Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

No and no is the answer to both questions but I want to focus on question two.  There seems to be double talk on this point.  It seems like the same people who say we need to get past focusing on skin color can do nothing but focus on skin color the second something bad happens.

What made the George Floyd incident racial other than people wanting it to be? The ATL incident? Kenosha?  As long as whites and blacks continue to live, work, and congregate in the same places there will occasionally be conflict because that just happens between people from time to time.  But whenever it happens the default reaction is “well, that must be racial.”

I mean, are we trying to get past skin color or not? The messages seem mixed.

Sadly, the children and grandchildren of the '60s civil right leaders are focusing more and more on skin color.  The idea of a color-blind society is now seen to be racist itself.
MLK's ideas are not supported by today's "black leadership."

I had not known Wilson grew up in Augusta, GA.  I did as well, which perhaps explains some things (until I was 10).

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?

Excellent experiment, SF!

I don't judge people by their demographic group, either. But when the evidence is overwhelming that our society does, in fact, judge people by their demographic group--particularly skin color--then pretending that it doesn't exist won't fix it.

The answer to your first question is systemic racism. That is the whole point.

The answer to your second? I'm guessing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but it could be any famous black person who said that. 

Here's another take on the same theme, from a friend and former colleague:
"Sometimes I look at my sweet little black boy and a guilty thought creeps, a hope really, that his light eyes and fair skin will make him appear less threatening and more human to the Amy Coopers and Officer Chauvins of the world.  And it makes me sick."

That comment also highlights the insanity of how we got to determining blackness in the first place. What makes her son black when his father is as white as anyone?

So summarize, either black people are inherently inferior, or there is a systemic racism problem. It's not the former. If it's the latter (it is)--then we need to take active steps to address it, rather than hoping that if we ignore it, it will all go away.

It's more difficult for the average cop to engage in hand-to-hand fighting with the average resister these days.  For one thing, cops carry a lot heavier load than they used to, more ammo, more comm gear, often including flak vests, so they are relatively slow and cumbersome compared to the guys they are trying to catch and arrest.
There are increasingly more female cops, and on average they are smaller and weaker than the males.  And they too are encumbered by the additional baggage that cops now carry.  I believe that I have seen some seemingly reliable studies showing that female cops are more likely to escalate a confrontation into a shootout.  Also, too bad about the facts of biology, females generally have less authoritative/intimidating voices than males do.
But, yeah, they do seem rather unversed in h-to-h tactics and techniques.  I've wondered why those Kenosha cops didn't just tackle that guy instead of letting him walk toward his car.

Because he had a knife. They did try to grab him and keep him from going in.

From a policy standpoint what else would you like to see done to even the playing field even more for blacks in this country? 

I'll answer your question, below, but what would you do in the farm example?

Honestly, my policy proposals are almost all focused on economic rights and education, primarily improving the public education system (which, yes, requires more funding, among other things), and working to better balance the distribution of corporate wealth between the property owners and the workers. My preferred technique for that would be focus on private labor unions, because I think the private sector would better manage it than the government.

But that doesn't mean the criminal justice system doesn't require updating, particularly how it addresses low-level offenders, and that policing doesn't need updating, from a system that focuses more on initiating conflict to one that focuses more on reacting to it.

There are lots of other things to tinker with, but tinkering it should largely be.

I don't judge people by their demographic group, either. But when the evidence is overwhelming that our society does, in fact, judge people by their demographic group--particularly skin color--then pretending that it doesn't exist won't fix it.

The answer to your first question is systemic racism. That is the whole point.

The answer to your second? I'm guessing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but it could be any famous black person who said that.

Here's another take on the same theme, from a friend and former colleague:
"Sometimes I look at my sweet little black boy and a guilty thought creeps, a hope really, that his light eyes and fair skin will make him appear less threatening and more human to the Amy Coopers and Officer Chauvins of the world.  And it makes me sick."

That comment also highlights the insanity of how we got to determining blackness in the first place. What makes her son black when his father is as white as anyone?

So summarize, either black people are inherently inferior, or there is a systemic racism problem. It's not the former. If it's the latter (it is)--then we need to take active steps to address it, rather than hoping that if we ignore it, it will all go away.

The answer to my quote was Jesse Jackson. And my point was to illustrate that while racism does exist, it is a two way street. Perhaps the answer to racism is as someone here suggested that we quit viewing every incident through a racial lens. 

While you seem to want to blame systemic racism for these incidents, perhaps if people raised their children to respect other people, regardless of race, then perhaps your friends fears will not be realized. I know that you will say that cannot happen, but I ask why not? 

I live in a predominately white community(?) (I live in a rural area that one would hardly consider a community). Most of my neighbors are farmers or children of farmers that built houses on the farm land. We do have a couple of people of color that have purchased houses in the area, but for the most part, most people here are white. 

One could conclude that because of this, most people in our area would be very suspicious of black people, not having grown up with them and with all of the "systemic" racism that is bread into our systems. After all, what evidence to we (my neighbors and myself) have that black people don't all live in poverty and commit crimes? 

I can say that anyone coming to that conclusion would be wrong. What few black neighbors we have that have relocated here recently, are hardly discernible from anyone else. They are treated no better nor worse than anyone else in the area. They go to work everyday, take care of their families and their homes. They don't demand anything from anyone and are just as willing to help someone in need as anyone else. In other words, the only difference between them and everyone else is that their skin is somewhat darker. And do you know what? NOBODY CARES. 

My point to this is to say that neither the black folks living here nor the white folks have focused on race. Therefore, we have ZERO racial issues. No one is treated any differently than anyone else. We all look out for each other and will come to the aid of anyone that needs help. I would hope that others could learn from that.