This is obnoxious, dishonest, bullying.
One of my favorite things about this new type of political activism is that words no longer mean what we all understood them to mean in ages past. "Explicit" would mean something along the lines of Coinbase or Armstrong saying "we support the status quo of American racism", as you have alleged. Alas, I've read all these blog posts and there is no sentence that matches or even could be remotely construed to resemble the one you have wrote.
A good example recently from current events was the US president being asked in a press conference to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, "win, lose, or draw". He responded with "we'll have to see what happens". In the context of the question being posed, that's a clear and explicit failure to commit, given that context.
Context can entirely invert the meaning of two identical statements, and, in the right context, a failure to do a certain thing, or even remaining silent, can indeed be an explicit statement.
Another case comes from 2013, Salinas v Texas, when the police were questioning a murder suspect who suddenly became quiet during questioning when the topic turned to the murder. They were able to use this sudden silence as incriminating circumstantial evidence, given that specific context. This resulted in silence in the face of questioning by the government having to be explicitly invoked as such to not be potentially incriminating, which is an odd state of affairs and probably not the best outcome, but you can however tell that those judges weren't completely insane. Silence after saying "I affirmatively invoke my right to remain silent" is very different than silence after you were just answering police questions voluntarily, until they asked you about a murder they thought you committed.
Silence can speak volumes, explicitly, given the circumstances preceding and surrounding that silence.
Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, once said:
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
If in your parent comment you had accused Coinbase/Armstrong of implicitly supporting the status quo (as you define it) I would've said "yeah, sure, if I squint hard enough and wash it through the 'silence is violence' filters I can see how you'd think that".
Another troubling thing I want to point out here is your comment is part of an accelerating trend where people, particularly from but not limited to those on the left, consistently attribute maximum malice of intent to peoples' comments (said and unsaid) or their actions. That is, imo, one of the reasons these environments are so toxic, because people are immediately put on the defensive.
Two can play this game.
And it is a game.
Given enough time, your being incorrect on the topic will only harm yourself, not others.
It's a moral "package deal." The idea being that if you reject BLM for its bad politics, you reject that black lives matter. And if you accept it, you also accept a bunch of other shit you're not actually for.
BLM should be recognized for the moral "package deal" that it is, and vehemently rejected. It's dishonest.
It's not Coinbase that is conflating anything, BLM itself is a conflation of ideas.
The fact that you believe that is probably most of the problem.
You'll certainly find 11-year olds in Call of Duty who will say it for shits and giggles to control you; you won't find anybody who actually believes it.
The disparities in policing, application of police violence, and prosecution are well-documented.
This is why the movement exists. It's a real problem, whether you personally have experienced it or not, whether you personally wish to acknowledge it or not.
There are many people out there who simply do not think that it matters whether or not black people live or die. Many of them are in uniform.
This isn’t about office politics, or political activism at work. This is about Coinbase making an explicit vote for the status quo of American racism, and trying to deflect the heat they’re taking for that by confusing people into thinking that this is about standard political discussion.
It makes me really angry that they would do this.
It makes me really sad that it worked.
I guess with that much money you can hire really good PR people to shape the narrative into exactly what you want, and dupe tons of people who are rightfully tired of the american culture war into thinking that this has anything to do with that.