There is definitely racial bias in this country and no unarmed killings are justified but to simply label all events that fit a profile as racially motivated killings and blanket cases of systematic racism is just as misleading.
Right, this is exactly my point. There IS racial injustice, so to jump to the conclusion that cops killing unarmed black citizens as not racially motivated because some cops kill white people too is tacitly deflecting the problem and explaining it away as happenstance. This is about far more than just this particular instance of police brutality. You can't look at every case in a vacuum or else we will always be stuck here. Sure, media coverage of white against black police violence is disproportionately covered. But that's because it's proportionally a larger problem and until recently it has been swept under the rug almost completely, tacitly allowed. Everyone knows some police abuse their authority against all races, I don't think anyone would try to deny that. But many people, seemingly yourself included, routinely try to deny that this problem disproportionately affects black communities.
Also there is a difference between brutalizing/killing an unarmed black man who was not resisting arrest, to killing an armed black man who legitimately was threatening the lives of the officer(s). This case being the former.
I agree that police brutality against
anyone at all is a problem. But going by the graph of stats of people killed by police in 2019, when you take per capita into consideration, it is nearly 3.5x as frequent for a black person to be killed by cops (3.356x is my math is correct) than it is for a white person. This is an overwhelmingly large difference.
as a white male who grew up in abject poverty, I can tell you it's really not the same. if I was born with dark skin in Chicago my life would've been a lot different in lots of bad ways.
This. Most cops are white (as are most of every profession since 74% of Americans are white), and any given white cop (in aggregate, not every single specific individual white cop, of course) is more likely to use excessive force against a black person (or other non-white person) than they are against a white person. There are many reasons for this and it's not as simple as pure racism... part of it is that as you pointed out, in many communities, black people are more likely to be in gangs, or to hate the police. Besides the outright psychopaths who enjoy hurting people, and those psychopaths who are also specifically racists, police are scared of black people moreso than they are on white people. But why is this? It's not because of poor character choices. It's because of a deep-seated system of oppression and removal of opportunities, the largest opportunity remaining being gang involvement. Just because some black people from poor backgrounds choose to not join a life of crime and find a way out to better their lives, it doesn't mean that them getting caught up into gang life as teenagers because they have been indoctrinated or see no other choice means they somehow deserve it or that they are morally worse than poor white people who don't face the same struggles, though they face many struggles just the same.
And let me say again, this was a murder of an unarmed black man who was not resisting arrest, not a shooting of a gang member who was threatening the lives of the officers.
But yeah, we also have a big problem with haves vs have nots in America. It is more than a racism problem, but racism is a problem, especially for the people affected by it.
People claiming that making this about racial injustice is making racism worse are far off the mark. Making this about racial injustice is,
finally, attempting to actually address a deep-seated and longstanding issue that directly traces its roots back to lynchings and the civil rights movement. To suggest it's unrelated is to ignore (quite recent) history.
If I had to venture a guess, I would think the rates of white cops killing black people is FAR lower now than it was before the age of camera phones and the media highlighting police brutality against black people. Hell, even when it's reported, typically the cop only loses their job and doesn't even face criminal charges. That
still gives the tacit message that it is okay to kill unarmed civilians if they're black, if you happen to get caught, you'll get a slap on the wrist. Before these killings were reported, before people were able to easily provide video evidence, cops like this could literally get away with murder without any real chance of any justice whatsoever. Contrast that, though, with a black cop (or white cop, but especially black) killing an unarmed white man... you better believe there would be full retribution from the law.
Also you have to consider people are just looking at the numbers of killings... there are many instances of police brutality that do not result in death. I am curious to see figures on police violence on a race basis.
