THIS: 

I can tell you from experience that police officers are just like everybody else – they are not all the benevolent guardians of small children, grannies and fluffy puppies. They do over use their authority, they do have bad days and they do lie, cheat and steal. But just as importantly, they do mostly try to do what they are asked to do. And what they are too often asked to do is… to protect you… from me.

Not from the educated, lawyer/judge me, or the granddad me, or the mentor teacher me… but from the Black menace me. The problem is that for too many of our citizens and our police they are one in the same!

So, we don’t miss the support and trust police have in the majority population… t’was always thus… we just don’t care to let that support and trust kill more of our sons and daughters. We are tired of letting their subjective “fears” be reason enough to make us bury another child.

Doc wrote about this once, this culture of fear and mistrust, and I think this reader e-mail gets to the heart of why it’s crap and always has been. Your feelings don’t trump someone else’s actual life.

Your vague resentment of a public worker’s pension doesn’t mean he shouldn’t eat.

Your unnerved-ness about gay people doesn’t mean someone else should be prevented from receiving full equality under the l aw.

Your discomfort with abortion doesn’t mean a woman should die from a medical procedure.

Your belief in God doesn’t mean an atheist owes you something.

And once and for all time, mah fellow white peoples, your itch when you see a black dude you do not know is not something black people are required to indulge by dying.

People keep trotting out “sincere beliefs” as the reason their idiocies should be tolerated, as the reason minority groups or anyone they consider “other” should continue to be beaten down. As if the foibles of the fearful are equivalent to the beat of a human heart.

A.