1.) We have yet to see all of the evidence in this case to make a determination that this was a case of police misconduct. All we really know for sure is that a black man was shot by 2 officers. Everything else is either 2nd hand knowledge or conjecture. Until the facts come out, we really have no idea if this was justified or and unjustified shooting incident.
2.) Without all of the fact of this case, what does this incident have to do with centuries of discrimination against any race? You have made the leap that this is a race issue due to the color of the skin of the cops and the suspect. (I say suspect because is was reported that he had 1 or more warrants out for his arrest).
So my insinuating that this is a race issue minus any substantive proof, are you not projecting a racist opinion on the subject? And this is the reason for my question. Because of the races involved in this shooting, people have jumped directly to the conclusion that this is a race issue. Could it simply be that a person resisted arrest and then posed a threat to officers that then feared for their life? Or maybe they over-reacted, not because he was black but because he had just fought them off and said he was going for a weapon.
But instead of looking simply at the facts that are known, we have people bringing up centuries of racism to explain what is going on. I would prefer that we allow the authorities to investigate, get the details out and then we can sit around and make judgments of people whom we have never met and know very little about.
1) Agreed.
2) What this has to do with racism is the familiarity the black community has with being on the wrong side of police violence, and the systemic problems that put them there. Maybe this was a justified shooting (we're still waiting on that), but it is endemic of a problem that a large part of this country wants to pretend doesn't exist. Racism, and its effects on this society, did not end in 1965, or even when George Wallace agreed that maybe segregation wasn't the right way of handling things.
The solutions to these deeply ingrained problems aren't easy, but they also aren't simply throwing our hands up and pretending they don't exist. Nor are they state legislatures explicitly saying that the reason they are enacting voting "reform" is to deny black people votes (as the appeals court held regarding North Carolina's legislature in
this decade, they "target African Americans with almost surgical precision.")
That's what drives Black Lives Matter protests. When people stop responding with "All Lives Matter" without being willing to agree that "All" necessarily includes "Black," there will be fewer protests.
This is just about the criminal justice system, but it's a useful start:
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-racial-disparities/
As a thought experiment, imagine two farms that share a river as a water source and grow the same crops. The upstream farmer intentionally pollutes the river as it leaves his property because he knows it will flow downstream and damage his neighbor's crops. This allows him to sell his crops at a higher price because his are beautiful, whereas his neighbors are poor. He does this for decades. When the downstream farmer realizes that for decades his fields have been wrecked by the upstream farmer's intentional conduct, he takes that farmer to court. The upstream farmer learns of the lawsuit and stops the intentional pollution. Over the course of those decades the upstream farmer has gotten rich, while the downstream farmer has barely managed to scrape by. The upstream farmer has gotten rich, reinvested in equipment, expanded his farm, and grown a small empire where his product is known as the gold standard, while the downstream farmer has lived season to season barely getting by, had to sell most of his assets, is deeply indebted to the bank, and has a long reputation for poor quality. But the intentional pollution has now stopped, so we're all good, right?
