Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
You boiling the narrative down to your interpretation of some shaky body cam video completely misses the point.
The point is that police are growing increasingly militaristic, aggressive, and violent towards the population they are supposed to protect. Because of a bunch of bad policy going back to the 60s, plus a lot of institutional and systemic bias towards black people, that violence is disproportionately felt by the black population.
The antagonism of police towards civilians is the real cause for concern here. Racism is just one strand - albeit one of the biggest parts - of this increasingly concerning problem.
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This. So much this.
America definitely still has a racism problem. It has reared its head since Obama was elected. However, with so many police incidents over these past few years, we have seen where officers of color even have problems. We have seen limited incidents of white people also getting pretty awful treatment. So while there certainly are plenty of racist police officers (and racist non police officers as well) I have always felt it was the combination of the two factors peter mentions.
Really aggressive policing/militarization colliding with historical and structural racism that caused black communities to interact with police a lot more. And I think that nuance is very important. Because it allows the conversation to shift a bit. We no longer have to ask the specific question of 'was Derek Chauvin racist' and instead examine the structural problems that have caused policing to impact minority communities in disproportionate ways.
That is a double edged sword unfortunately. Because while it is a big relief to not always have to try and evaluate individuals racist tendencies, instead you have to all of a sudden look at a lot of very large scale problems with the structure of America. And no one ever has the political guts to take those on.