It’s not a difficult question

What everything comes back to is this: “is it all right for police to kill someone who hasn’t been charged with a crime, and go unpunished for doing so?”

Spare me a single word about looting or vandalism or anything like that. This time last week there weren’t people in the streets. Sometimes post hoc ergo propter hoc isn’t a fallacy. This is about whether it’s okay for police to kill a man falsely accused of passing a fake $20 bill. Or whether it’s okay to carry out a no-knock warrant and repeatedly shoot another uninvolved occupant of the house. Or whether it’s okay for a redneck to decide to take the law into their own hands and chase down (with guns!) someone who they think is “suspicious.”

Basically, does white privilege extend to extrajudicial murder or not? Don’t let broken windows and a couple of missing televisions distract you from that question, and don’t come back with “well, but” – because that’s the whole point. Racists are dying for you to be more concerned about a Target than about the fact that the police and their wannabe impersonators are able to do unaccountable murder. A political party that’s spent years of capital on “I fear my government” and “jackbooted thugs” and who could put hundreds of people with rifles in state capitals because they felt oppressed by quarantine should be SHITTING THEMSELVES at the notion that the police can kill who they want and get away with it.

But they aren’t. Ask why not. And pay attention to the answer.

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