I can't imagine the difficulty of being Black as my perceptions of police violence are their being a form of lynching based on the lack of prosecution and implicit institutional tolerance.

I also think that much of your writingin our dialogue has been your own sublimated trigger of a disempowered people whose suffering is denied and therefore perpetuated. When we identify with someone, our emotional response can both increase and empathy and increase a narrative.

My own feelings were not different from yours. I, too, felt my people's suffering was going unseen. They raped and murdered a woman and paraded her corpse while bleeding from the vagina. Imagine that Israel had done this. You see how the expectations are higher of us than them. Hamas rapes women and calls for a Holocaust in its charter and the response has been to ask us to give them land.

Then I imagine I am Palestinian in Gaza. I imagine my 5-year-old children are there with me, vulnerable. I imagine praying at night that they don't die in a bombing, that I don't die and leave them fatherless.

And I see that Blacks in America, Jews in Israel, Palestinians in Gaza -- we all have the same needs, the same hearts, the same fears. We all need goodness and insofar as we deny it to others, we deny it to ourselves. This is why I have striven to have a fruitful dialogue with you -- because even when you were condescending and dismissive when you first wrote me, I recognized the same feelings and behaviors in myself. I told myself - this woman is unconsciously showing me that she and I have the same feelings. She and I are the same.