Kindly quit acting as if YOU are the voice of all white people on racial issues. More and more of us, with every day and every week, are rejecting your assumptions that 1) racism is nothing but a problem of a few isolated bad apples; 2) that whites are somehow "the real victims" in this country, that we are the ones who did everything to create the place and deserve to arrogantly regard ourselves as "the only Real Americans". and 3) WE, and not the historic and continuing victims of systemic racism, are the ones who are entitled to set the terms of this discussion, or to determine if the discussion is to happen at all- it was conservative white people who forced structural racism off the political agenda in this country from 1972 through at least 2008, and kept it off the agenda enough that our first Black president knew it would do him irreparable political damage to discuss racism even as the police kept killing Black people in the streets over things they'd have give you or I a $50 ticket and a warning on.
Well, sorry, no, it doesn't work that way- we, as white people, have NEVER been the victims in this country's racial dynamic, Black people have never treated us with even one-tenth of the lethal hostility and contemptuous dismissiveness we've shown to them, and while I don't like hearing the anger either, we AS A GROUP have earned it and need to listen to it. What have we got to lose from listening to what the victims of systemic racism are saying and taking their word for it about what they experience on this issue? And who the hell are we to say WE know more about this subject than they do or act as if we're entitled to tell them they're making a big deal over nothing?
It isn't our kids, our friends, our spouses or ourselves being gunned down for our skin color.
Oh, and what then hell does "black on black crime" have to do with this discussion at all? It's not as if the Black community hasn't spent decades trying its best to put an end to that and the situation in Chicago proves that doing what white conservatives want- giving unquestioning approval to whatever police do to Black people, particularly young Black men- is never going to make any difference on that.
