| > How can you say that race’s role in the US has only recently become so large when there have been lynchings in the recent past, and it was legal to own someone who was black? That's easy--I never said anything remotely like this. :) I quite explicitly scoped my claim to "within my lifetime". Indeed, everyone knows that race played a big factor in our nation's history. We made a lot of progress away from racial ideologies following the civil rights movement, and while the work isn't complete it doesn't follow that we should double down on different racial ideologies. > One of the important take aways of those protests is understanding that these murders are not uncommon, but a part of what it means to be black in America. I don't think that's remotely an appropriate takeaway. By all appearances, violent crime rates account for the disparity in police killings, which are indeed rare regardless of race (contrary to your "not uncommon" claim). Indeed, last time I dug into the WashPo police shootings database and filtered out all instances in which the deceased was wielding a weapon, the disparity virtually disappeared. Further, while we're all familiar with the myriad cases of unjust police killings of black Americans, there are plenty of cases of white people heinously murdered by police which were never elevated by the media. Consider [Daniel Shaver][0], [Tony Timpa][1], and [Justine Damond][2] (all killed by police within a year or so of each other). Of course, people always say "they didn't get national attention because they weren't killed for their race" which is of course begging the question since the only evidence that George Floyd or whomever was killed for his race is the presumed lack of notable cases of white people being killed by police. To the extent that fear of police is "part of what it means to be black in America", it appears to be a largely manufactured or vestigial fear. The only appropriate conclusions to draw are: 1. the United States has a police brutality problem (irrespective of race) 2. that black citizens are more likely to commit crimes than citizens of other races--presumably for historical reasons--leading to a disparity in police killings of black citizens 3. the media will absolutely sow divisiveness on a nationwide scale for clicks [0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/a-polic...
[1]: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tony-timpa-suffered-the-...
[2]: https://www.startribune.com/australian-woman-justine-damond-... |