A killing in the United States by a white officer of a black man is still a statistically rare occurrence compared to the killing of black men by other black men.
For half a century, the debate has raged but always remained the same: Should a black man be acquitted for the killing of a (white) policeman? Should a white police officer be acquitted of the killing of a black man?
Are white policemen really stupid enough to go around shooting with impunity innocent black men? Are they not aware of the consequences (years spent being investigated and having to face a grand jury, a career ruined, a life thereafter of guilt and shame, condemnation? Think Rodney King, the Duke Lacrosse team, and all the others.
What is the statistical likelihood of a black man being assaulted by a police officer compared to his being involved in a fight with another black man?
If it is true that white people show how racist they are by being afraid of black people, how is they can (or have the guts to), at the same time, mistreat, degrade, and attack black people?
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Police brutality is terrible. I have a victim of it both here in the U.S.--with racial overtones--and abroad.
But the protesters descending down on Ferguson, Missouri do so without knowing more than two very skeletal facts: (1) the young man was black and unarmed; (2) the police officer was white. They have only to go by on the inflammatory rhetoric that accompanies every alleged case of white racism and brutality (remember the Duke Lacrosse team players who were accused of raping a young black woman several years back?).
What also disturbs me now is that there are thousands of deaths of African-Americans every year, the vast majority at the hands of other African-Americans. I recall it was something on the order of between 10,000 to 15,000 depending on the year.*
How many police killings in the U.S. are there, on average, yearly, whether in legitimate self defense or not? How many of the victims are African-American?
And how many black homicides, of which 95% are committed by other blacks?
Yet this does not seem to receive any national or local attention. It is as the killing of a black man by a policeman has been symbolically made to stand for all the hundreds of deaths of black men that occur each year.
In other words, a killing by a white officer of a black is still a statistically rare occurrence compared to the killing of black men by other black men.
Yet liberals and leaders in the black community shun this fact, which could, I believe, be amply borne out by statistics from the F.B.I. and elsewhere.
Instead, the police become the whipping-boy target of all the frustration and rage felt by blacks, especially as very few of them seem to understand how this mechanism of projection works and has worked in the past half century since the Sixties.
If African-Americans were to become cognizant of the disparity and distortion of the larger picture, they might have to look more deeply inside. And for that, I have to blame the demagogues and their lackluster-but-full-of-bluster community leaders for leading their flock astray, so to speak, for so long.
It is the oldest occupation in the world: Milosevic tried this in the early 1990s, portraying the Serbs as victims of Muslim-Croat aggression in order to leap to and consolidate power via near mass hysteria.
I have yet to hear a truly fearless African-American civic leader denounce the culture of "Might is Right," the tacit approval of "a real man knows how to kick someone else's ass," and all the subliminal, deeply ingrained messages inculcated in so many African-Americans since early childhood.
Earnestly I hope that recent African and Caribbean immigrants will not buy into this insidious mindset, the cause of so much widespread terrible suffering and loss within the African-American community.
From the behavior of East Africans and others, I have reason to hope...
The protesters are going after the wrong persons. Those who have duped them for years with a distorted victim mentality have yet to be unmasked. The enemy sometimes is not out there, it is us. It is within ourselves, the lies and rationalizations that we have told ourselves and that we do not want to give up at any price.
* http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304830704577496501048197464
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/bvvc.pdf
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