Minneapolis

Cross-posted at Precipice.

This is beginning to feel a lot like the long hot summers of my youth, circa 1964-68. So many riots began over particular law-enforcement incidents, became statements of generalized rage, and then deteriorated into the looting of stores and burning of buildings.

The unrest has spread from Minneapolis, where George Floyd's horrific death occurred, to Los Angeles.

The video of what happened to Floyd is damn hard to watch. Any conclusion other than excessive force motivated by rank cruelty would be hard to draw. A crowd gathered and implored the officer with his knee on Floyd's neck to let up. One person in the crowd was an EMT with the Minneapolis Fire Department.

The first step the city has taken - firing the officers - is the correct one. The city will now have to begin an investigation that will have to be both thorough and swift. The catalyst of the incident - police responding to a report of a forgery in progress - will have to come under intense scrutiny. I know that Lady Justice's blindfold needs to be securely in place here, but I'd say the odds are good that those officers will then be arrested on various charges.

I grew tired of the term "racism" a long time ago. For one thing, it's misused a lot, and as a writer, precise application of terms means a great deal to me. Racism is the belief that races can be arranged hierarchically, that races are superior or inferior relative to one another. It is not the same thing as bigotry. Bigotry toward ethnic groups that are broadly classified as being in the same race as one's own - say, in the case of someone of Northern European descent looking askance at someone from Latin America - is not racism. It is not racist to point out that the coronavirus started in China.

But black Americans for a long time - centuries - lived under the dual oppression of being objects of both racism and bigotry. Is that still true? There are a few things to parse in the search for an answer to that question. It's hard to argue that actual racism is still prevalent, given the fact that we've had a black president, that there are black leaders in fields ranging from business to medicine to national security. Now, whether there is still prevalent bigotry in America could be, and indeed is, the subject of intensive study.

The above-mentioned process by which the wheels of justice will turn in the George Floyd case may not tell us what went on in the hearts-of-hearts of those four officers. That's not going to be the question at hand in a courtroom, which is as it should be. Trying to get at that has always been my problem with the concept of hate crimes. If they exhibited behavior that falls under the definition of murder, or being an accessory to murder, or any number of other applicable statutes, penalties are on the books to address it.

Where things get sticky is that we have to take into account some facts. The wave of unrest that roiled the nation in the middle of the last decade over the Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri was a case of misplaced rage. A grand jury, and indeed, the Obama administration's Justice Department, led by a black Attorney General, found officer Darren Wilson innocent.

Black opinion columnist Larry Elder assembled some data as the Colin Kapernick controversy unfolded that bears examination:

Out of the 965 people killed by the police in 2015 (as of Dec. 24), the Post reported (on Dec. 26) that "less than 4 percent" involved an unarmed black man and a white cop, the fact pattern most commonly referred to by anti-police activists like Black Lives Matter. Last year, The Washington Post put the number of unarmed black men killed by the police at 17, less than the number of blacks likely struck by lightning. Twenty-two unarmed whites were killed by the police. Any death that results from police misconduct is one death too many, but the point is that police killing of a suspect is rare, no matter the race of the suspect or the cop. And a police shooting of an unarmed black male is still more rare.

But blacks are routinely and disproportionately being stopped, pulled over and/or arrested due to police misconduct, right?

No, not according to numerous studies, many by the government. Take traffic stops. In 2013, the National Institute of Justice, the research and evaluation agency of the Department of Justice, published a study of whether the police, as a result of racial bias, stop blacks more than other drivers. The conclusion? Any racial disparity in traffic stops is due to "differences in offending" in addition to "differences in exposure to the police" and "differences in driving patterns.”

According to Philippe Lemoine, writing in National Review, a white person is, on average, more likely to have interactions with the police in any year than a black person, 20.7 percent vs. 17.5 percent. It is true that a black person is more likely to have multiple contacts with the police. But according to the data, multiple contacts with the police are rare, as well. Lemoine writes that 1.2 percent of white men have more than three contacts with the police in a year versus 1.5 percent of black men.

But in 2020, one has to juxtapose the foregoing with some things we haven't seen in a while, such as the vigilante killing of Ahmaud Aubrey in Georgia earlier this year, and now this.

Okay, what does this mean for the nation as a whole?

I'd venture that it is part of an overall spiritual inventory that our national soul is screaming for. There is little about our shared life as a country that is not rotten. Sorry, but there it is. We have much to atone for, and this kind of thing is no small part of it.

But let us be wary of diagnoses or proposed remedies that ascribe collective guilt. It's clear that two or more decades of diversity circles and white-privilege seminars have not improved the cultural climate.

The way out of our country having to experience any more of these cyclically occurring tinderboxes is what the best spokespeople on the subject - think Dr. King at the Washington Mall in August 1963 - have always said it was: looking at people as invididual souls. The rioters currently burning buildings in Lost Angeles are thinking of their skin color first, and as a result, inflicting severe economic harm on people far removed from what happened to George Floyd thousands of miles away in Minneapolis.

We either cultivate or abuse or God-given dignity as individual human beings. Recognizing that fact is the key to any kind of real and lasting freedom for any of us.