelines. The Oregon occupiers chose to draw attention to their cause by disrupting the status quo through a media stunt involving trespassing, just as Black Lives Matter activists did when blocking traffic at several airports on December 23.

One of the great promises of Black Lives Matter is communicating simple, powerful testimonials about the consistent mistreatment...